Tom the Dancing Bug is a weekly comic strip by Ruben Bolling which presents critical commentary on modern life, current events, and conventional wisdom and cliches. (There are no bugs or dancing involved and there are no characters named Tom.) The strip is carried in both mainstream and "alternative" papers, as well as on Salon.com. The strip frequently includes sociopolitical satire, often critical of the political establishment. This article is about the comic strip, the sequential art form as published in newspapers and on the Internet. ... Ruben Bolling is a pseudonym for Ken Fisher, a cartoonist, the author of Tom the Dancing Bug. ... Screenshot of Salon. ...

Recurring characters

• Bob is the extremely average male. He sits at home drinking beer and watching scrambled porn on TV on the weekends, and tries to avoid doing chores and other household duties. During the week, he works in the cubicle by the elevator. He pokes fun at our image-conscious society, especially "glamour" magazines and TV shows.

• Louis Maltby is an introverted kid with a major guilt complex. He's featured in segments like "Games Louis Plays" which describe how Louis looks at the world and "The Education of Louis" which show his confusion at the world around him. Louis is used to make social commentary by displaying how school and society treats him, and may be semi-autobiographical. He also sometimes appears in other segments when a kid is needed.

• Charley is an australopithecine — a less-developed hominid from the pliocene epoch. He does not have some of the more advanced emotions of humans. He has a taste for grape soft drinks. It's unclear what he communicates.

• Billy Dare, Boy Adventurer parodies the cliches used in boy adventurer stories. Billy is very similar in appearance to Tintin, a famous Belgian boy adventurer.

• Sam Roland, the Detective Who Dies is a Sam Spade-esque noirish private detective, except that he always dies.

• God-Man is the omnipotent, omniscient superhero. Placed in normal superhero situations, he fights villains like Dr. Moral Relativism and Blasphemy Boy to teach us something about theology, and to occasionally criticise organised religion. God-Man's "mundane identity" (when he does not want to attract suspicion) is Milton Baxter. God-man occasionally solves problems by re-creating the universe and organising the atoms so that the problem is prevented in the first place.

• Judge Scalia is an extremist version of the US Supreme Court justice, Antonin Scalia, used to criticize Justice Scalia's Supreme Court opinions and overall judicial philosophy.

The opening panel to one of Ruben Bolling's comic strips that features Lucky Ducky [1]

• Lucky Ducky (purportedly from Wall Street Journal Comix) is a duck who despite being homeless, destitute, and working in a crummy job always manages to enrage his arch-nemesis, the very wealthy Hollingsworth Hound. He is used to demonstrate how taxes especially hurt the poor, and to demolish claims that they do not. (Strips) Lucky Ducky first appeared after the Wall Street Journal editorialized against progressive tax policies, calling poor workers "lucky duckies" because they have a smaller federal income tax burden (see Lucky duckies).[2]

• Harvey Richards Esq., Lawyer for Children is about a lawyer who works for children by using the standard children's tricks for getting out of things or getting people to do things ("My fingers were crossed!" "I called no crossies!"). The point is that lawyers act an awful lot like young children. The character has been optioned for a feature film by New Line Cinema, to be co-produced by Universal Press Syndicate's AMUSE division.

• News of the Times and other unnamed segments poke fun at and re-conceptualize current events through analogy and comedy.

• Did You Know? points out "Fun Facts" in all sorts of things, poking fun at statistic-and-tidbit-obsessed society. The cult of celebrity is also a frequent target, with subversive trivia such as Nicole Kidman had to work as a waitress before she became famous, and not a single person asked her for her autograph and claiming that the Universe has never been nominated for an Oscar.

This term australopithecine refers to two very closely related hominin genera: Australopithecus Paranthropus When used alone, the term refers to both genera together. ... Genera Subfamily Ponginae Pongo - Orangutans Gigantopithecus (extinct) Sivapithecus (extinct) Lufengpithecus (extinct) Ankarapithecus (extinct) Subfamily Homininae Gorilla - Gorillas Pan - Chimpanzees Homo - Humans Dryopithecus (extinct) Ouranopithecus (extinct) Paranthropus (extinct) Australopithecus (extinct) Sahelanthropus (extinct) Orrorin (extinct) Ardipithecus (extinct) Kenyanthropus (extinct) Pierolapithecus (extinct) (tentative) The hominids are the members of the biological family Hominidae... The Pliocene epoch (a. ... A soft drink is a drink that contains no alcohol. ... The Adventures of Tintin (originally Les Aventures de Tintin), drawn and written by the Belgian writer-artist Georges Remi a. ... Poster of the 1941 Warner Brothers film version of The Maltese Falcon, directed by John Huston Sam Spade was the leading character in the novel and movie The Maltese Falcon (1931). ... This still from The Big Combo (1955) demonstrates the visual style of film noir at its most extreme. ... Superman (left) and Batman, two of the most recognizable and influential superheroes. ... In philosophy, moral relativism is the position that moral or ethical propositions do not reflect absolute and universal moral truths but instead are relative to social, cultural, historical or personal references, and that there is no single standard by which to assess an ethical propositions truth. ... Blasphemy is the defamation of the name of God. ... Theology is reasoned discourse concerning God (Greek θεος, theos, God, + λογος, logos, word or reason). It also refers to the study of other religious topics. ... Seal of the Supreme Court Scotus redirects here. ... Justice Antonin Scalia Justice Antonin Scalia (born March 11, 1936) (Sometimes known by the nickname Nino) has been a U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice since 1986. ... Image File history File links LuckyDuckyComic. ... The Wall Street Journal is an influential international daily newspaper published in New York City, New York with an average daily circulation of 1,800,607 (2002). ... A progressive tax, or graduated tax, is a tax that is larger as a percentage of income for those with larger incomes. ... A boy from an East Cipinang trash dump slum in Jakarta, Indonesia shows his find. ... Lucky Duckies is a term that was used in Wall Street Journal editorials starting on 20 November 2002 to refer to Americans who pay no federal income tax because they are at an income that is below the tax line (after deductions and credits). ... Nicole Mary Kidman (born June 20, 1967) is an Academy Award-winning American-born Australian actress, producer and singer. ... The deepest visible-light image of the cosmos. ... Although he never won an Oscar for any of his movie performances, the comedian Bob Hope received two honorary Oscars for his contributions to cinema. ...

Super-Fun-Pak Comics

These collections of smaller comic strips poke fun at comic strips. They also commonly make fun of New Yorker cartoons and settings, like two people sitting across a desk and husband and wife at home reading the paper. Typical mini-strips include: The New Yorkers first cover, which is reprinted most years on the magazines anniversary. ...

• Marital Mirth is an endless series of jokes about two married people who really hate each other and always have sex with other people, presumably making fun of married-people-hating-each-other jokes. It's supposedly drawn by bitter Rex Feinstein. Apparently it's a parody of The Lockhorns.

• Uncle Cap'n is an old lazy pirate who swears and makes you do his work for him.

• Selfish Gene is about a boy named Gene who only acts in ways that are beneficial to him under the framework of sociobiology. This is apparently a reference to Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene.

• Doug is a bunny who refuses to do much of anything.

• Classix Comix/Comix Playhouse is an extremely shortened comic form of famous plays and novels. This is apparently a reference to Classics Illustrated, a series that provided classic books in shortened comic form.

• Elevator Ride of the Damned is dreadful elevator conversation in comic form.

• Stock Sitcom Gags Presented in Comic Form is just what you'd expect.

• Comics for the Elderly (formerly "Hey, Old People! Comics!") shows old people giving ornery advice to young people and the young people quickly accepting it.

• Funny, Funny Celebs shows celebrities saying inane things to parody of the respect we give to celebrities and actors.

• Chaos Butterfly parodies the butterfly effect.

• Dinkle, The UnLovable Loser is a parody of such characters as Ziggy or The Born Loser, with the catch being that he is totally un-lovable: For example, he smells like urine.

After September 11, 2001, Bolling used the Super Fun Pak Comix format to acknowledge the events - the punchline to each one of the comics was "Terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center, killing thousands". The Lockhorns is a one-panel syndicated comic strip about a married couple, Leroy and Loretta Lockhorn, who bitterly hate each other and yet do not divorce. ... Sociobiology is a synthesis of scientific disciplines that attempts to explain behaviour in all species by considering the evolutionary advantages of social behaviours. ... Dawkins is the holder of the Charles Simonyi Chair in the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford. ... Classics Illustrated were comic book adaptations from classic literature, a series that Russian-born Albert Lewis Kanter (1897-1973) began in 1941 for Elliot Publishing. ... The Butterfly Effect is a phrase that encapsulates the more technical notion of sensitive dependence on initial conditions in chaos theory. ... Ziggy is a single panel comic strip created by Tom Wilson, an American Greetings executive. ... The Born Loser is a comic strip created by Art Sansom in 1965. ... The World Trade Center on fire The September 11, 2001 attacks were a series of coordinated terrorist attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001. ...

History

Bolling told Salon.com:

I started "Tom the Dancing Bug" in 1990 in a small New York newspaper. It was called New York Perspectives, then it was called New York Weekly, then it was called "bankrupt." But before it went bankrupt, I was able to sell the strip to a few other papers. For seven years, I was sending packages out and following up with phone calls, trying to get editors to run the strip. I ended up selling it to about 60 newspapers [under the name Quaternary Features]. I was surprised at the success I had, especially in selling to daily newspapers. I didn't think it would be my market.

In 1997, the Universal Press Syndicate approached me and asked if we could work together. That came at just the right time, as I was starting a more serious day job, and I was about to have my first baby. I just didn't have the time and energy to devote to the selling of the strip. I decided that whatever job they did would be better than whatever I could put forth at that time. [3]

Universal Press Syndicate provides syndication for a number of lifestyle and opinion columns, comics, and various other content. ...

Books

Three book-form collections have been published:

• 1992: Tom the Dancing Bug ISBN 0060969490
• 1997: All I Ever Needed to Know I Learned From My Golf-Playing Cats ISBN 1561631833
• 2004: Thrilling Tom the Dancing Bug Stories (oversized treasury) ISBN 0740747371

Awards

Best Cartoon from the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies: finalist in 2001, First Place in 2002 and 2003, nominated in 2004.

Quotes

• "One of the few comic strips I can read at this point in my life and still be reminded why I loved comics in the first place." - Tom Tomorrow [4]

• "Consistently funny, pointed without being dogmatic, and takes on subjects that no one else does ... an oasis of keen intelligence in the comics page." - Association of Alternative Newsweeklies award judges, 2003

Dan Perkins (born 1961 in Wichita, Kansas), better known by the pen name Tom Tomorrow, is an editorial cartoonist. ... The Association of Alternative Newsweeklies (AAN) is the trade association of alternative weekly newspapers in the United States. ...

External links

• Tom the Dancing Bug comic strips at UComics.com
  • Tom the Dancing Bug blog
  • News and commentary on the strip from the author
• A free index of all comics
• Latest strips (requires paid subscription for Salon.com or viewing an animated advertisement)