Ruben Bolling
Template:Short description Template:Infobox comics creator Ruben Bolling (born c. 1963<ref name="Elder">Template:Cite news</ref> in New Jersey) is a pseudonym for Ken Fisher, an American cartoonist, the author of Tom the Dancing Bug. His work started out apolitical, instead featuring absurdist humor, parodying comic strip conventions, or critiquing celebrity culture. He came to increasingly satirize conservative politics after the September 11 attacks and Iraq war in the early 2000s.<ref name="Tufts" /> This trend strengthened with the Donald Trump presidency and right-wing populism from 2017-2020,<ref name="Roth">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> his critiques of which earned him several cartooning awards.<ref name="Herblock"/><ref name="NCS"/>
CareerEdit
Fisher, who has no formal art training, read many comics when he was a child (his biggest influence being Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury),<ref name="Elder" /> and sometimes features their styles in his work. However, he didn't aspire to be a full-time cartoonist; instead he studied economics as an undergraduate at Tufts University and later attended Harvard Law School (graduating in 1987).<ref name="Elder"/> It was at Harvard in the mid-1980s that Fisher came up with the idea for "Tom the Dancing Bug" and his pseudonym, Ruben Bolling (which is a melding of the names of two favorite old-time baseball players, Ruben Amaro and Frank Bolling).<ref name="Tufts"/> Tom the Dancing Bug originally ran in the Harvard Law School Record.<ref name="Elder" />
After graduation, Fisher practiced law for several years before resigning to pursue comics full-time. When that didn't work out, comic writing became a side interest and Fisher became a full-time employee at a financial services company.<ref name="Tufts" /><ref name="Elder" /> Tom the Dancing Bug was picked up for weekly syndication in 1997 by Universal Press Syndicate.<ref name="Elder" />
Fisher was working on building a full-time comics career, driven in part by a project, thus far never realized, with New Line Cinema to produce a movie about his character Harvey Richards, Esq., a "Lawyer for Children."<ref name="Deconstructing">Template:Cite podcast</ref>
Newspapers that have published Tom the Dancing Bug include The Washington Post, The Village Voice, and Los Angeles Times.<ref name="Elder" /> At its peak, Tom the Dancing Bug was syndicated in print in over 100 newspapers, but is now published almost entirely online. <ref>Template:Cite tweet</ref> In 2012, Fisher launched a subscription service, the Inner Hive,<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> which he credits with keeping the comic going amid declines in print newspapers.<ref name="Roth"/>
A Super Fun-Pak Comix installment from 2014, entitled The Comic Strip That Has A Finale Every Day, parodied farewell installments from long-running comic strips. This then became an ongoing feature on the gocomics.com site under the pseudonym John "Scully" Scully, releasing the same comic every day.
In 2015, Fisher published the first in a series of children's books, The EMU Club Adventures.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>
AwardsEdit
Fisher is a five-time winner of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies Award for Best Cartoon, for 2002, 2003, 2007, 2008,<ref name="Gardner">Gardner, Alan. Ruben Bolling Wins Best Cartoon Award from AAN. The Daily Cartoonist (June 10, 2008)</ref> and 2009.<ref name="Xerexes">Xerexes, Xavier. Onward Into the Webcomics Breach. Comix Talk (July 1, 2009)</ref> In 2010, he received the Society of Professional Journalists award for Editorial Cartooning for a non-daily publication.<ref name="SPJ">Announcing winners of the 2010 Sigma Delta Chi Awards for journalism (May 10, 2011)</ref>
Fisher won numerous awards for his satirical criticism of the Donald Trump presidency. He was the winner of the 2017 Herblock Prize for editorial cartooning<ref name="Herblock">2017 Prize Winner. Herb Block Foundation (March 19, 2021)</ref> based on a selection of 15 Trump-themed Tom the Dancing Bug cartoons. In 2017, he won a 2017 Silver Reuben Award from the National Cartoonists Society<ref name="NCS">71st Annual Reuben Award Winners Announced! National Cartoonists Society (May 27, 2017)</ref> for "Donald and John," a series in the style of Calvin and Hobbes that cast Donald Trump as a childish Calvin-like figure and Trump alter-ego John Barron as Trump's "imaginary publicist" in place of Hobbes.
He was awarded a prize for best cartoon in the 2018 Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award<ref name="RFK">FULL LIST: 2018 Robert F. Kennedy Book & Journalism Award Winners (May 3, 2018)</ref> and in 2019 and 2021 he was a finalist in the Editorial Cartooning category for the Pulitzer Prize.<ref name="Pulitzer">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> His "mordant wit, superior artwork and inventive delivery" won him the 2021 Berryman Award for Editorial Cartoons from the National Press Foundation.<ref name="Berryman">Ruben Bolling wins 2021 Berryman Cartoonist Award (November 1, 2021)</ref>
Bolling won the National Cartoonists Society's Reuben Award for Editorial Cartoons in 2022 and was nominated again in 2023.<ref name="NCS22">The Reuben Awards Are Back! Here Are This Year's Winners. GoComics (September 19, 2022)</ref><ref name="NCS23"> Colleen Doran, Alex Ross, Sarah Andersen among this year’s NCS divisional nominees. Smash Pages (June 7, 2023)</ref>
Personal lifeEdit
Fisher is married to a lawyer; they have three children.<ref name="Elder" />
BibliographyEdit
- 1992: Tom the Dancing Bug Template:ISBN
- 1997: All I Ever Needed to Know I Learned From My Golf-Playing Cats Template:ISBN
- 2004: Thrilling Tom the Dancing Bug Stories (oversized treasury) (Andrews McMeel) Template:ISBN
- 2015: Alien Invasion in My Backyard: An EMU Club Adventure (Andrews McMeel) Template:ISBN
- 2015: Ghostly Thief of Time: An EMU Club Adventure (Andrews McMeel) Template:ISBN
- 2020: Tom the Dancing Bug Presents: Into the Trumpverse (Clover Press) Template:ISBN
- 2020: The Super-Fun-Pak Comix Reader (Clover Press) Template:ISBN
- 2021: Tom the Dancing Bug Awakens (Clover Press) Template:ISBN
- 2022: Tom the Dancing Bug: Without The Bad Ones (Clover Press) Template:ISBN
- 2022: Tom the Dancing Bug: Eat the Poor (Clover Press) Template:ISBN
- 2022: Tom the Dancing Bug: All-Mighty Comics (Clover Press) Template:ISBN
- 2023: On the Trail of Tom The Dancing Bug (Clover Press) Template:ISBN