Who: Cartoonist, "Tom The Dancing Bug"

Current Residence: Manhattan.

Spotlight: You probably thought Antonin Scalia was merely a Supreme Court Justice. Turns out he’s also a modern-day Zorro, sporting a black cape, driving around on a motorcycle, engaging in occasional “badger-wrasslin’” and making sure justice is served. At least, according to Ruben Bolling he is. Such is life in the world of “Tom the Dancing Bug”. Bolling’s weekly comic strip, which runs in over 50 newspapers and websites, from the Village Voice to the Washington Post to Salon.com, fires off round after round of equal-opportunity call-outs. Through a rotating series of regular characters, like Scalia, God-man the omnipotent superhero, and Charley the Australopithecine, as well as one-time-only riffs on everything from the Presidency to the Oscars, Bolling puts politics, pop culture, and everything else through an absurdity litmus test. The strip has twice earned the Best Cartoon award from the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, as well as the somewhat dubious, certainly singular distinction of being called “as free-ranging as a cow on a Neiman Ranch-covered moon” in Salon.com. I could go on, but what would probably make more sense would be for you to [http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/tddbArchive click here.

Secret Identity: The very private Bolling inks his comics under a pseudonym and spends the 9 to 5 block at an executive banking job. “It’s very Clark Kent-like,” he has said. “I even take my glasses off.”

The Office: Bolling’s studio also has a day job; his strips all start life in a converted closet in his Manhattan home.

Name Game: The cartoonist’s nom de plume is a mash-up of two baseball players from back in the day: Ruben Amaro and Frank Bolling. As for the strip’s name, Bolling claims it represents his efforts to dream up the “stupidest” thing he could when his first editor pressed him for a title (he initially wanted his strip to be nameless, to match its “free-format…not tied down to anything” approach). Bolling thought back to a seemingly trivial event earlier that day. In one of his classes at HLS, a bug had landed on his friend’s pen; when the friend started twirling the pen the bug started bending his knees to keep its balance, appearing as if it was—you got it—dancing. Bolling dubbed the bug Tom, called up his editor, and the rest is history.

Bolling's Beginnings: Bolling went from a young comic aficionado (which accounts for the variety of artistic styles in the strips from week to week) to an economics major at Tufts, where he earned some campus fame for criticizing the dining hall cereal. It wasn’t until he was at the Law School and answered an ad for a cartoonist in their newspaper that Tom the Dancing Bug as we know it came to life. A few years later, he began selling the strip to newspapers himself. Universal Press Syndicate took over that job in 1997, and they seem to be doing okay at it.

Silver Screen: In 2005, New Line Cinema optioned Harvey Richards, Esq., the Lawyer for Children, a character who sticks up for clients who haven’t reached double-digit ages yet by citing the doctrine of “finders keepers.’ Speaking of which…any hopes for a Ruben Bolling biopic? That all depends on the Jolie-Pitt family’s schedule. “Only Brad Pitt has the abs to pull it off,” Bolling said, in an interview with Quirkeee.com, of the formidable task of portraying him onscreen. He adds, “But I doubt he has the chops for the wrenching emotional scenes of me watching Mets games.”

In his own words: “With a good political strip, or a topical one, the ideal response would be, 'Wow, how did he think of that? How did he think of that take on that subject?' My goal for a general humor one is, the reader would say, 'Wow, why did he think of that?' That's the higher calling…something that you don't know why he thought of it, but it just seems so right.”—Bolling sums up his comedic theory in Salon

Don’t get him wrong: At the end of the day, Bolling says, all the skewering comes from a place of love. “When I make fun of Americans, I’m definitely making fun of myself, too. I like baseball, Disney World, sitcoms, mall food, action movies—I just also like to bitterly satirize them.”

*The World According to Ruben Bolling [Tufts Magazine]
*The Mystery Man Behind “Tom The Dancing Bug” [Salon]
*20 Questions With Ruben Bolling [Quirkee.com]