I asked Bolling why the comic is called “Tom the Dancing Bug.” One day in class at law school, he said, “my friend had gotten a bug on his pen, and he was swivelling the pen. The bug was moving its legs to stay on top, back and forth. And I said, ‘That’s Tom the Dancing Bug.’ ” That night, he submitted his first strip to the paper. A purist, he didn’t want it to have a title—it would be wholly different each week—but the paper insisted. “So I thought of the stupidest name I could think of, and I named it ‘Tom the Dancing Bug,’ in retaliation,” he said. “But I remember riding my bike home afterward thinking, I actually like that.”
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