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Dal New York Times
Dan Perkins, who writes and draws the political cartoon “This Modern World” under the name Tom Tomorrow, got some bad news in January.
Perkins to create a cover for the new Pearl Jam album, “Backspacer,” top.
Village Voice Media, the chain of alternative weekly newspapers, was dropping all syndicated cartoons as a cost-cutting measure, and Mr. Perkins lost 12 papers at once, a major blow to his income. He called his friend Eddie Vedder, the lead singer of Pearl Jam, whom he had met at a Ralph Nader campaign rally at Madison Square Garden in 2000. Maybe, Mr. Perkins said he hoped, he might get a gig designing a Pearl Jam concert poster.
“He said, ‘Maybe we could help out a little bit,’ ” Mr. Perkins, 48, remembered Mr. Vedder telling him. “ ‘Maybe we could put something up on our Web site. Maybe you could do a couple posters for concerts coming up. And maybe you could have a shot at designing our next album cover.’ That’s about when my jaw hit the floor.”
Within weeks he was working on the cover for Pearl Jam’s latest album, “Backspacer,” which will be released on Sept. 20. It is Mr. Perkins’s first album cover, and the first time that Pearl Jam has gone outside its circle to find a cover artist. Both parties also realized that they had been brought together partly as a result of the transformations of their fields by new media, since the Internet has wreaked the same havoc on newspapers as it has on the music industry.
“It used to be real simple,” Mr. Vedder explained. “Dan writes a strip, it gets in the paper, people read it, Dan gets paid. That’s how we felt too: make records, people buy them at a record store, we tour, there you go. It’s not that simple anymore.”
For Pearl Jam, a free agent now after 18 years under divisions of Sony, “Backspacer” is a move into new distribution territory. The album is being sold at Target stores, but the band negotiated an unusually permissive deal that also allows it to be sold through iTunes, the band’s fan club and even independent record stores.
“They just chose to do the right thing,” said Eric Levin of Criminal Records, an independent shop in Atlanta. “They’re the first guys who have said: ‘This is a very viable market. Historically, these are the stores that built our careers.’ ”
Mr. Perkins said that despite Pearl Jam’s offer of help, he had no guaranteed assignment. “This is not a pity job,” he said. “I really had to work at this thing.”
Mirroring the album’s straightforward, mainstream-rock sound, the nine-panel grid on the cover is rendered in Mr. Perkins’s characteristically clean, lucid lines. But unlike those of “This Modern World,” the images are more surrealistic than political.
For example, after Mr. Vedder said that he often thought of a 1947 photograph from Life magazine of a young woman who had jumped off the Empire State Building, Mr. Perkins played with the image until it resembled a body peacefully floating at sea; Mr. Vedder decided it was “kismet” because Mr. Perkins hadn’t yet known that the band had written a song called “Amongst the Waves.”
“There are people who have a tendency to pigeonhole you,” Mr. Perkins said, “but I was given room as an artist to be intuitive and impressionistic, not as literal as I usually have to be in the course of creating a political cartoon.”
To hear members of Pearl Jam describe the collaboration, they were the star-struck ones. Jeff Ament, the bassist, said he read “This Modern World” every week and marvels, “God, that’s exactly what I was thinking.” Mr. Vedder compared Mr. Perkins to Garry Trudeau, the Pulitzer Prize-winning creator of “Doonesbury,” and said he was worried that Mr. Perkins would deem his band unworthy.
“I wasn’t sure if our politics were hard-core enough for him,” he said.
Mr. Perkins, who lives and works in New Haven, said that since meeting Mr. Vedder at the Nader rally, he had become a casual fan, but that during the band’s rise in the early 1990s, he was preoccupied with other things.
“What I spent most of my time listening to at that point was right-wing talk radio,” he said. “The whole grunge scene, I kind of missed it.”
Lately Mr. Perkins has gotten some good news: last week “This Modern World” returned to The Village Voice. Andy Van De Voorde, the executive associate editor of Village Voice Media, said it would be up to the discretion of each paper in the chain whether to reinstate the strip, and so far no others have.
But Mr. Perkins’s association with Pearl Jam has expanded. He has designed some concert posters for the band, as well as the cover for a subscriber-only edition of the October issue of Spin, which features Pearl Jam and goes on sale Sept. 22.
“He’s part of the family now,” Mr. Vedder said.
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