Drawing Blood: Cartoonists With Attitude

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THIS MIGHT BE HARD to believe, but it's a hard time to be an editorial cartoonist.

You'd think with the current political climate — a president with his approval ratings in the toilet, an unpopular war raging in the Middle East and a burgeoning campaign season — that it would be a fertile period in the history of cartooning, with ideas flowing from the pens and brushes of giddy cartoonists.

But it's not, at least not for Ruben Bolling, the creator of the alternative cartoon "Tom the Dancing Bug." Bolling has been railing against President Bush for about seven years now. He had the polls against him and the polls with him and it doesn't really matter.

"How many times can I keep on saying the same thing: 'I hate Bush'? And that's something that I have to battle against all the time," Bolling said, "For me, it's a really old story. It's just like we're in a holding pattern and Bush won't let us get out of it until he's out of office."

Bolling, and his fellow cartoonists in the Cartoonists With Attitude collective, will be putting on a slideshow presentation at a downtown Borders. Joining Bolling in the presentation will be a group of cartoonists at various stages in their careers, from younger cartoonists like Mikhaela Reid ("The Boiling Point") and Matt Bors ("Idiot Box") to more established artists like Ted Rall ("Search and Destroy") and Keith Knight ("The K Chronicles").

At the event, the cartoonists will be taking an in-depth look at their work, going panel by panel, explaining how and why they wrote and drew each of the cartoons. Bolling explained his methodology for choosing what to do each week is to not consciously allow himself to get boxed in and do whatever he finds interesting.

"If I go four weeks, that's just goofy humor, because that's what I want to do, that's what I allow myself to do," he said. "Even if a war is raging and political bombshells are dropping, I'm perfectly happy to ignore that."

The "Tom the Dancing Bug" format lends itself to that sort of treatment. The comic features an array of reoccurring strips, from a Tintin satire called "Billy Dare: Boy Adventurer" to a strip starring Judge Scalia and his brand of bare-knuckled justice to one of Bolling's personal favorites, "God-Man, The Superhero With Omnipotent Powers!"

"I love doing 'God-Man' because he would really surprise me," Bolling said. "He was like a format that just kept giving because I just made up this God superhero and then I would just put him in a situation that a superhero would be put in, and all of the sudden the idea would write itself. I'd be surprised at an insight that just came onto the page because of the way I was mixing religion and cheap genre superhero crappiness."

» Borders, 1801 K St. NW; Sat., 2 p.m., free; 202-466-4999. (Farragut North/ Farragut West

Artwork courtesy Ruben Bolling