2017 Herblock Prize winner is Ruben Bolling, creator of "Tom the Dancing Bug"

WASHINGTON, DC (February 23, 2017)—Ruben Bolling, the pen name of Ken Fisher, has been named the winner of the 2017 Herblock Prize for editorial cartooning.

Ruben Bolling is the creator of the weekly comic strip "Tom the Dancing Bug," distributed by Andrews McMeel Syndication to many newspapers across North America. It also appears on BoingBoing.net, DailyKos.com, and GoComics.com.

"Tom the Dancing Bug" is a free-format comic strip that uses varying types of humor, artistic styles and formats. It's an unusual strip in that in any given week it could feature a spoof, a multi-panel sketch, political or absurdist humor, recurring characters or caricatures of real people. During 2016, political subject matter was at its heart, as it mostly dealt with the election and Donald Trump's rise to power.

Ruben Bolling was the 2014 winner of the Society of Illustrators Best Cartoon Award. In 2011, he won the Sigma Delta Chi Award from the Society of Professional Journalists for Editorial Cartooning. "Tom the Dancing Bug" has been nominated twice for the Harvey Award for Best Comic Strip or Panel, and has won the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies Award for Best Cartoon five times.

In 2015, Ruben Bolling authored a series of chapter books for children called the EMU Club Adventures. The first two installments, Alien Invasion in My Backyard and Ghostly Thief of Time, are published by Andrews McMeel Publishing.

In addition to the weekly comic strip, Bolling has had comics published in The New Yorker, Nickelodeon, MAD Magazine, ESPN The Magazine, and Harper's.

Bolling lives in New York City with his wife and three children.