Congrats to our friend and colleague Ruben Bolling for winning the Society of Professional Journalists Award for his Tom the Dancing Bug comic strip!
“Combining rapier wit with an astute sense of kitsch, Ruben Bolling’s weekly comic strips play on (and play with) conventions of American pop culture and psychology as well as any artist today. Nothing is sacred in Bolling’s work; and giving lie to the sacredness American society invests in its golden calves (military machismo, Christian exceptionalism, the WASP-y, superficial idealism of the 1950s and early ’60s) is what gives the work so much of its power.
Bolling’s work takes corporations’ “rights” to task, in the form of a bedtime tale told by a suit-wearing father to his young daughter, a la “Leave It to Beaver” and “Father Knows Best.” The strip foretells a future that peers back to a horrific past, when corporations were not granted the rights of individuals — before the days of “too big to fail” and the Citizens United Supreme Court decision.
In the end, we learn the father is, himself, a corporation.
Judges called the work “smart, clever and, more important, unique.” They praised Bolling’s willingness to creatively subvert convention – in part by incorporating and recontextualizing those conventions in his work.”
Well deserved, Ruben!
Ruben Bolling wins Society of Professional Journalists award for Tom the Dancing Bug comic