Tom the dancing beetle

“Tom the Dancing Bug” cartoon gallery

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From Wikipedia:

Tom the dancing beetle is a weekly satirical comic by cartoonist and political commentator Ruben Bolling that treats current events from a liberal perspective. The strip appears in mainstream and alternative weekly newspapers as well as on the Boing Boing website. Tom the Dancing Bug won the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies Awards in 2007, 2008 and 2009 for best cartoon. In 2011 the strip received the Sigma Delta Chi Award for editorial drawing from the Society of Professional Journalists.

Tom The Dancing Bug has no real narrative continuity. Some individual strips are stand-alone one-shot presentations. However, certain recurring features within the strip are displayed alternately on a regular basis. One of the most popular recurring segments, “Super-Fun-Pak Comix”, comes out roughly once a month and is covered in a separate entry below. Other features that are currently common are:

• God Man: The superhero with almighty powers!: In normal superhero situations, God-Man fights against bad guys like Nietzsche-lad, Dr. Moral Relativism and Blasphemy Boy. The “worldly identity” of God-Man (if he doesn’t want to arouse suspicion) is Milton Baxter. God-man occasionally solves problems by recreating the universe and organizing the atoms to prevent the problem from occurring. Speaking of readers who insult the God-Man strips in an interview, Bolling said, “God-Man is not really God. He’s a straw man with whom I make fun of some people’s very simplistic views of religion and philosophy make. ” Billy Billings is “God-Man’s Pal”, a parody of Jimmy Olsen.

• Lucky Ducky: The poor little duck who is rich in happinessis a recurring segment reportedly featured by the Wall Street Journal Comix. Lucky Ducky is an anthropomorphic duck who, despite homelessness, poverty and work in a lousy job, always manages to piss off his nemesis, the very rich Hollingsworth Hound. Hollingsworth (who usually plays a much more prominent role in this segment than the title character) considers any source of joy or happiness in Lucky’s life to be too beneficial and does his best to eliminate it, claiming that the joy or happiness comes up Cost of the very rich, like him. Lucky Ducky appeared first after that The Wall Street Journal editorially against progressive tax policies and calls poor workers “lucky ducks” because they have a lower federal income tax burden. Hollingsworth Hound has also been seen on occasion in solo adventures.

• News of the time parodies current events in a way that is somewhat reminiscent of March Of Time newsreels.

• Judge Scalia is an extremist version of the US Supreme Court, Antonin Scalia, which criticizes the views of the Supreme Court and the overall legal philosophy of Judge Scalia.

• The outer reaches of the plot change Parodies of The Twilight Zone and Outer Limits, which feature stories that use multiple plot alternations, to the point that lifting of disbelief is difficult to achieve.

• Did you know? points out “fun facts” in all sorts of things and makes fun of society obsessed with statistics and delicacies. The cult of celebrity is also a common target, with subversive trivia like that Nicole Kidman had to work as a waitress before she became famous, and not a single person asked for her autograph and claim that the universe was never nominated for an Oscar.

• Harvey Richards Esq., Child Attorney is about a lawyer who works for children using common kid tricks to get out of things or get people to do things (“My fingers crossed!” “I didn’t call any crossies!”). The point is, lawyers act a lot like young children. The character was selected for a New Line Cinema feature film co-produced by the AMUSE division of Universal Press Syndicate.

To see more of our extensive collection of professional cartoonists, visit our Political Cartoons Sampler, Political Cartoon Galleries, Apolitical Single Panel Cartoons, and our International Political Cartoons Sampler. If you’d like to draw, you can submit a cartoon on our Amateur User Made Cartoons page. If you’d like to try your hand at subtitling cartoons, head to our Cartoon Subtitling Contest.

Also check out our gallery of funny videos, our humor columns and of course our own fake news from various authors.

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Tom the Dancing Bug is Ruben Bolling’s weekly comic that appears in good newspapers and websites around the world and features insightful and funny social and political satire.

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