Tom the Dancing Bug is a weekly satirical comic strip by cartoonist and political commentator Ruben Bolling that covers mostly US current events from a liberal point of view.
As Bolling recounted in an interview: I started Tom the Dancing Bug in 1990 in a small New York newspaper.
[14] In 2012, Bolling launched a subscription service, the Inner Hive,[15] which he credits with keeping the comic going amid declines in print newspapers.
[16] After the September 11 attacks in 2001, and especially with the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016, Tom the Dancing Bug's focus became more overtly political.
When accepting the Clifford K. and James T. Berryman Award for Editorial Cartoons on May 4, 2022, Bolling said, "When it started, it was just about apolitical.
Bolling also explained his approach to satire, pre- and post-Trump, at the same dinner: In the before days, pre-Trumpism, my age-old satirist trick was to exaggerate and twist my target's position to expose its hypocrisy or flaws.
The title itself is a dadaist non-sequitur, as there is no character called "Tom the Dancing Bug" ever seen or referred to in the strip.
One of the most popular recurring segments, "Super-Fun-Pak Comix", appears roughly once every month or two, and is dealt with in a separate entry, below.
For example, they commonly make fun of stereotypical New Yorker cartoon settings, such as two people sitting across a desk or a husband and wife at home reading the paper.
Individual comics can also be based around peculiar or bizarre concepts, like 'Funny Only to Six-year-olds' or 'Comic Designed to Fit Vertical Spaces'.
[19] Currently recurring mini-strips (not always seen in every Fun-Pak) include: Following the September 11 attacks, 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".