Interviewing Ruben Bolling About The ‘Tom The Dancing Bug’ Kickstarter

Ruben Bolling is the writer, artist, and creator of the comic strip Tom The Dancing Bug. It is a strip with origins in the newspapers that is currently seeing distribution on the internet. Tom The Dancing Bug features a host of characters in a satirical manner. Clover Press is planning to publish the first two volumes of the original years of his strip. Bolling and Clover Press are at the time of this publishing seeking funding through a Kickstarter campaign to do so.

Benjamin Hall: In a general sense what keeps you going creatively?

Ruben Bolling: What a huge question. The urge to express myself? The fun of making people laugh? The very rare and thrilling moments of genuine inspiration? Fame and fortune? The hilarity of tricking people into paying me to draw my stupid pictures?

Hall: Do you hope for new readers who will keep up with the current strip thanks to collections being available?

Bolling: I always hope for new readers. While I imagine that these collections would most appeal to my most ardent and longstanding fans, I do hope that brave and curious souls who buy the books while not very familiar with the comic strip will be happy enough with them to continue reading and join my merry band of readership.

It’s been amazing to have Volumes 3-8 of The Complete Tom the Dancing Bug Library published so beautifully by Clover Press. And now with this Kickstarter, Volumes 1 and 2, the rare, earliest Tom the Dancing Bug comics will be published, and the entirety of Tom the Dancing Bug’s long run will be in print in this multi-volume set. Basically, my whole life’s work!

Hall: After 9/11, you shift to making the strip anti-conservatism and then anti-fascism. Do you remember your thoughts on why you needed to do so

Bolling: That is a very fair and accurate statement. Because my comic strip is free-form, and I vary the subject matter, art style, tone, and comedic voice greatly from week to week, it’s mostly improvisational — each week I write and draw wherever my intuition takes me. Its humor can be silly, observational, absurdist, satirical, or anything else. But, yes, after 9/11, I made a rare conscious decision to make more political comics to express how I felt about the direction the country was moving. And as Trump rose to prominence in 2015 and 2016, I made another explicit decision to write and draw about what I saw as the most important political phenomenon of my lifetime. While I thought that might be short-lived, here we are ten years later.

Hall: Is your creative routine the same since the change from newspapers to news sites?

Bolling: Yes, it really is. I’ve been doing the weekly comic strip pretty much the same way for 35 years. When it was only in print newspapers in the early ’90s (about 150 of them), I created the comic strip in black-and-white, but with the rising prominence, and then dominance, of its web distribution, starting in the late nineties, I began doing the comic in color.

Hall: Since Tom The Dancing Bug has been going on so long do you imagine end points for it other than nuclear war?

Bolling: Nuclear war, gulag imprisonment, disability, a lottery win… There are a number of ways I could see the comic strip ending. I could just decide to end the comic strip as well, and I sometimes think about that because the weekly deadlines always get in the way of other projects I’ve been dreaming about. But I do love it, I keep putting one foot in front of the other, and I don’t have any current plans to stop.

Hall: Lastly, do you think we would have Donald Trump if Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush did not have their times as president?

Bolling: Good question. Reagan and W. certainly tapped into an underlying reactionary sentiment and racism in the country, and led it down the road toward authoritarian policies and corruption. But Trump seems sui generis in activating a virulent and violent racism, the total destruction of democratic norms, and unbridled kleptocracy. There seems to be a qualitative difference in Trump’s unabashed embrace of fascism, rather than anything incremental.

Thank you to Ruben Bolling for his time and answers!

The Kickstarter for Tom The Dancing Bug volumes 1 and 2 is currently live.