The Miraculous if not Virgin Birth of Tiger Tom

by Gene Franks

(This article appeared in a paper Gazette in the early 1990s.)

Being a paper tiger isn't half bad. At least they don't lock you in a cage next to a bunch of stinking apes.--Tiger Tom.

Before I got a computer, which wasn't so very long ago, I vowed that when I did get one I would never decorate things I write with the little computer wreaths and cornucopias that the early dot matrix people adorned their writings with. I've always stuck to that. And you won't see this site cluttered with fancy little gifs. If I ever write an article about trains, I promise not to have little choo choos chugging across the top of the page.

When I started teaching myself Desktop 101, however, using a DOS processor that was already old for the time, there was a period when I could coax only two pictures from the software. They were a Mona Lisa and a tiger, provided as easily evoked samples by the software maker. I used them to learn to put captions under pictures and wrap text around frames. I wrote captions and stories for them to have some text to wrap.

After I got tired of desecrating Mona Lisa by having her say the grossest of things, I wrote some stories about the tiger. He had a name right away--Tiger Tom--and in no time at all he started spewing outrageous blasphemies. Things that prototype phony tigers like Tony were too wimpish to say. And Hobbes too intellectual. He really started speaking for himself, and his voice was so forceful that I saw he needed a regular Gazette column.

Tiger Tom is an eclectic. Like all of us, he talks only with other people's words. Even his name, I decided with hindsight, he probably lifted from the great individualist Tigre Juan, the curandero (amateur healer) protagonist of Ram6n Pérez de Ayala's early-century trilogy of novels. Else why would he call himself Tiger Tom rather than the more logical Tom Tiger? One other possibility, I learned later when I was researching for a piece about plant patenting, is that he took his name from a now extinct tomato variety that was, indeed, called Tiger Tom. In either case, there is nothing original about his name and nothing original about his writings.

Tiger Tom isn't for the fainthearted, but he deserves your attention. Read at least three articles before you judge him. It takes a while to figure out what the boy is about. I suggest you start with The Grumps, which was his very first Gazette contribution (Gazette #40, Winter 1992).

 

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