Boing Boing's own Ruben Bolling, the cartoonist behind Tom the Dancing Bug, has a brand new book out this fall: "It's the Great Storm, Tom the Dancing Bug!" published by Clover Press.
The book compiles every Tom the Dancing Bug comic from 2020-2023, covering, among other things, the 2020 election, Trump's insurrection, and continued malignant festering of Trumpist and MAGA insanity.
Ruben and his "intricate, incisive, shape-shifting" comic strip were profiled in a great The New Yorker article just a couple of weeks ago:
"'Tom the Dancing Bug,' which Bolling began publishing widely in 1990, has always been free-form and vaudevillian from week to week—original characters, recurring parodies and satires, one-offs, a terrific long-running meta-funny-pages gag. His illustration style tends toward a tidy clean-line aesthetic, à la 'Tintin,' but it morphs to suit whatever he's up to: hatched and shaded portrait-style depictions of celebrities and politicians; imitations of other artists; fake ads, posters, and informational broadsides."
Among the over 200 comics in"It's the Great Storm, Tom the Dancing Bug!" is Ruben's infamous Peanuts pastiche published immediately after the January 6 Insurrection, to which the book's title and cover refer.
And it includes his lauded Richard Scarry-inspired piece following the tragic 2022 Uvalde school shooting.
The book is part of Clover Press's The Complete Tom the Dancing Bug program, in which the entire run of the comic strip is being published in a gorgeous, serially released multi-volume set. So far, six volumes have been published.
Ruben's comics have won many awards (the Herblock Prize, the Berryman Award, an RFK Journalism Award, etc.) and he was a Pulitzer Prize Finalist for Tom the Dancing Bug twice in the last five years.
And The Complete Tom the Dancing Bug program has attracted endorsements form the likes of Seth Meyers, Mark Hamill, and "Weird Al" Yankovic. The back cover of the book:
In fact, the book includes a bonus three-page comic "Weird Al" invited Bolling to create for his graphic novel The Illustrated Al.
You can buy "It's the Great Storm, Tom the Dancing Bug!" in bookstores, and there are various ways to order it (and all the volumes in The Complete Tom the Dancing Bug set) online, although Amazon is currently already out of stock.
But you can buy your very own personalized/signed/sketched copy AT THIS LINK, and copies are being sent out, in the order of the queue, right now!
