Fighting Freedom and Democracy
Welcome to the Tom the Dancing Bug Review.
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Hmm… I wonder if America is going to become a violent Fascist dictatorship in a couple of weeks?
🤷♂️
This week’s comic is A CAPTAIN AMERICA FOR THE TRUMP 47 ERA.
Read this week’s Tom the Dancing Bug on GoComics HERE.
Read this week’s Tom the Dancing Bug on BoingBoing HERE.
Read this week’s Tom the Dancing Bug on DailyKos HERE.
Brought to you by the Inner Hive, including longtime member Olivia Stafford and new member Wingtip Willy.
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I’ve lately been posting daily Trump comics from the past six years on social media, calling it “22 Days of Trump Horrors.” On Wednesday, I posted this one from 2019, and asked, “Remember when Trump tried to use public funds to extort Ukraine into announcing a bogus investigation of Biden?”
It was not a rhetorical question. Trump does so many batshit crazy, illegal, and traitorous things every day, that people have legitimately forgotten that he was impeached for phoning the president of Ukraine and extorting him for personal political gain.
He threatened to withhold aid money that the U.S. had already passed a law to give to Ukraine, unless Zelensky announced he was launching an investigation into Biden.
And we never would have known about it if it weren’t for a brave whistleblower who heard the conversation. That whisteleblower’s career was ended for that. But Trump’s goes on and on.
Here’s the comic from Thursday:
It boggles my mind that in 2019 I thought the president being shielded from prosecution for any crime while in office was a ridiculous scenario deserving the ridicule of a dystopian science fiction parody — yet the Supreme Court went farther than that, ruling that a president can never be prosecuted for crimes committed in office!
What the hell has been going on??
And finally, I’ll put here the comic I’m going to post on social media today: “Trump’s THIRD, Newer, Best Testament of the Bible” (2019).
Of course, Trump the grifter would eventually sell his own Bible. The price he charges?
You can’t make this stuff up. But you can guess the price.
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This week’s Classic Tom the Dancing Bug (published on GoComics yesterday) is “THE TRUE STORY OF PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP” (from 2020).
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And the GoComics Super-Fun-Pak Comix page has recently featured comics from this installment (from 2014).
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I’m now occasionally writing posts for Boing Boing. Here is an item I wrote recently:
And one of my comics was included in this roundup of election comics from In These Times, curated by Matt Bors.
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Okay, please buy a book while it’s still legal to do so.
And please upgrade by joining the Inner Hive. You get access to each week’s comic before it’s published, plus lots of other comics and content. And I may soon need all the help I can get.
Your faithful future fugitive,
Rb
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Clover Press's promotional copy for the book:
Clover Press’s Complete Tom the Dancing Bug program bursts forward with the eighth chronological volume, covering all of the most recent installments of the comic strip, a two-time Pulitzer Prize Finalist, from 2020-2023.
It’s the Great Storm, Tom the Dancing Bug! includes Bolling’s award-winning work covering the last year of the Trump presidency and the post-term MAGA insanity. All the favorite Tom the Dancing Bug characters try to make sense of the dark times of the early 2020s, including: the Smythe family of Chagrin Falls; Lucky Ducky, the poor little duck who’s rich in luck; and Billy Dare, boy adventurer. Also in the volume is Bolling’s comic contribution to “Weird Al” Yankovic’s hit graphic novel, The Illustrated Al.
Tom the Dancing Bug is the wildly popular, groundbreaking comic strip that has won multiple awards, including the Herblock Prize, the Berryman Award, and a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award. Mark Hamill called it “wondrous, whimsical, and witty,” and Seth Meyers recently wrote, “The fact that Tom the bug can keep dancing in this day and age is a testament to Ruben Bolling’s skills as a cartoonist!”
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The Tom the Dancing Bug shop at Threadless is growing.
Confuse your friends. Perplex your neighbors. Confound yourself. Various colors, styles, sizes available.
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In case you are interested:
Here is the official Tom the Dancing Bug webpage: tomthedancingbug.com
You can join me on:
Threads (@rubenbolling)
Bluesky (@rubenbolling.bsky.social)
Mastodon (@rubenbolling@mastodon.social)
I’m still on Twitter, but mostly just to burn down my account
And I’m on Substack’s own Notes.
👉 I am also on: Facebook and Instagram.
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My email address is tomdbug at gmail dot com
The Tom the Dancing Bug Review. Copyright 2024 Ruben Bolling.