See today’s strip here. Mordant! As I recall, after the Columbine shootings he did one about an “Armed and Dangerous Teenaged Inkblot” (everybody interpreting what it is/means their own way). Ruben Bolling is a national treasure!
What’s your fave Tom the Dancing Bug running bit? Mine is “Super Fun-Pak Comix,” so many different zingers packed into one strip, but I also dig “The Adventures of God-Man” and “Billy Dare, Boy Adventurer.”
Has a collection of TTDB strips ever been published?
I like Tom The Dancing Bug in general, but I LOVE Super Fun-Pak Comix. Those always slay me (like 10,000 years between panels, or the fun kid’s stuff).
Ehhh, SFPC was my favorite for awhile but after awhile it all seemed to be the same, to the extent of even reusing the same or nearly the same comix. Even if that was the point it ceased to be funny.
I guess I like them all equally, even SFPC. God-man, Bob the Australopithecine, Lucky Ducky, etc. I guess I don’t like Billy Dare too much but it’s been a long time since I read TDDB.
I too have wondered about TTDB collections. I’d buy.
There’s currently one TTDB collection out there, I believe. You can get it here:
Ditto on Super Fun-Pak Comix. I love metafiction in general, and I really love how those strips poke fun at the conventions of comics and humor. One of my favorites was about a contest in which readers were invited to submit a caption by e-mail. The winning caption was, of course, spam…
Dang, I was thinking about starting a Tom the Dancing Bug appreciation thread. Except starting threads isn’t really my thing.
Tom the Dancing Bug is the best. I really love Godman, the superhero with omnipotent powers. “I’ll fly over the city looking for clues!” “I’ll check out my contacts in the underworld!” “And I’ll reverse time and restart the big bang such that the criminal is never born!”
I think TTDB even compares favorably with its nearest equivalent, This Modern World. Tom Tomorrow too often yields to the temptation of talking heads: A strip might be nothing but a dialogue between Sparky and a conservative strawman. It gets the point across but it’s not always funny, and makes the strip visually uninteresting, which is a cartoodinal sin.
I think my favorite in the recurring “Super Fun-Pak Comix” was a Marmaduke-style panel strip called Oh, That Wolverine! If that was a real comic, I would read it.
I think “Lucky Ducky” gets more usage than it’s really worth. I can’t get enough of “Billy Dare” or “Dinkle the Unlovable Loser.”
Lucky Ducky RULES, since it was in an LD strip when Bolling introduced “James K. Poult”, the great Mallard Fillmore parody.
My fave is Marital Mirth.
“Cartoonist Rex Feinstein hates his wife. Not in a humorous ‘Oh, God, she burned the pot roast again,’ kind of way, but in a very real, perpetual-silent-scream kind of way.”
I love that strip. One of my all-time favorites is “God’s Reelection Campaign,” in which God runs for another three-billion-year term against a used car salesman who promises such things as talking llamas, a beverage-holding appendage on any human who wants it, and “Evil. Gone. First hundred days!” 