Ruben Bolling is the award-winning, and award-losing, cartoonist behind the weekly comic strip Tom the Dancing Bug.  But his path to a Creative Life hasn’t been straightforward: It’s marked with late starts, missed opportunities, compromises, failures, setbacks, pitfalls, and, most notably, very substantial day jobs.  But he’s learned that creativity isn’t just producing what we call Art.  It’s what makes us who we are, and finding and channeling it in everyday life is one of life’s greatest joys.  Bolling takes us through his creative journey and what if means to be creative, and if you’re not careful, you might just learn something.  As an example, he explains his complicated and initially reluctant relationship with Photoshop, and how it has transformed his pen/paper artistic process.

Presenter Bio

Ruben Bolling, Independent Cartoonist

Ruben Bolling is the author of Tom the Dancing Bug, the weekly comic strip distributed by Andrews McMeel Syndication, and appearing online at BoingBoing.net, DailyKos.com, and GoComics.com.  The comic strip won a 2017 National Cartoonists Society Award, the 2017 Herblock Prize, a 2018 Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, and in 2019 it was a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.  Clover Press has launched a Complete Tom the Dancing Bug series of books, and the first published volume, Into the Trumpverse, was released last year.

Links:

Blog/Homepage: tomthedancingbug.com

Comic samples: The Buggiest of 'Tom the Dancing Bug'