This week’s comic is “Respect the MAGAs.” They’re very sensitive.
Read this week’s Tom the Dancing Bug on BoingBoing HERE.
Read this week’s Tom the Dancing Bug on DailyKos HERE.
Read this week’s Tom the Dancing Bug on GoComics HERE.
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Hey, Tom the Dancing Bug was Mentioned this week. And Honorably so!
The comic strip received an Honorable Mention for the National Press Foundation’s Berryman Award.
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A nice way to lose an award? Anyway, congrats to Steve Sack, who is an excellent cartoonist, and with whom I’ve already exchanged angry emails.
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This week’s Classic Tom the Dancing Bug (published on GoComics yesterday) is “Lucky Ducky, in ‘Deficit Hawk Down,’” from 2010. For new readers, Lucky Ducky is a recurring character who constantly infuriates his wealthy nemesis Hollingsworth Hound by being poor and thus getting all the breaks in our country. It’s drawn to evoke the style of my comics hero Donald Duck artist Carl Barks, but I think I thanked him explicitly in the fine print for this one (Unca Carl) because my picture of the hawk turning around may have crossed the line from homage into swiping.
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Earlier this week, I ran across a tweet from Trumpist Candace Owens that I just had to reply to.
I don’t know how anyone could look at Trump and see a “manly man,” whether he’s wearing his blue suit and power tie, or a dress.
A manly man uses his strength to protect and support others.
(By the way, that’s what a womanly woman does too.)
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In other social media “news” (generously defined), I was alerted late Tuesday night that Bette Midler had tweeted one of my comics. I checked out her account (2 million followers) and saw this image of last week’s comic:
Notice anything missing? By the time this image had come across Ms. Midler’s attention (I assume), someone had stripped out the “Tom the Dancing Bug” title and the “by Ruben Bolling” byline from the top of the comic.
It’s cool that probably hundreds of thousands of extra people saw this comic, but it would have been cooler if they had a chance to glance over the name of the comic strip.
Variations of this kind of thing happen all the time.
And it’s so weird. If you want to rip the comic and post it yourself, why even go through the trouble of removing the title? It’s not like they replaced it with their own name to claim credit. And they even left in the fine-print copyright notice.
It reminds me of my colleague John Kovalic’s installment of his great webcomic Dork Tower (which I recommend!) on this subject.
The whole issue is really complex; I mean, I don’t necessarily agree with every aspect of John’s etiquette guidelines. I don’t want to be asked every time someone uses my comic. And I do silently resent it when a commercial website just rips my entire comic, even if it includes a link.
But individuals come across images and memes in cyberspace, with various types of attributions and links, and they’re going to copy them and share them without fully considering, or certainly researching, the source. I’m sure that’s what Bette Midler did.
Obviously no casual social media user can be expected to know all those complex rules in John’s comic.
Except that last one, which is obvious.
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And you may someday be able to catch me being a hypocrite on this issue, but I’m not going to be a hypocrite while everybody’s watching. Yes, I asked John’s permission to use his comic here, and I did include a link to his website.
In fact, when I asked him permission, he informed me that he believes his comic was inspired by what he saw happen to one of my comics! This one:
This one really made the rounds. One reader told me he made copies and would walk around parking lots putting them on the windshields of Hummers.
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This week’s GoComics Super-Fun-Pak Comix page featured comics from this installment (from 2000):
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Whew, this was a long one. I doubt many future Newsletters will have quite this much Content™️!
Info on more ways to Tom the Dancing Bug below.
Your friend,
Rb
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The Tom the Dancing Bug Newsletter. Copyright 2020 Ruben Bolling.