Ruben Bolling interview by Kent Worcester February 2002

An edited version of the following appeared in The Comics Journal #247

WORCESTER: Why don’t we start by asking about your family background.
BOLLING: I grew up in New Jersey. I was born in 1962. The cultural influences that I had are probably extremely common for people who ended up in this line of work, who were born at the same time and grew up in a suburban atmosphere. Mad Magazine was a tremendous influence when I was a kid. A shining example of what I thought was the pinnacle of humor was a Frankenstein spoof that appeared in a really old Mad Magazine. The scientist was throwing lots of things into Frankenstein in order to build the monster. One of them was chicken fat. I remember laughing with my brother, even though we didn’t know what chicken fat was. But for days we would just say to each other, Chicken fat! and laugh. Peanuts was a big influence, and the fact that I was the only kid in my first grade class who could draw a credible Snoopy and Charlie Brown. It made me the celebrity, and was a big factor in helping identify myself as a cartoonist.
WORCESTER: Was Snoopy your favorite character, or did you identify with Charlie Brown?
BOLLING: That’s a good question. Snoopy was never my favorite character. In a lot of ways the popularity of Snoopy took Charles Schulz’s eye off of the ball in terms of his artistic mission. Charlie Brown was really the soul of the strip. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I identified with him as a muse. Probably what I found the most enjoyment out of it was really just the pure craft and joy that he had in assembling this cast of characters and finding different ways of getting humor out of it. It was something that I would go home and try to duplicate when I was drawing and making up comic strips. It was clearly a big influence on my work.
WORCESTER: Any other cultural influences you want to emphasize?
BOLLING: Good and bad television was a tremendous influence. Scooby Doo. A Portrait of Eddie’s Father. Billions of hours of anything on TV that was nominally funny.
WORCESTER: Let’s say as a kid around the age of ten – how many hours of TV were you watching?
BOLLING: How many hours are there in a week? I’d come home and pretty much turn on the TV. I remember at one point saying, Oh, look. A new commercial is on! I was watching so much that I would see every commercial and when a new one would come on that was worthy of note.
WORCESTER: Were you a big fan of Saturday morning cartoons?
BOLLING: Oh yeah. In September I’d get that Sunday’s newspaper and dissect the programming strategies for each of the networks. It didn’t matter how bad the shows were. They were bad and I knew it. I was just interested in the whole idea of all of these different universes that they were creating and the cast of characters and finding out what was being done with that.
WORCESTER: What was your favorite kind of universe? Did you prefer the universe of super friends or a more fantastic universe, like with H. R. Pufnstuf?
BOLLING: I was a big H. R. Pufnstuf fan. He was my homey. I loved that.
WORCESTER: [Incredulous] He was your homey?
BOLLING: Yeah. But that changed as I grew up. Obviously, that became stupid and of course the only intelligent thing to watch was Herculoids. Earlier I would tend to gravitate towards stuff that was supposed to be funny. Then later on I got into the dramatic superhero stuff. That fed into the whole comic book thing, which I got into right at the stereotypical time that I began to read Ritchie Rich comics. You move from TV to saying, "wait a minute. I can read about these also. I can collect comic books—the Gold Key and then Harvey and straight into Marvels." I just ate that stuff up.
WORCESTER: Was part of your enjoyment of the Saturday morning cartoons that they offered a fantasy of immersing yourself in somebody else’s constructed universe?
BOLLING: I don’t know. Maybe when I first used the phrase creating these universes, I may have been overstating the case. I really was just sort of sitting there with my mouth hanging open watching Yogi Bear.
WORCESTER: You say you had a brother. Any other siblings?
BOLLING: Yeah. I was referring to my older brother, because at that time he was the one who shared my passion for Mad. But I have a younger brother as well. My older brother is two years older, and my younger brother is four years younger.
WORCESTER: Did your younger brother share your pop culture tastes?
BOLLING: Yeah. In fact, he became the recipient of the comics and books that we supposedly outgrew. He inherited Peanuts paperbacks and Mad paperbacks and became the steward of that for the family. But of course, we reserved the right to raid his room and get the stuff back at any time, which I’m actually still doing.
WORCESTER: What did your parents think of your reading Mad Magazine or watching endless hours of television?
BOLLING: Whatever we wanted to do, no matter how stupid it was, they would go along with it. Drive us to where we heard a Mad paperback was supposed to be stocked that we wanted to get. My mom actually took us to the Mad offices. We heard somewhere that you were allowed to go on a tour of it. She took us on a tour of the office. But it wasn’t really a tour. You just rang the bell, and they would have an office guy just show you around.
WORCESTER: What was that like?
BOLLING: It was the coolest thing. The office itself was nothing impressive at all. But being in those hallowed halls was a great thrill. At the end, they would show you where they stacked the paperbacks, and you were expected to buy a couple. While we were there, Dave Bird called. One of the editors said, Here. There’s a kid here. He wants to talk to you. He put on my younger brother, who was five. I thought, aw, he’s so lucky! Afterwards, we asked him what he said. He said, I don’t know. I couldn’t understand him.
WORCESTER: What did your parents think of your cartooning? Did they buy you art supplies, or did they warn you that cartoonists don’t make any money, and end up with short, unhappy lives?
BOLLING: I wish they had warned me of that, but no, they didn’t. They were supportive of whatever I wanted. This follows through as an adult. No matter what disastrous decision I would make in pursuit of cartooning, they would just say, Great. They would try to get me to go to art classes, but I really wasn’t interested in that. I would go to them, but it seemed to me that that involved a lot of copying the teacher. I remember cleaning paint brushes a lot. I really just wanted to read comics and copy them and draw them and learn how to draw abdominal muscles and furry animals.
WORCESTER: Was there ever a period where you rejected funny animals or superheroes?
BOLLING: Oh, I rejected them absolutely when I was in high school. It was totally uncool and of course the funny animals came first. Then I realized that superheroes were incredibly uncool also. I didn’t pick up a comic book again until well into college when I stopped caring so much about what was cool. I even thought it was cool to like them anyway, because they had sort of retro stupid kind of cool to them. There was a period when I forsook all cartooning in general for the sake of my glorious career as a cool teenager.
WORCESTER: What pulled you back into comics?
BOLLING: My reentry into comics in college was very sporadic. I would just buy one every once and a while and see what was going on with the characters that I remembered. It wasn’t until law school that I took a more serious interest in comics. It probably was through more of an interest in newspaper comics, which I was becoming more interested in. Doonesbury and Zippy were carried in the Boston Globe. A comic book store, the Million Year Picnic, was where I began to understand that there was a whole world of comics going on that I really wasn’t aware of it.
WORCESTER: Which part of Million Year Picnic were you drawn to? The adult stuff in the left corner, the superheroes, the funny animals, the back issues?
BOLLING: I remember Bill Griffith’s Zippy book…Are We Having Fun Yet? I got that and I just thought – I still think – that that was a brilliant… I would call it a graphic novel but it’s not a novel in structure but a book-length piece that really blew me away. At the time, I was trying to write and draw comics, and that really opened me up to different styles of humor that I could use in my writing. A much more free and open, sarcastic, goofy, absurdist, or minimalist approach. All different kinds of humor instead of the types of humor that I had been following more closely like Bloom County and Doonesbury. That was the turning point in my development as a writer. Not just Zippy, but being able to incorporate the type of humor that I would use with my friends as opposed to try and imitate the Doonesbury format of set up, pause panel, wry punch line.
WORCESTER: I’m interested in the period between when you gave up comics and when you began to reconnect with it. Were you still drawing in that intervening period?
BOLLING: I had stopped drawing then, too, but I always sort of identified myself as like a cartoonist. Even a closet cartoonist. I wouldn’t tell anyone, but I felt like it was a part of me. It was in my DNA.
WORCESTER: What does that mean precisely? Does that mean you were doing caricatures?
BOLLING: I submitted comics to the newspaper in college and was rejected. But I didn’t do that until my senior year and I’m sure those comics were very bad and deserved to be rejected.
WORCESTER: Tell us about those comics.
BOLLING: That’s when I was trying to be Doonesbury, trying to be [Gary] Trudeau.
They were just extremely bad and derivative. It’s all part of finding your own voice, and yet I would have done a lot better if I had done a lot more of them, because I think it would have been quicker to find my own voice. That’s what I needed to do.
WORCESTER: I don’t think anyone who reads Tom the Dancing Bug thinks that its creator would have any problem finding his individual voice. It’s a very confident strip.
BOLLING: It took a while to get there. I started Tom the Dancing Bug in law school. A major influence on me in terms of humor is obviously television humor. I think much more than any comic was the type of sketch comedy and Saturday Night Live and Monty Python, and realizing that I can write comics that way was a revelation to me. It was really like a switch going off. Then it was much easier for me to find my own voice once I had that approach.
WORCESTER: Apart from Zippy, what other kind of comics or other kinds of material would you have looked toward for inspiration?
BOLLING: Not much. I was going in there buying some compilation books. I remember the World’s Toughest Milkman was one. It was more like a television sketch that was put in comic book form. It really goes back to the early Mad stuff that I was starting to reread.
WORCESTER: Your degree was in economics. Why economics?
BOLLING: When I was in college I was groping for a career. A lot of my career decisions have been made based on trying to keep my options open, because at that time I didn’t know what I wanted to do. Economics seemed like that was the most business-oriented major offered, so I figured I’d major in that. I became interested in microeconomics on a philosophical level. Law school was a professional decision. I figured I’ll go to law school. I don’t have to be a lawyer. There are people who go to law school and use their degree for other things. I figured that was another way of keeping my options open for other careers.
WORCESTER: You’re at a high-pressure law school. You have three years, and the law boards at the end of those three years. How is it that that’s the moment in your life where you suddenly rediscover yourself as a cartoonist? It seems counterintuitive.
BOLLING: Yeah. It seems like a strange time to do it. I’ve been living with those ramifications ever since then. But that’s exactly what happened. I discovered not only my love for cartooning, but my ability to do it in a way that satisfies people, which I didn’t have before, especially in terms of writing. In law school, in the middle of my second year, there was an ad for a cartoonist for the law school newspaper. I don’t know if I’d been a cartoonist today if there wasn’t an ad for it. My attitude was, Well, they asked for one, so I’ll do it. I don’t know if I would have gone down this path at all if that ad wasn’t in the paper.
WORCESTER: What is the name of the paper?
BOLLING: Harvard Law Record.
WORCESTER: What kind of strip did you send them?
BOLLING: It was Tom the Dancing Bug exactly as it appears today. I saw the ad and came up with the idea absolutely fully formed in about five minutes. I came up with the comic in another ten minutes. Nothing in that cartoon has ever been that easy since. It’s one of those rare times when the answer was just obvious, and everything fell right in.
WORCESTER: Were you initially thinking that you would introduce a bug that danced?
BOLLING: No. It was never that. In fact, when I started the strip I didn’t want to have a name at all. I wanted to be as clever and funny as possible. I wanted to do my own Mad Magazine with differing characters, different themes each time. I would be the Don Martin and the Mort Drooker and everybody… the whole staff. When I approached them with the strip, they said they wanted to run it. But they wouldn’t run it unless it had a name. Out of spite I came up with the dumbest name I could think of.
WORCESTER: Do you feel saddled with this name now?
BOLLING: No. Then I loved it almost immediately. I mean, it was out of spite, and then about a half hour later when I was walking home I said, No. That’s great. That’s perfect.
WORCESTER: Do you get readers who write in saying, When are you going to bring back Tom?
BOLLING: It really happens very rarely now. It used to happen a lot. When I was dealing with editors more directly when I was self-syndicated, I would occasionally get the question, "where’s Tom the Dancing Bug?" But I think everyone knows what it is now. It’s just a silly, goofy name.
WORCESTER: Some Comics Journal readers might be surprised to learn that your real name is not Ruben Bolling. How did the use of the pseudonym come about?
BOLLING: It came about at law school. It’s a relatively small school, and on a personal level I felt more comfortable not knowing. It came in handy right away, because my third comic was a pretty vicious attack on a Dean who had pretty vicious policies. I found out from the editor that the Dean wanted to know who Ruben Bolling was. He refused to reveal it. After that, it became a real secret there. Since then it’s just sort of become almost like my own metaphor for the sort of double life that I’ve been leading, in terms of Ken Fisher having a job and a family and Ruben Bolling drawing the comic strip.
WORCESTER: Do you think of Ruben Bolling as a different kind of person? Is he a younger you? A brasher you? A meaner you?
BOLLING: I haven’t compartmentalized it that way. I don’t think I’ve gone quite that crazy yet. No. It’s a different name. I come home from work and take off my glasses and change into my superhero costume and start drawing comics.
WORCESTER: Do you ever hear yourself saying something and say to yourself, oh, yeah, that’s what Ruben would have said.
BOLLING: No. I think of it in terms of how people perceive me. I don’t think about Ruben Bolling at all. But some people, when they meet me, expect to meet Ruben Bolling. I think they’re disappointed to meet Ken Fisher sometimes.
WORCESTER: So who is Ruben Bolling? Who are they expecting to meet?
BOLLING: Well, I would imagine that they would expect to meet someone a little bit wackier than someone who pulls down a regular job. I’m not as crazy as you’d expect from the comic strip.
WORCESTER: Is there ever a sense that Tom the Dancing Bug under Ruben Bolling’s name does and says things that you yourself wouldn’t be comfortable saying under your own name?
BOLLING: I don’t think so. I’m saddled with having to explain it over and over again not only in interviews like this but just on a personal level. It’s always sort of awkward. Sometimes I try to just let people call me Ruben Bolling, but after a minute or two I feel like I’m perpetrating fraud on them, or I’m not letting them into my real world. So I have to explain it. It’s just another reason for awkward introductions.
WORCESTER: Was there ever an encounter where someone simply refused to believe that you were Ruben Bolling?
BOLLING: [Laughs.] Is that happening right now, with this line of questioning?
WORCESTER: I’ll drop it. What was the response to your law school comics?
BOLLING: The response was extremely gratifying. The fact that I was able to, in some respects, satisfy myself with the way that I was writing and drawing was very encouraging. Probably more than that was the reaction from students. Even though I had a secret identity, the reaction that I could see people having to the strip, both people who knew about it and would tell me and people who didn’t know about it but would talk about it, was extremely gratifying. At the end of the year I photocopied all of the comics and sold them at the bookstore. I couldn’t photocopy enough of them.
WORCESTER: You stapled them together?
BOLLING: I stapled them together.
WORCESTER: For a dollar?
BOLLING: I think it was three dollars. I don’t think I’ve ever had as great a publishing success since. I know I haven’t. That was my only publishing success.
WORCESTER: That was your first act as a self-publisher.
BOLLING: Yes. That’s right.
WORCESTER: OK. So you graduate from law school in 1987, and you make your way to New York. What was your game plan?
BOLLING: Probably just to pursue a career in law and see where that takes me. I went to a firm that had a rotation program… Again, to keep my options open so I could go through different departments in the law firm and hoping against hope that I’d find one that I actually liked and would fall into a career and be happy with it. After about a year of going through the rotation program—a year and a half—I quit to become a full-time cartoonist.
BOLLING: Yeah. My idea was to launch a syndicated daily comic strip. I had written a submission package, and had gotten the ubiquitous encouraging rejection letter that said maybe if I worked on this full time I would be able to launch a comic strip. The plan was that I could create a strip out of the adventures of Charlie.
WORCESTER: That’s Charlie the Australopithecus. Why Charlie? Do you identify with Charlie?
BOLLING: Oh, I do greatly. It’s the only character who I’ve created who is not in some way ironic and I think is the only character I’ve created who is sort of successful in terms of creating a personality that I believe in and believe he exists.
WORCESTER: That personality is honest and straightforward and never quite understanding all of the little rules of modern life that keep us apart.
BOLLING: He’s just a little bit off-kilter, because he is an Australopithecus, which is an ancestor species to humanity that lived three and a half million years ago. My idea in creating him is that he would be enough animal like that he would be off-kilter. In developing that I came up with a personality that really just appealed to me.
WORCESTER: Would you still like to do a Charlie daily strip?
BOLLING: Not at all. I would hate to do that.
WORCESTER: Why is that?
BOLLING: What I’m doing now is exactly what I really wanted to do. I saw the Charlie strip as something that would be fun and I really didn’t see a weekly comic strip as a career option. I saw a daily comic strip as a career option. It was totally wrong, but I wanted to find something that I believed in. It was a very strange daily comic strip. It wouldn’t have been conventional, but I thought if I could convince them to run it then I’m making a living being a cartoonist. It didn’t work out, but I’m glad. This way I can use Charlie when I want him, and yet do anything else whenever I want to as well.
WORCESTER: You said you think of him as alive. Do you find yourself writing on his behalf?
BOLLING: Yeah. I have not written a lot of fiction, but Charlie is the one character that I have developed with whom I have that kind of relationship. I can put him in a situation and watch what he does and then transcribe it. It’s a very common thing. Writers talk about that all of the time. Of course there’s plotting and I’m thinking about what he would do, but really it’s just sort of that very organic process that I have only with him.
WORCESTER: Let me read something you wrote in a strip that was published in the Tom the Dancing Bug comic book (1995), the only comic book collection of your strips. You say, "The worst thing about Mondays is realizing that not only are the five days ahead going to be mind-numbing, soul-squashing, empty, and futile, but blaming your all-consuming misery on your job is a self-deluding exercise since even your life away from work has been a relentless series of crushing disappointments and humiliating failures." Is that autobiographical?
BOLLING: No. At the time, I did have a job that I wasn’t really happy with, but even with that, 95% of that was not true in terms of my outside life. Really, it’s just a negative, nihilistic gag.
WORCESTER: How do you feel about negative, nihilistic humor in comics? Are you a fan of the "work is hell" school of comics? You have this career in a straight job. You have all of these office situations you take part in, but Tom the Dancing Bug barely touches on that kind of thing – except for the character Bob.
BOLLING: Even here I’m not really touching on it, because really, if you look at what the context of the strip is, it’s a joke about office strips. There’s always a level of irony there that…Probably more than most cartoonists I keep an arm’s length between my personal life and my work.
WORCESTER: By work you mean your cartooning?
BOLLING: Yeah. Not my personal work, but my cartooning work. One of the ways that manifests itself is the fact that I’m the only cartoonist I can think of in my generation that has never put themselves in a comic strip or comic book. Everyone else does that. I don’t know why I do that. Maybe it’s out of a sense of privacy. It’s just not right for what I’m trying to do. I’ve set up these rules for what’s right for the comic strip and what’s not. I have no idea why the rules are there. But I stick to them doggedly. Obviously, as an artist you incorporate parts of your life into what you’re writing about, but it’s always on an arm’s length and subtle way.
WORCESTER: It seems to me that you keep your professional work at arm’s length from your private personal life as well. So there’s three different spheres… the cartoonist, the family man, and the work person.
BOLLING: I really should have a third name. I’ll come up with one.
WORCESTER: Why do you think autobiographical comics are so popular with your – our – generation?
BOLLING: Many of them are well done. The fact that I don’t do it is not a condemnation of the form. Although, I will say that you have to have a really good reason for doing it. It should stand on its own even if it wasn’t autobiographical. I think it’s because of Crumb. He was so successful at it. Crumb is a tremendous cartoonist and one of the giants in the field. But I think he’s been a terrible influence on cartooning, because a lot of his autobiographical work, as well as nonlinear, make-it-up-as-you go along type of writing, has produced some pretty bad work out of some pretty good cartoonists.
WORCESTER: You’re not going to name any names, are you?
BOLLING: No. These have been generally people I’m a fan of. I like people who follow more in the Kurtzman line of cartooning – a real strong structure to the writing, obviously thought-out and linearly progressive, as opposed to people who follow Crumb, which has been successful for Crumb, but no one should be imitating him.
WORCESTER: Should anybody be imitating Jack Kirby? Do you get tired of all of the superhero work that’s derived from Kirby’s influence?
BOLLING: As little as I’m an expert on comic book writing, I’m much less so on superhero illustration. But he’s been a tremendous positive influence, sure. People can use him as a model for centuries to come. He was just so incredibly inventive. I have no problem with illustrators who copy him. On an ironic level, I copy him all of the time. When I’m trying to evoke that dramatic style of cartooning, it’s always Kirby. It’s fun for me, and I think it makes for a good comic when I do it. Even if only a handful of people notice it, I try to choose an artist and evoke that style—Kirby or Eisner. I think that it serves an idea well.
WORCESTER: Let’s talk about irony for a minute. There are a lot of critics who say that irony has been played out in American culture. What’s your relationship to irony?
BOLLING: I sprinkle liberally. It is interesting that we’ve now entered into so many levels of irony that things can have so many meanings. You can evoke so many meanings by drawing Kirby. You can be at once sincere and ironic. It’s so generation specific, because people who have grown up with the same touchstones will know exactly what you’re talking about and other people won’t. It’s used in everything: movies, and especially advertising. It can’t be ignored. On a certain level, it’s part of all of our lives. We’ve gone through all of these decades of little pop cultural references, and now they’re all sort of mixing with each other.
WORCESTER: This is the moment of the hyper-verse, where all cartoon images come together in one playing field to be mixed and matched.
BOLLING: I find it to be very powerful. You can be funny and playful and serious all at the same time with just the way that you are drawing something or your use of the word, "gosh." It’s a powerful form of shorthand for writing.
WORCESTER: In a few instances your comics are not ironic. In the first Tom the Dancing Bug collection, you have a one-panel comic, with George Bush Sr. speaking from the new U.S. capitol in Anchorage, Alaska. He’s sweating under a hot sun, and he says, "Greenhouse effect requires further study." Why don’t we see more comics like this from your pen?
BOLLING: I regard that one as a failure. That was not my favorite comic. When that book came out, it represented, literally, everything I’d ever done professionally. In fact, I had to add some things because we were short. I try to avoid that kind of simple gag whenever I can. I’m not a big fan of that type of simple gag-panel political cartoon.
WORCESTER: So there’s never a moment when you’re in front of the television and you hear something so outrageous that you dash for your drawing board and whip something off, hand it in and say, "This is my contribution to society?"
BOLLING: I never think I’m going to change anything. That’s not even my goal.
WORCESTER: Do you apply a kind of whackiness test to your own work? If you finish it and it makes you laugh, you send it in?
BOLLING: No. If I finish it, I send it in. I don’t think I’ve ever done a comic that I finished and not sent in.
WORCESTER: Why don’t you describe the writing/drawing process?
BOLLING: Sure. That’s certainly a big question. My writing process has changed a lot. When I first started writing, I thought of it as a very mystical process. These ideas would come to me and I had no control over them. They hit me like lightening bolts, and then I had to draw them. After a few years of truly believing that, I did an analysis and looked back at how it was that I wrote the comics that I had done. I realized that that’s just total bull. The ideas come to me when I have a blank piece of paper in front of me and I’m actually thinking about it. They don’t hit me when I’m on a bus thinking about baseball statistics. I have to think about it. That’s the process of becoming a more professional writer, and recognizing what it takes to write things. I still fear the blank page and the possibility that nothing is going to come to me that week. I still secretly believe that every week that is exactly what is going to happen.
WORCESTER: How far ahead are you?
BOLLING: I’m never ahead. I’m always up against the deadline. If I don’t do anything to that deadline, then there will be blank spots in 70 newspapers the following week.
WORCESTER: How does your family put up with the pressure? Why doesn’t your wife say, Ruben, please accumulate a few comics so that you can take a vacation without having to worry about your deadline?
BOLLING: It’s true. If I’m taking a vacation, I know that I absolutely have to get it done early, and so it does get done early. It always depends on when I know it actually has to get done. It would make my life so much better if I could get ahead. But I can’t write unless the deadline is there. My brain just gets too lazy. When a deadline pressure is there, I have to make stupid, half-baked ideas work. So I keep on massaging them and eventually something will come out of it.
WORCESTER: And you often stay up late?
BOLLING: Never writing. I can’t write late, because I get tired. But I draw late all of the time. In fact, I don’t think I’ve inked a comic before the hour of 11 p.m. in the last year. It’s always done late at night because the deadline pressure is always there.
WORCESTER: Do you ever have a hard time getting up in the morning and going back to your regular job after staying up inking a last minute strip?
BOLLING: Yeah. It’s hard. About once a week that that happens. That’s a tougher day than usual.
WORCESTER: What day is that?
BOLLING: It’s changed over the years. Right now my deadline is for Wednesday, so I’m up late Tuesday night working.
WORCESTER: So friends know not to call you on Tuesday nights?
BOLLING: No. No one knows.
WORCESTER: Who are some of the writers that you look to for inspiration?
BOLLING: I often find that when I’m writing the comic strip, I write for television and then translate it into the comic book form. The way I think of it is more in terms of television. Of course, there are writers for television and television programs that have influenced me or continue to. Things like Monty Python and certain Saturday Night Live seasons and that type of sketch comedy.
WORCESTER: Do you have a room for your writing and drawing, or do you have to share space in a crowded New York apartment?
BOLLING: Definitely the latter. I have a drawing board in the corner of a living room that’s next to my kid’s toys.
WORCESTER: How do they know not to ruin your space? Are you strict parents? BOLLING: I almost never work while they’re around and awake. When they’re around and awake they have my total attention. If I have to work, either I’m gone or I’ll get out of the house to write, but mostly it’s after they’re asleep at 8:00. This is very recent, because my daughter is three years old and my son is six months old. Basically, it’s after they’re asleep—8:00—that I’ll sit down and get going.
WORCESTER: Would you rather be writing for television?
BOLLING: I’d be very interested in writing for television, but my preference right now is for writing my comic strip, which I love doing. It’s just that stylistically, my influences have been television. That’s the way I think about humor.
WORCESTER: Which do you find more difficult, coming up with a humorous idea or executing it?
BOLLING: I find coming up with the humorous idea more difficult. I probably find it less difficult to execute the idea because I’m less accomplished at it and I’m doing the best that I can with it. That’s fine. I leave that as the grunt work, and I try to make it as fun as possible for myself because I think that’s just better for me, first, but it also makes for a better comic when there is some joy in the drawing. Sometimes I look back at something that I had to bang out late at night and it comes across that there was a lack of joy and interest in doing it. I try to figure out ways of making it interesting for myself.
WORCESTER: Do you sometimes work over sentences and try to figure out what it is that Harvey Richards, lawyer for children, is saying in a particular sentence, and how to get that sentence exactly right for comic effect?
BOLLING: Oh, definitely. It’s a very fragile thing. You have to juggle a lot of things when you’re writing for comedy. You have to get down the motivation of the character, say it in exactly the funny way, but also get the larger point across. It’s a real juggling act. The hardest point is coming up with the idea. Then comes executing the writing on that sort of structural level. Then of course you have the drawing of it and laying it out.
WORCESTER: Do you write out everything before you start to draw?
BOLLING: Absolutely.
WORCESTER: Do you revise the script while you’re drawing?
BOLLING: Yeah. I’ll change little words and stuff, but by the time I’ve sat down with a pencil to draw it, I’ve worked everything out. I know exactly what it’s going to be. My notes for comics are almost all writing. There are only very small sketches of the way someone is going to look, or a camera angle just to indicate. It’s all about the writing.
WORCESTER: Do you ever censor yourself?
BOLLING: No. Let me think about that for a second. I write about stuff that interests me and that I think will make a good comic strip. On that level, maybe I’m ruling out things I don’t want to deal with because I don’t think of them for a comic strip in the first place. Once I’ve decided on the comic strip, I don’t do any censoring at all, which actually strikes a lot of people as strange. Because the comic strip is very G-rated, despite what daily newspaper editors would say, which is that it’s a hugely controversial strip that will invite tons of letters from angry senior citizens. But really, by most cultural standards, it’s G-rated compared to all of the stuff that’s out there in the culture and as well as the other alternative style of cartoonists. What I’m saying is that I don’t censor myself. This is what I think the comic strip should be.
WORCESTER: What word would you find acceptable and what word would you not find acceptable?
BOLLING: Like I would say "crap" but not "shit."
WORCESTER: What about "damn?"
BOLLING: I would say "damn." My standard is pretty much what can be said on television. Maybe that’s because the stuff I’ve seen written, and I’m emulating that. I don’t know why that is, but I think of an old vaudeville comedian saying to me, "don’t work blue." That’s such a waste. I was doing this exact same thing when I was working only for one newspaper, the New York Perspectives. They would have loved for me to have used all kinds of curse words. I just don’t think that’s what it’s about. I really have no idea why I feel that way.
WORCESTER: Let’s talk about some of the characters in Tom the Dancing Bug. Harvey Richards, lawyer for children… How did he come about?
BOLLING: He came about in law school. I was thinking about the ways that behavior is affected both by laws and by means other than laws. The fact that laws are not always what restricts us from doing what we want to do. I didn’t refrain from stealing this lunch because I was afraid of getting caught by the police and going to jail. I did it because I buy into the contract, the social contract. There are all kinds of rules that we live by that are determined by our morality, or by markets. Harvey Richards sort of came out of the fact that kids have these rules that are just as valid as our own…
WORCESTER: And as complex.
BOLLING: Yes. Yes. And as able to manipulated, as our own sophisticated legal code. But that’s a long-winded intellectualized explanation for a character that really, once I thought of him, I thought it was funny. If I hadn’t come up with a funny way to do that, it would still be something bouncing around in my head. But the fact is, I found Harvey Richards. What makes him so funny is the fact that he’s so mean about it.
WORCESTER: Yeah. He’s always collecting from his kids.
BOLLING: Yeah. He doesn’t really care about them. That’s really the hook for Harvey Richards. It’s not that I can come up with all of these children’s laws that are like real laws. It’s the fact that he’s so mercenary about his approach to it and he doesn’t care at all about the kids.
WORCESTER: Do you get letters from lawyers praising Harvey Richards, picking up on that particular character out of all of your characters?
BOLLING: Yeah. Yeah. I stopped using Harvey Richards. I’ve used him once in the last three years. Just because I never thought that I was going to use him as much as I did. Actually, that was my first professional sale. I sold Harvey Richards to National Lampoon.
WORCESTER: What year was that?
BOLLING: 1989 probably. Sam Gross was their cartoon editor, and I sent it in. I really thought this was a one-shot comic. I had done the comic in law school and gotten a big reaction from it. He called up and said he loved it but he wanted it in three different comics. So I said, Wow. That’s stupid. Why would you want to divide it? This is such a dense comic, why divide it up. And he said, put him outside the office. Have him go out and do stuff. So I did, and it’s three different comics. That sort of led me to exploring the character in other ways and not just saying he’s a one-shot character. But he’s like a Saturday Night Live sketch. He’s come pretty close to saturation point.
WORCESTER: Do you like lawyers? Do you like the company of lawyers?
BOLLING: Yeah. I do. I think that they’re very interesting and engaging, especially litigators. It’s a lot for people to take, because they don’t understand the combative aspect of that. Really, it’s just a front, and a way to work through an issue. Litigators understand there’s nothing meant by a challenging style of conversation. People can get offended by them.
WORCESTER: So you would never end up doing a collection mocking lawyers.
BOLLING: I don’t think about marketing myself in that way anyway. I just think about what might be funny, not what niche I could find in the marketplace for that.
WORCESTER: What about Lewis, the kid who daydreams. How did you come up with him?
BOLLING: Actually, the derivation of him was when I was doing that daily comic strip Charlie and Lewis were teamed up. They never have in Tom the Dancing Bug.
WORCESTER: It seems like an odd combination.
BOLLING: Well, they were a team. That’s not a good explanation, because that’s in many ways Lewis is a way for me to write about my own childhood. He’s different in a lot of ways, but a way of exploring an aspect of my own childhood.
WORCESTER: Because you daydreamed in class and drew in your book?
BOLLING: Oh, I daydreamed a lot. Yes. I would just not do assignments. I can name what grade and what were the huge assignments that everyone was working on for months and then when it was time for me to turn it in I had done absolutely nothing. I was well into junior high when I finally found the maturity to actually pay attention in school. Before that, I did absolutely nothing and my grades reflected it.
WORCESTER: Is that part of the appeal of television, that it allows you to engage in a rich fantasy life?
BOLLING: Sure. That’s it, and I love to read. I’d read comic books, and I was much more interested in that that anything in school. But really it was just laziness and immaturity and I just didn’t feel the need or inclination to participate in it.
WORCESTER: Lewis does strike me as a little vulnerable, actually. Much more vulnerable than some of the kids in the Harvey Richards strip.
BOLLING: That’s right. The kids in Harvey Richards are totally different types of characters. They’re set upstairs. They’re straight men. There’s a level of irony there that I don’t use with Lewis. Lewis is another… I probably should add him to Charlie as a character that I feel is pretty well realized and someone who I understand. And then, I guess in ’98, I had Lewis grow up a few years, and put him in junior high school. I wanted to get him up to seventh and eighth grade.
WORCESTER: Where the humiliations are even greater.
BOLLING: Yeah. It opened up a whole new world for me. It was a great decision. It just shows the flexibility of what I’m doing. I can use Lewis, I can have him grow up more or send him back or stop using him altogether.
WORCESTER: Was your original thought that you would only use recurrent characters? And that Tom the Dancing Bug would consist of one week of Harvey, one week of Charlie, one week of Lewis?
BOLLING: As I first conceived it, it was actually going to be no recurrent characters. I’d regard it as a failure, like I was repeating myself, if I used a character again. But that was a little bit too stringent for me, as it turned out, on a weekly basis. Of course, it’s much richer for it, because the characters are a great boon to this strip.
WORCESTER: Would you ever bring back Schluff? I like Schluff a lot.
BOLLING: He’s come back.
WORCESTER: I missed the return of Schluff. Schluff is the monster from planet Dormar who likes to take naps on planets. On his first strip, "I’m Here to Take a Nap on Your Puny Planet, Do Not Try to Stop Me," he naps and then he mysteriously leaves by saying, It was a good nap. Flying into the cosmos.
BOLLING: Yeah. And he came back because he thinks he dropped his keys. [WORCESTER laughs.] But he didn’t, so he flies away again. These are just fun, silly things to do. This is somewhere I evoke Jack Kirby. It’s just fun to draw a giant alien. In the second one, I had him walking in a river with a bridge, and that was just fun to draw. That was sort of the excuse for doing it.
WORCESTER: Where did Sam Roland come from? He’s the detective who always dies.
BOLLING: Let’s go back to Schluff more.
WORCESTER: Oh, please. We could turn this into an all-Schluff interview.
BOLLING: Schluff represents two different styles of my writing. Schluff is something that I always want to develop more, which is pointless, silly stuff, as opposed to the political stuff, which I think in some ways is just easier to write because it’s reactive. You read the paper and come up with the idea. He’s sort of a style of writing that I’m really proud of, where you don’t say, "How did you think of that?" I don’t know why. Sometimes it doesn’t work and it falls on its face, but that’s a risk I’m willing to take. When if works with Schluff like that, it’s really satisfying. I have really gotten a great reaction to him. So… Sam Roland, he was just a character. I do a lot of playing with the sort of narrative conventions and making fun of the way that we look at stories and expect certain things from our plots. The fact that he dies every time was something that I thought was funny, and I did it… I think I did seven of them, and he kept dying in more and more bizarre ways. And then I heard that in South Park, they have that character who keeps dying. I think that’s one of the reasons why I don’t watch it. That came out just as Sam Roland was wrapping up. I felt as though it was taking away from the uniqueness of Sam Roland, which is silly, but I felt bad about it. It soured me on South Park.
WORCESTER: One of my favorites of your early strips is the Impossible Squad. It’s about a group of guys who are tough – a little bit like Sergeant Rock with the Punisher thrown in. Four specialize in explosives, and one specializes in entomology They have to take out a supply bridge. Any ideas? Three of them are like, let’s use TNT, and then Jack Duke, cigar-chomping entomology fan, says, Now hold your stoogies. I’ve got a better idea. I say we use termites. Much mayhem ensues.
BOLLING: Yeah. I was really proud of that one. This is a good example of the technique I try to use, which is burying the punch line. First of all, you have to really read the fine print to realize that their specialty is all explosives. I don’t telegraph that. I think it’s a lot more, it just makes it funnier when that is sort of buried in there.
WORCESTER: Have the Impossible Squad ever returned?
BOLLING: No. They haven’t. But maybe next week, now that you’ve got me thinking about it.
WORCESTER: OK. What about Max and Doug. Originally, they were two of your more important characters.
BOLLING: Yeah. They were. In fact, in my first book, which published everything I’d done up to that point they are used quite a bit. I’ve barely used them in the last three or four years. I realized that I was using them as a crutch. When I couldn't think of an idea, I would use them as a reflexively ironic take on comics. I just began to get less and less happy with the results. I really use them very sparingly now. There are Max and Doug comics that I like a lot, such as "The History of Doug."
WORCESTER: That is a nice one. Doug is a slightly Disneyfied anthropomorphic bear type. Max is a baby; a kind of cute, funny, clever baby that has been in comics for the last hundred years.
BOLLING: They’re supposed to be a comedy team of these comic icons, who are aware that they are comic strip characters, and comment on it. But you know, I’ve gotten less satisfied with doing comics about comics. I’m moving on to other interests and other things.
WORCESTER: Wait a minute. You’re tired of doing comics about comics, and you don’t want to do too many political comics, or autobiographical comics, what’s left?
BOLLING: Schluff. I will make it all Schluff. No. You’re right. It certainly sounds like I’m not satisfied with a lot of stuff. I’m always searching for new things. I developed the Super Fun Pack Comics.
WORCESTER: I was going to ask you about those.
BOLLING: Now I’ve done that a lot, so now I’m thinking maybe I’ve done too much of that. I’m always looking for that new format that I think will click and yield dozens of new comics in a whole new area. News of the Times was one. I just started one called Did You Know.
WORCESTER: Yeah. There’s a country called Canada. I found that out.
BOLLING: That was the one that started it, and then I decided to make that into an explicit format, which I’ve done two of my last three have been Did You Knows. They’ve gotten strange, and I’m writing them in ways I don’t understand, and they’re hyper-ironic and a lot of fun to write.
WORCESTER: What about Lyle, the Talking Pig. What happened to Lyle?
BOLLING: He was a character that was set up just for that one joke, that one logical conundrum of the fact that if animals could speak, they might actually encourage people to eat them, because it’s their only chance for survival. There are as many pigs as there are in America only because we eat them. How many mountain lions are left in America? It was just a vehicle for that, and I never intended to use him again but I did. I used him in another two-parter, and then something about pig transplants. So something will strike me and I’ll go back and use a character or not.
WORCESTER: The first newspaper where your cartoons appeared is New York Perspectives. Is that right?
BOLLING: That’s right. That started in June of 1990, and it was a new newspaper. I took some samples that I had done and showed them to the art director. They pretty much wanted me to start on the spot, which was great.
WORCESTER: Who else was featured in the New York Perspectives?
BOLLING: There was one other cartoonist, Marcelus Hall, who did a comic called Bill Dogbreath. He’s a musician, and he’s gone on to do illustrations for the New Yorker. Around the time I started Kyle Baker started a strip. It was great. I’d never seen his work before. I’m not sure how well known he was at that time, in 1990. But it was great to see someone like that, an emerging talent. And he’s gone on to such great things. Soon after I started, Ted Rall started. He called his strip The Other Cheek.
WORCESTER: Did you meet Ted through the New York Perspectives?
BOLLING: I did. I’d seen Ted’s work in a few other places, and I thought that I would give him a call, just to make contact. I called him up and said, Let’s meet. That was in 1990, and we’ve been friends ever since.
WORCESTER: Did you begin to self-syndicate your title around this time?
BOLLING: Yes. Perspectives went out of business around ’95 or ’94, and before they folded I had placed Tom the Dancing Bug into a bunch of other newspapers. By the time it folded, I was in 30-40 newspapers. It was so strange to not be in the newspaper in my own hometown, however. Getting into another New York newspaper, in particular the Voice, became an obsessive goal of mine. I constantly sent in samples and said how much I wanted to be in there. At around the time they let Jules Feiffer go, they began running my comic intermittently. I happened to be running in the issue after the let him go. There was a lot of flack about that. Who is this Ruben Bolling guy? He replaced Feiffer. But in fact, I’d already run intermittently in there. Ward Sutton and Tom Tomorrow were then taken up by the Voice, and eventually they made the decision to bring me on as well.
WORCESTER: Why don’t you say something about self-syndication? Was it worth the time that you put into it?
BOLLING: It was. In fact, I remember when I first met Ted, what we talked about is self-syndication. We were both trying to get into alternative newspapers. He was maybe like a half a step ahead of me. I remember seeing him in Funny Times, an all-comics monthly newspaper. I asked him about his approach to self-syndication. I remember his exact words. What he said is, you have to be an animal. I took that to heart. You have to constantly send stuff out. There was a period when I was obsessed with getting my samples out to newspapers, talking to editors, and so on. The perseverance paid off. It really launched my career as a cartoonist.
WORCESTER: When were you picked up by a syndicate?
BOLLING: After a while I began getting more and more newspapers – mostly alternatives. Then I started sending stuff to daily newspapers and I started having success there. I was in the San Jose Mercury News and the Washington Post and the St. Louis Post Dispatch. That’s when the syndicate started to notice me and I started to get some feelers from syndicate executives asking if I’d be interested in working with them. None of them I was interested in fielding because I was happy with the way things were going. But then Universal contacted me just at the right time. I was starting a new job, I was about to have my first baby, and I was wondering how I was going to take care of the business side of the comic. They came to me with a great offer that was respectful of what I had accomplished, including provisions for existing clients and artistic freedom. They really just would take over the business side of distribution. I could just do the comic. I quickly got very comfortable with the people and I think it really was the right move at that time.
WORCESTER: Do you work with an editor?
BOLLING: I do. I send my stuff into an editor named Greg Melvin, who is just terrific. One of the great side benefits of working with Universal is being able to talk to Greg once a week about the comic. He’ll catch typos, and that’s a big plus. He’ll also have some suggestions and thoughts. Part of our deal with Universal is that I’m not required to take any suggestions unless it has to do with some libel or legal reason. But it’s great to be able talk to someone about... Should a dash go there? In addition, he’s a great person to talk to and bounce ideas off of on subsequent matters for the future.
WORCESTER: Do they have ambitions for your career? Are they happy with your output and your profile, or would they like to see your characters on T-shirts and your story lines used in movies?
BOLLING: I think when they took me on they probably thought there was some upside. If I was able to get the comic in 50-60 newspapers, maybe they could get even more and build up the daily newspaper coverage because that’s where their expertise is. I think by now they must realize that there is very little upside with my comic strip for what they have expertise in. They’re probably happy with the content of the comic and the work that I do on a weekly basis. But they’re probably a little disappointed in the strip’s ability to be more widely distributed, in particular among their bread and butter client base, the daily newspapers. It’s a very quirky strip. It can be controversial, although I think that’s exaggerated by the fact that their clients prefer a very, very low degree of controversy. It’s the wrong size for a daily newspaper. It’s the wrong frequency of distribution. So it’s a real challenge to get it into daily papers.
WORCESTER: But it was through your efforts that you placed Tom, the Dancing Bug with the Village Voice itself.
BOLLING: Yeah. That was after Universal had taken over, but I’d already started the relationship and was in there intermittently when they took it over. I had already started talking to the editors there and eventually got it in solely through my efforts.
WORCESTER: I remember when the Feiffer firing story broke, the Village Voice and the New York Press were engaged in a kind of cartooning war over which paper had the best cartoonists. The Press had Tony Millionaire and Kaz, and Ben Katchor, and the perception was that the Voice had fallen down on its ability to deliver great cartooning. But now you have a quartet that readers can count on: Ward Sutton, Tom Tomorrow, Ted Rall, and Ruben Bolling. Of the four, you seem the least political, the quirkiest, the least predictable. Do you want to talk about your role at the Voice?
BOLLING: Well, Tom Tomorrow and Ted Rall see their role as political cartoonists. They may deviate from that on a rare occasion, but they see their role as making political comments. Ward is probably closer to me in that he makes a lot of social commentary and pop culture stuff. Although I don’t think he goes as far afield into general humor as I do.
WORCESTER: I think of him as preoccupied with the culture of celebrity and entertainment.
BOLLING: Yeah. I think that’s true. He does that. But he does a lot of political stuff. He sees that as his primary role, and I think that’s what he does best. So on a professional level that’s where we stand on that type of spectrum. It’s been great to be in that quartet, as you call it, because before I was in the Voice, Ted was my friend, but I really felt very isolated from other New York cartoonists. One of the great benefits I have as a cartoonist is meeting other cartoonists and sharing ideas.
WORCESTER: Learning secret handshakes...
BOLLING: Right. And so on occasion the four will get together, sometimes with the design director of the Voice who will sometimes organize it. It’s been a great way to feel as though we’re part of a New York cartooning community. Of course, there are all kinds of New York cartooning communities and lots of sub-cultures in New York. But I never felt part of one until this thing happened with the Voice.
WORCESTER: Do you feel your place at the Voice is secure even though you do have a more general humor approach?
BOLLING: I’ve no idea how secure my place is at the Voice, or any newspaper. I always feel I’m one editor change, or change of editor’s mind away, from being cancelled. But the fact that I have a friendly relationship with the design director, I think I feel a little more secure in that respect, which is not the case for any of my other newspapers. This is a guy I will go out and have drinks with.
WORCESTER: Do you want to say something about Salon?
BOLLING: When they approached me in 1995 to do comics on their site, I had to ask a friend what the World Wide Web was. I’d heard of the Internet, but not the World Wide Web. At that time I was definitely not alone in knowing what that was and what Salon was talking about. I said, Sure. That sounds great. I figured I’d have that for maybe a couple of weeks until the World Wide Web collapses. It ended up taking longer than that. Salon became one of my most important clients, if not my single most important client, and it offers incredible national exposure. It’s great to be associated with something that’s been such an editorial and artistic success.
WORCESTER: Is it a different audience?
BOLLING: I would imagine that, demographically, if I’m in the Voice, then I’m pretty much covered by the same types of people who read Salon and the same would be true in any alternative weekly that I happen to be in that geographic area. What Salon gives you is access to that same demographic, but across the board. I just got an email today saying, I live in Alabama and it’s great to be able to read your comic strip on Salon. It just enhances the scope of readership.
WORCESTER: To date you’ve released two books: Tom the Dancing Bug, published by Harper Perennial in 1992, and then, in 1997, NBM’s All I Ever Needed to Know I Learned From My Golf-Playing Cats. How have these books done for you?
BOLLING: Their sales were not massive. The first book came about through a total fluke. I had just started, in the middle of 1990, and I guess it was in 1991 that I decided that it was time to look into a book contract. I sent the comics I had done, which were very few, to a friend of mine who was just getting started in publishing. I was only sending them because I wanted to ask her how you get a book contract. I was totally naive and ignorant of every aspect of it. How does it work? Do you fill out an application and then you get accepted or denied into the world of publishing? So I just asked her and she asked me to send her some stuff and so I sent it. She forwarded it on to the editor who did Matt Groening’s books. She was with him very early and had taken a real risk on him and it had paid off. And that editor called me up and said, Let’s work on this. Before I knew it, I had a book contract. It came really easily. Looking back, it came probably too easily. I hadn’t even done enough comics to fill up the book. I had to rush and do more comics to fulfill the obligation. It was a very early compilation book. But when that editor called me up and said, Yeah. I want to do this and I’m Matt Groening’s editor, I felt as if... This is it! I’m on my way. Let’s move to Hollywood. But the book itself, I think, disappointed even the modest goals of Harper Collins. Their strategy was to put it on the shelf and see what happened. They must have been disappointed by the pre-orders, because the advertising and marketing budget quietly disappeared by the time the book was published. They had talked about doing some stuff, and they really did nothing. The second book came in 1997 and I had a lot more success as a syndicated cartoonist by then, and my name was out there a lot better. That book did fairly well, and it met our expectations in terms of sales and sold out its run and, unfortunately, is now out of print.
WORCESTER: Did the title work for you?
BOLLING: No. The title was an exercise in performance art, which is not exactly what you want to do with your second book publishing foray. I thought it would just be funny to do a title that had nothing to do with the content of the book, which is sort of similar to the title of my comic strip. I thought it would be funny to see if anyone would actually buy the book thinking that it would be about cute stories about golf-playing cats and find out that it was about giant wombats and stupid stuff like that. I don’t think that the title helped sales at all. But I doubt it hurt it, either. I think that the people who know my strip went out and bought the book and the numbers sort of look like that.
WORCESTER: And for both NBM and Harper Collins was the idea that your humor could reach chain bookstore audiences and kind of regular American book buyers rather than simply a comics based or a cartooning based audience?
BOLLING: I think much more so with Harper Collins, who I think had had success with Matt Groening and thought, Let’s see if this hits as well. I think with NBM, they’re more a comic book publisher and I think that they were looking at it more like, Well, this guy has a lot of readers in these cities where his strip runs in the alternative paper or the daily paper. Let’s see if we can get his fans to buy the book.
WORCESTER: Any plans for a third book?
BOLLING: I’m going to be working with Andrews McMeal, the publisher’s arm of the syndicate Universal, on a third book. It’s far overdue. I haven’t had the time to put together the book, and I want to have another high-concept, hopefully something better or different from All I Ever Needed to Know I Learned From My Golf-Playing Cats. I’m trying to work out a way to make it more interesting than just a compilation book.
WORCESTER: Do you want to say anything about other future projects? Do you get inquiries from Hollywood or that sort of thing? Do you think about the business potential of this strip, or are you content with its preserving its integrity?
BOLLING: I think all of the time about expanding not so much the strip but more whatever I can do in terms of writing or producing or creating. I would love to work in television. I feel that that’s where my writing roots are. I am working with the Cartoon Network on a couple of things. They approached me a couple of years ago, so we have a developing thing. I’m really hopeful that something can come out of it, because we’ve got some good ideas.
WORCESTER: And yet you have worked so hard with the comic itself to resist using one character or telling the same kind of story over and over again. You’ve consciously avoided making your work amenable to the kind of easy translation into other media.
BOLLING: That’s true. It’s offbeat and there’s no subject matter. You can’t even say it’s a political strip. It’s a tough sell even to alternative newspaper editors. But I’m afraid I have no interest in changing the strip to make it more marketable or more saleable.
WORCESTER: Let’s turn to September 11th. Where were you when the planes hit the World Trade Center towers?
BOLLING: I was on my way downtown to my day job and I take a van. People pile into a van and drive to downtown. I was getting to work late that day. I would have been to work at 9:10, which for me is pretty late. I usually get in around 8:00 or 8:30. The van pulled up downtown. We got off the FDR Drive and we looked at the World Trade Center. Both towers were on fire. I think the second plane had just hit. Everyone else in the van got out as though they were going to work. I work very close to the World Trade Center. It wasn’t even going to be a question. I was not going to be able to get into my office. So I asked the van driver where she was going, and she said, Back uptown. I said, I’m going with you. We were back on the FDR and I was home maybe ten, fifteen minutes later, because there was no traffic going up.
WORCESTER: And then you went straight to the TV?
BOLLING: I went straight to the phone. You could still make calls. I talked to my wife. When I first saw the two towers on fire, I didn’t know what had happened. Someone said a plane had crashed. We didn’t know why there were two towers on fire. I turned on the radio on the van on the way back up, and I realized the enormity of what had happened, and all I wanted to do was get my family together. So I called my wife and said, Get out of your office. She works mid-town. We met at my daughter’s nursery school. I just wanted to get everyone together. Once we heard the Pentagon had been hit, I just felt as though... And we were hearing rumors of all kinds of things. There were eight planes in the air and they only accounted for four. At that point I didn’t know what was going on. I thought, What’s next? A ground invasion?
WORCESTER: A suitcase nuke.
BOLLING: Yeah. Yeah. Who knew what was next? So I tried to gather my family up. I was talking to my wife on the phone when I saw on TV the first tower go down. It barely even registered. I just felt so desperate to get to my daughter. The implications of the tower hadn’t gone hadn’t hit me. It barely even registered to me when that happened.
WORCESTER: Did you know anyone who died in the attack?
BOLLING: Thank God no close friends or relatives. Friends of friends and relatives of friends, but no one very close to me.
WORCESTER: What was the first comic you did after 9-11?
BOLLING: I had such trouble, obviously. One of the reasons was that I didn’t really care that much about comics right after September 11th. The other thing is that every aspect of what happened and the implications of it translate so poorly to what I do as a satirist and ironist.
WORCESTER: And general humorist.
BOLLING: Right. Exactly. It’s light-hearted stuff. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I was at a loss for how this was going to affect my comic that week, in the weeks to come, and really my career. So the first one I did was a super-fun pack comics. I just sat down and wrote down words about what happened and directions I could go in the comic and thank God something came to me all at once, that I would do a super fun pack, which is a form that I use where I do a fake newspaper comics page. I would use a normal set-up, but every single time the punch-line would be...
WORCESTER: Terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center killing thousands.
BOLLING: Yeah. It was much more heart-felt than a lot of my work. It may not seem that way, because I still have a certain detached style. But I was very, very emotional when I wrote and drew that comic.
WORCESTER: What kind of reaction did you get? Were some people put off by the morbidity of this comic?
BOLLING: Well, there were people who misunderstood it. Every cartoonist I’ve talked to said they got the weirdest emails after 9/11. I think this was a good example of it. I got some that were extremely positive. Then there were people who, I think, clearly misunderstood it. The venom that they put forth in their emails was also unbelievable. They really personally attacked me for what they thought was trivializing the tragedy.
WORCESTER: What do you do when you get a nasty email? Does it linger in your head? Does it lead to bad nights of...
BOLLING: It affects me so much more than it should. I understand rationally that it’s one person. I don’t take the ones that are good very seriously, I can tell you that. But the ones that are bad I definitely mull over. And these were very bad. I try to respond if I feel as though it was done with even a modicum of civility.
WORCESTER: What is it that these critics want from you? What kind of cartooning are people supposed to do?
BOLLING: I don’t know. Certainly cartoonists and all humorists were in a tough situation. I don’t know what they want us to do, but I can see their point. If they felt as though this was sacrilegious, then they should call me on it. But it was clearly just a misunderstanding. They thought I was saying that it was funny or trivial, and my point was the opposite.
WORCESTER: It was like hearing a loud gong on the written page.
BOLLING: Right. That’s the way it was intended. But I think a lot of it was an intentional misreading. I think people were ready to fight and be angry and if they thought something was inappropriate, the response was a lot more vociferous than it would have been about anything other than that event.
WORCESTER: Have any of your other subsequent 9-11 comics attracted the same kind of mixed reaction?
BOLLING: There’s been a lot. Since September 11th, I really changed the way I do cartooning. I’m just starting to come out of it. I admit that for a while I lost my footing, and yet I’m very proud of some of the stuff that I did. After a while I felt as though it was inappropriate and disrespectful to do anything but things on September 11th.
WORCESTER: Like a lot of New Yorkers.
BOLLING: Yeah. I think that was part of the issue, is that New Yorkers were still preoccupied with this, and the rest of America was sort of moving on to other subjects. I got an email saying something like, You’re just milking this to make money and for your career. That one really stuck with me, and it really made me realize that people in other parts of the country are not as obsessed with this as we are here. In truth, I really sort of had to slap myself and wake myself to get out of it. Because I just kept on doing stuff. And then I began doing stuff about the fact that that’s all I could do. That’s all I could do. It’s only recently that I’ve begun doing some things that are not having to do with September 11th. Enron, I did one on baseball. I just did a totally frivolous comic about Bob. Now I have the right mindset where I can do it when it’s appropriate and I can do other things when necessary as well.
WORCESTER: As a reader I was really struck by the Billy Dare, smuggler’s cave cartoon, which appeared about a month after the WTC. Billy and Clinton, the talking parrot, are on the trail of evil Doctor Mordu. They’re being chased by angry foreigners who call Billy an infidel. He’s climbing up some kind of building, saying, Evil? I’m the good guy in this comic strip. The angry mob down below says, No. You’re the bad guy. And he says, Huh? What comic strip are you in? And then suddenly you have a new title, a new title panel, Dr. Mordu, Righteous Avenger. And Billy Dare says, When did I get into that insane comic strip?
BOLLING: This was my favorite of the post-9-11 comics, because it really represents what I find most satisfying about writing and drawing comics. I was grappling with something that was almost an ineffable feeling of discomfort for how American’s conceive things so differently from not just two or three evil doers, but entire nations of people. And how can we be so far apart on that?
WORCESTER: And which comic strip are we in?
BOLLING: Right. Well that’s what...
WORCESTER: Are we in ours or are we in theirs?
BOLLING: I could not think of a way to do a comic on that. When this one came to me, everything fell into place. It was a very cathartic feeling. I felt good about the way that comic was structured and I was able to express something that I was unable to express before, perfectly within the comics idiom and my comic strip, using a recurring character. That was a really good feeling. I would even go as far to say, even though this was illusory, I brought some measure of order to a very chaotic feeling that I had in myself by bringing this into my world and explaining it in these terms.
WORCESTER: Somewhere in the comic book universe, Billy Dare is being chased in issue after issue, and you’re just alerting now, your readers now, to this fact. There are other Billy Dare stories out there and they are not all positive.
BOLLING: That’s right. Billy Dare is a funny character, because he started with really a one-note character, making fun of Tintin and Hardy Boys and the fact that as children they are involved in really violent situations. That’s the way it started and I did one or two of those. Then I began to expand it into a whole explanation of the narrative art form. What is the story that we’re telling about our place in the world. It’s a great example of what I try to do in having characters develop organically.
WORCESTER: One final cartoon having to do with 9-11. This is more recent: Things are Normal Again. Many people were concerned that 9-11 was a wake-up call to a new, scary, and dangerous era. But now we know it was merely an event, which led to a brief, victorious war, which solved the problem. And then there’s a little nice chart. Here’s how it works. We had a period of three months where it wasn’t normal. Things were normal from 12:41 onward, and for the next thousand years things will be fine. Do you feel like everything’s back to normal?
BOLLING: Well, this is clearly sarcastic. What I was commenting on here was I felt myself, and the country, sort of re-characterizing what happened as an aberrational event that has now been solved because there haven’t been any recent attacks. The shoe bomber became sort of a joke.
WORCESTER: The anthrax was probably domestically created.
BOLLING: And there have been no new incidences of that, and we think that that may have been someone who was shocked himself at the severity of what he did. You know, I catch myself feeling that way. Wow. Maybe things are O.K. This is a sarcastic way of expressing a dumb way of looking at things.
WORCESTER: It’s partly about your own career, and your own comic strip. You’re telling the reader that after now you can expect cartoons that aren’t going to be about September 11th.
BOLLING: It was really about our mindset, a mindset about what happened. But in fact, in writing and drawing it, I was thinking, After this one. I think I’ve got to force myself to think of other topics.
WORCESTER: Any reaction from the readers to the Things Are Normal Again cartoon?
BOLLING: It’s actually very similar to the stuff we talked about before. Mostly very good, but one person got really mad and thought I was serious and not sarcastic and wrote in saying, How can you say things are normal? That’s the one I remember. I clearly missed it with him. Maybe I didn’t go far enough in the sarcasm. I don’t know.
WORCESTER: Do you think that being part of the regular group of cartoonists at the Voice gives you a kind of spotlight that you wouldn’t otherwise have, say with Salon or with regular alternative newspapers, given that your work appears next to Tom and Ted’s and Ward Sutton’s cartoons, and that the Voice is exceptionally political by alternative paper standards?
BOLLING: I think it is exceptionally political by those standards. And they do so much reporting and commentary and it’s so substantive. But I really don’t think of my role with the Voice as part of that larger picture. I have always felt as though my comic is what it is, and when editors come aboard, then they’re with me for the ride whether I’m doing a five-point series about an Australopithecus, or whether I’m doing three months about the political and human ramifications of a national tragedy. So I feel as though I fit in wherever I do and leave it at that.
WORCESTER: There have been a couple of controversies that have involved the Voice and cartoonists over the last years. Not only the Jules Feiffer firing, but the enormous controversy over Ted Rall’s Art Spiegelman cover story. Did you see that article before it went to print? Had you talked to Ted about Spiegelman before...
BOLLING: Yeah. I did talk to him about it. And I was there when the article was being birthed, during a conversation with Ted and an editor at the Village Voice. My take on it is that – and I said this right from the start – I disagree with his entire premise.
WORCESTER: You mean his premise that Spiegelman hadn’t been productive after Maus?
BOLLING: Well, I think he went farther than that. I don’t think he was very complimentary toward Maus. I think Spiegelman is a great cartoonist. He certainly hasn’t had any negative or positive influence on my career and I’m sure that he hasn’t impeded me. I feel that he’s a total irrelevance to my career, and just a great working cartoonist. Whether he’s done good or bad stuff since Maus is a debate I’m not even interested in. I think he’s done both good and bad stuff since Maus. One of Ted’s premises is that he’s overrated, and I think that’s a dangerous subject for any article. You have to answer two questions: How is he rated? And then, Is he overrated? And that becomes a circular question. But I think Ted made some valid points. I think that any time you have a negative criticism of anyone’s career, if it’s a well written article, and I think it was, you’re going to hit some spots that, Yeah. Maybe this wasn’t good and this wasn’t. But, unfortunately, this has become necessary to say. I think it’s obvious that I support his right to say it.
WORCESTER: What about Danny Hellman’s emails? Was Ted’s livelihood threatened? Was Ted right to take Danny Hellman to court?
BOLLING: [Hesitating] Umm...
WORCESTER: Do you not want to talk about it?
BOLLING: I don’t want to talk about it, except to say one thing. And that’s simply that, from what I understand, Ted simply wrote a negative review and then was attacked in such a way that he didn’t know what was going on. He was deliberately fooled into thinking that it was very extensive, and literally had to hire a lawyer in order to find out who was doing it and get it to stop. Once you’ve done that, you’re in the world of litigation. You’ve had the expense of hiring a lawyer to find out what’s going on. It’s not a pleasant world to be in, but that’s the world of litigation that is opened up by those actions.
WORCESTER: Another Voice controversy involved the Ralph Nader campaign. Ward Sutton was vociferously in favor of Al Gore, while Tom Tomorrow held his own in favor of third party politics, and Ted weighed in cynical and angry and critical of all sides, but especially the two party system. Yours was the one cartoon that didn’t take a stand in this big debate. Where you aware of that on a personal level of how intense this issue was for Sutton and Tomorrow? Are you interested in these questions?
BOLLING: Sure. I’m sure I was aware of it and I was following their comics and talking to them personally about their views on it. And I thought it made for some great comics. It really highlights some of the differences in the way that we work. Usually I come from the perspective of, Here’s an issue. Can I work a way to find something funny about it? If I don’t, I leave it, even if I’m intensely interested and feel intensely about it. They did great work on that and it was something that I was interested in on a personal and political and even as a reader of comics. But not enough that I was going to force a comic out of myself. My main goal is to be funny or clever, and if it doesn’t happen, I’m onto something else.
WORCESTER: What about Ted’s going off to Afghanistan? Did you talk to him before he became a foreign correspondent?
BOLLING: Yeah. I tried to get him not to go. He put himself in a life-threatening situation. He says that now, but he’s glad he did it. He’s glad he went because he learned a lot and was able to come back and do some great reporting and get himself in the spotlight. But it was clearly an unacceptable risk to take both in hindsight and in foresight.
WORCESTER: Unacceptable because?
BOLLING: Because there was very real danger. Journalists were the most at risk Americans in the whole conflict. You’d have to get the numbers from him, but I think he went in a convoy of about 45 journalists and I believe that three of them died. When the third one died, he was pulled out. Three out of forty-five over the space of three weeks is really bad odds. It was a very perilous situation.
WORCESTER: So you didn’t actually want to join him and say to your wife, Listen, darling. I feel the call. I need to...?
BOLLING: That really highlights one of the differences between me and Ted. I have no interest in putting myself at risk in that way. First of all, I have two kids. Second of all, it would be irrelevant to my career as a cartoonist and commentator. For the stuff that I do it was much more important that I be here, because what I really comment on is America and America’s reactions to things. Everything that I do is about how we feel about it, what we think about it, and what our political and national response is to what happened. So being away from that would have been bad for my career. But he ended up with some great stories and it’s great to talk to him and get first-hand accounts of what he saw there.
WORCESTER: A number of readers may have noticed how often your cartoons deal with humans in relation to the natural world. And the humor to your comics sometimes comes about because of the discrepancy between our pretensions, our language, our rhetoric and what we’re compelled to do because of evolution and biology. Is that right?
BOLLING: I think you just said the whole thing. I don’t know if I can improve on that.
WORCESTER: So we’re pretentious apes who walk around with elaborate filo-faxes and business cards but in fact we’re still acting out as if we were on the Savannah?
BOLLING: Yeah. I recently did a comic on the Jefferds Defection. I did an analogy to a troop of chimpanzees. One member within that group had switched alliances, and that upset the balance within the troop. I made this whole analogy of what the Democrats and Republicans were doing to a group of chimpanzees. It’s just a bunch of branch waving and hooting and grunting. But that’s the way we actually operate.
WORCESTER: Does this perspective, the sense that the biological roots of our behavior are stronger than we tend to recognize and exert a more powerful influence on our lives, lead you to a kind of fatalism? That something like war simply is the acting out of this innate aggression? Or that sexual fidelity is simply acting out this biological imperative to spread the seed?
BOLLING: I don’t know if I’ve ever expressed that in a comic, but I think it’s an interesting point. I don’t believe so. I think that if you ignore the derivation of these impulses and motivations and fully attribute it to conscious thought, then you run the risk of misunderstanding what you are doing and therefore repeating it. I think what everything is about is trying to fully understand ourselves, to make ourselves as people and as species better. I think that we have the ability to consciously deny ourselves these impulses, but in order to do so, we have to fully understand them. And if we understand exactly why we feel, let’s say, an impulse toward infidelity, we may be in a better position to make a conscious decision not to do so. Or to do so, but at least it’s... There’s nothing to say that just because it’s natural we should follow it. We should make a conscious, moral choice about how to behave, and the best way to do that is to understand where unconscious motivations may derive.
WORCESTER: Can you think of other cartoonists who have this interest in our biological roots?
BOLLING: Gary Larson did a lot of things that I guess subliminally were about people behaving – the animal switcheroo thing. People behaving like animals; animals behaving like people. One of the things that I allow myself with Tom, the Dancing Bug, maybe to its commercial peril, is that I explore whatever it is I’m interested in. Part of it may be that I’m the only cartoonist who will actually devote a number of comics to questions like this and I make it sort of an overall theme. And whether readers will have the same interest in it that I do depends on how well I present it.
WORCESTER: Is there part of you that wants to use comics to explain Darwin’s ideas and the contributions of evolutionary theory?
BOLLING: To the extent that there is anything that I would like to use comics as a form for, it’s probably that. But you know, I shouldn’t have something I want to say and do a comic about it. It should be that I want to be funny and interesting. My goal should always come to that, and think of funny and interesting things to say about things that interest me.
WORCESTER: In graduate school I was taught that there are three theorists of modernity: Marx, Darwin, and Freud. Each uncovered hidden forces at work in human lives that the Victorians had actively repressed and that the modern era was going to open up. Marx explores the hidden class struggle; Freud examines the realm of the unconscious; and Darwin describes powerful evolutionary pressures. Lots of cartoonists are working through the big questions that were opened up on Marx and Freud. But Gary Larson aside, you’re the only person I can think of who is interested in uncovering not sex or money but apes as the kind of hidden engine of human folly.
BOLLING: Yeah. I think that’s true, but the line between Darwin and Freud is probably a little blurred, because what Freud was saying, even without explicitly acknowledging, is that our evolutionary history created the subconscious. But Darwin takes it not just with sex but everything, including economics. Why are we so preoccupied with economic accumulation and displays? Darwin is the one that had really the grand unifying theory of all of that. And so that’s the one that I am most interested in.
WORCESTER: On my way here I saw a bumper sticker on the back of car that showed a bigger fish named "truth" swallowing up a smaller fish named "Darwin." Obviously you’re on one side of that debate, and at least some of your readers must be on the other.
BOLLING: Well yeah. I don’t think there’s anything inherent in