Tom the Dancing Bug: 2021 Pulitzer Prize Finalist, in a Year with No Winner

Tom The Dancing Bug Blog 2021-06-15

First of all, I am only deeply thrilled and honored by the decision by the Editorial Cartooning Pulitzer Jury to name me a Finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Award (for the second time), along with such amazing talents as Lalo Alcaraz and Marty Two Bulls, Sr. And I don’t want anything else I say to diminish my appreciation for that.

And whenever I'm recognized in any way, I always want to thank my syndicate, Andrews McMeel Syndication, all of Tom the Dancing Bug's print clients, its web clients BoingBoing.net, DailyKos.com, and GoComics.com, and the fantastic, indispensable, proud & mighty Inner Hive. I am so deeply grateful for these entities, and the people behind them, for sustaining Tom the Dancing Bug, and I make it my entire professional goal to give them more than they give to me.

At the end of this post are some of my comics from 2020 that the Pulitzer Prize Jury considered in naming me a Finalist.

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But the decision by the Pulitzer Prize Board to refuse to name a winner from among those Finalists, as is the custom, or from among any other cartoonists, as is their right, is frustrating, baffling, and wrongheaded.

I don’t know what happened that the Board was unable to name a winner. But it sure looks like they were saying that no cartoonist did work that was Pulitzer-worthy this year.

I’ve never begrudged a judging panel their decision for an award. Not in cartooning, not for my favorite movie at the Oscars, not for best pie at the county fair. I've always been ambivalent about the whole Awards idea. There aren't many kinds of human endeavors less suited to comparative judging than the arts. But I understand their role in marketing, and I've certainly been a beneficiary of the whole thing -- I've been fortunate enough to have won some¹ -- so I'm happy to play along.

I do think it’s silly, childish and arrogant to think there’s an objectively correct comparative winner of any award in the arts; judges simply make their best subjective call, and we all move on.

But this looks like it’s the Pulitzer Board members who are the silly, childish and arrogant ones, effectively declaring that there’s some objective standard of Pulitzer-worthiness, and going far, far out of their way to make a grandiose statement that nothing in an entire field was at that level. In a year in which, my comics aside, I think some of the best and most vital work in the history of the artform was done.

As though you can look back at the 100 years of editorial cartooning work that has been awarded Pulitzer Prizes and sniff that nothing done this year was of even a similar "quality." When it comes to subjective award-judging in the arts, I don’t think there’s much you can say that is wrong. But that is just wrong.

I don’t mind anyone saying this or that cartoonist's work is better than mine. They're probably right, and who's to say? But I absolutely resent the Pulitzer Board saying that my work is definitionally not worthy of a Pulitzer and neither is any of my colleagues’ in the entire artform.

I’ve honestly never been insulted by losing an award; I try to think about them as little as possible, and I don’t feel I’ve ever deserved anything. But I am insulted by this decision by the Board, on behalf of myself and all cartoonists.

¹I cringe to do this, but the Pulitzer Board has me feeling defensive. In addition to Pulitzer Prize panels of jurors (twice), the following organizations in the past did not find my work categorically unworthy of an award, and somehow found themselves a way to bestow a top award on Tom the Dancing Bug: The Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, The Society of Professional Journalists, the National Cartoonists Society, The Society of Illustrators, The Herblock Foundation, and The Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights. And by the way, of course the other Finalists, Lalo Alcaraz and Marty Two Bulls, Sr. have both received numerous honors, and are clearly far from definitionally unworthy of a top award.

6/15 UPDATE: A Washington Post article about the controversy here.

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Finally, not that any tragedy has befallen me, or that I'm in any dire need of Support Through This Difficult Time, but if this feels like a good time to join the INNER HIVE, to get each week's Pulitzer-unworthy Tom the Dancing Bug comic at least a day before it's published anywhere, with commentary and other exclusive comics, and to join the team that literally makes Tom the Dancing Bug possible...

YOU CAN DO SO HERE.

Thank you, I hope to see you there.