Ruben Bolling

He came to increasingly satirize conservative politics after the September 11 attacks and Iraq war in the early 2000s. This trend strengthened with the Donald Trump presidency and right-wing populism from 2017-2020, his critiques of which earned him several cartooning awards.

• Born — 1963 • Birth Name — Kenneth Fisher • Birthplace — New Jersey, U.S. • Nationality — American • Cartoonist — y • Alias — Ruben Bolling • Notable Works — Tom the Dancing Bug • Website — https: tomdbug.wpcomstaging.com/ • Awards — Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, Best Cartoon, 2002, 2003, 2007, 2008, 2009

Raised in the Short Hills section of Millburn, New Jersey, Fisher graduated from Millburn High School in 1980, where he was co-editor of the school newspaper and started drawing cartoons, but with little success. Fisher, who has no formal art training, read many comic strips when he was a child (his biggest influence being Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury), and sometimes features their styles in his work. However, he didn't aspire to be a full-time cartoonist; instead he studied economics as an undergraduate at Tufts University and is a 1987 graduate of Harvard Law School. It was at Harvard in the mid-1980s that Fisher came up with the idea for "Tom the Dancing Bug" and when he adopted his pseudonym, Ruben Bolling that is a melding of the names of two favorite old-time baseball players, Ruben Amaro and Frank Bolling. Tom the Dancing Bug originally ran in the Harvard Law School Record. After graduation from Harvard Law School, Fisher practiced law for several years before resigning to pursue cartooning full-time. When that didn't work out, cartooning became a side interest and Fisher became a full-time employee at a financial services company. Tom the Dancing Bug was picked up for weekly syndication in 1997 by Universal Press Syndicate. While Fisher worked on building a full-time cartooning career, he became involved in a project with New Line Cinema to produce a movie about his character Harvey Richards, Esq., a "Lawyer for Children", that has not been realized. Newspapers that have published Tom the Dancing Bug include The Washington Post, The Village Voice, and Los Angeles Times. At its peak, Tom the Dancing Bug was syndicated in print in more than 100 newspapers. It now is published almost entirely online. In 2012, Fisher launched a subscription service, the Inner Hive, which he credits with keeping the comic strip going amid declines in print newspapers. A Super Fun-Pak Comix installment from 2014, entitled The Comic Strip That Has A Finale Every Day, parodied farewell installments from long-running comic strips. This then became an ongoing feature on the gocomics.com site under the pseudonym John "Scully" Scully, releasing the same comic strip every day. In 2015, Fisher published the first in a series of children's books, The EMU Club Adventures.

Fisher is married to an attorney. They have three children.

Ruben Bolling is recorded as cartoonist.