Check out my interview with noted Canadian lawyer and pundit Bob Tarantino, about the Supreme Court of Canada and why Canadians don’t know much about it. It’s everything you wanted to know but were afraid to ask. We talk about politics, the appointment process, the media, and how our court compares and contrasts with the better-known Supreme Court of the United States.

If you’d like to help me raise some money in the meantime, maybe you’d be interested in buying this poster I recently drew, of all the Mega Man bosses. Check it out here: All Mega Man bosses poster, by J.J., care of Shark Robot

Well that’s the end for a while. Check out the blog post below for the full explanation.

In the meantime, be sure to check out my archives. I’ve got nearly eight years’ worth of material covering most of the relevant (and occasionally irrelevant) political developments of the last almost-decade. Everything from 9-11 to the Malawian vampire scandal.

It’s certainly been an eventful few years, and a fun time to be an editorial cartoonist. Thanks for sharing it with me.

My reasons are multiple, but the simplest explanation may also be the most blunt — the site is simply not popular enough.

I have been doing Filibuster for nearly eight years now, which is not an insignificant period of time by webcomic standards. I’ve produced almost 1,000 toons, and while my update schedule has obviously become far more loose over the course of the last year or so, overall, I’ve still held pretty firm to my self-imposed mandate of at least one toon a week, every week, since 2001.

Yet I don’t feel I have very much to show for it all. If Google Analytics is to be believed, I average an extraordinarily pathetic 2,000 visitors a day, a rate that has remained depressingly constant over the last few years, in spite of producing a number of very popular comics that have been cross-linked from some big-name blogs. In such situations I may get an enormous deluge of new visitors for a day or two, but it always trickles back into a wimpy stream soon enough. I likewise get very few emails from readers, and this site’s forum, though home to much intelligent and engaging dialogue, remains sparsely inhabited. It’s all very unsatisfying.

I don’t know exactly why Filibuster never “caught on.” Usually sheer longevity (coupled with a vaguely consistent standard of quality) is enough to drive up some sort of stable support base with just about any webcomic, but not so with mine.

I have my theories, of course. A leading one is that most people simply don’t like editorial cartoons, so I always faced an uphill battle. Editorial cartooning is a somewhat anachronistic art form with a subtlety that many people either don’t get, or actively dislike. Political cartoons, with their stock symbols and labels and visual metaphors and all the rest are formulaic, yes, but so is Manga and so are superhereo comics and so are online strips about video games and all the rest. But I’ve never quite understood why some folks get such a thrill out of eagerly denouncing and mocking the traditions (admittedly unimpressive and boring as they sometimes are) of political cartoons with a snobbish venom few other forms of cartooning ever have to face.

But editorial cartooning may be on the way out, anyway. According to Daryl Cagle, the prolific commentator on all things relating to editorial cartoons, as newspapers become less profitable in the internet age, editorial cartoons are often one of the first costs to cut. As a result, claims Cagle, there are now “only a few dozen editorial cartoonists left” in the United States “and they seem to be losing their jobs at a pace of about one per week.” So maybe I bet on the wrong horse.

Of course, this theory does not explain the tremendous success enjoyed by Cox and Forkum, another solely online editorial cartoon (now in hiatus too) whose popularity was enough to inspire tens of thousands of visitors, two books, reprints in newspapers across the United States and Canada, and all the accompanying rewards. Granted, Cox and Forkum was always an explicitly right-wing comic, which gave them a strong support base during the fanatic polarization of the Bush years. I’m not going to self-righteously suggest that I was somehow above crass partisanship myself when my pet issues were at play, but I was certainly less interested than most in making my comic openly pro or anti left or right. And that probably hurt me. Content wise, I was probably also too Canadian for my majority-American readership, and not Canadian (or perhaps not pro-Canadian) enough to get a strong Canadian base. But who knows, maybe I just should have updated more.

A webcomic can only be a labour of love for so long. In recent months Filibuster has become a bit of a chore, and its obligatory nature has often drawn my creative / artistic energy away from other projects that I am more interested in perusing. Living in Japan has likewise proven to be a much more difficult and unhappy experience than I anticipated, and the last thing I need when I’m in such a state is one more unpleasant chore to further lower my mood.

Lastly, I’m simply just not as into politics as I used to be, at least for now. I think President Obama deserves the benefit of the doubt for the time being, and I don’t wish him any particular ill in pursuing whatever agenda it is he’s pursuing. America voted for change, and he has a right to implement it. Politics in Canada, by contrast, has become so profoundly anti-change that I really have a hard time getting passionate about it anymore. Harper and Ignatieff are both decent men, I guess, but it’s going to be a long time before any effort is made to address Canada’s fundamental problems, which as a wise man once said, are never openly acknowledged, let alone solved.

Anyway, while one never wants to say never, especially when one is as fickle as I, I think this is going to be the end of Filibuster for a while. I’ve had a good run. Enjoy the archives, and if you are still interested in following my art, be sure to check out my Deviant Art page, which I will hopefully be updating more regularly in lieu of this site. When I do more writings or charts, I’ll also stick them on here, so updates will occur. I’m also planning on revamping my Canada Guide sometime in the future, so… don’t abandon Filibuster completely.

Thanks to everyone who has stuck with me this long. Though I may sound down, it has been a great experience for me overall, and I’ve learned a ton. Hopefully you’ve gained something, too.

Let’s stay in touch.

J.J. McCullough
April 2009, Saitama, Japan
jjmccullough@gmail.com

Comment in the forum

In the wake of what the Canadian Press has described as a “national uproar,” FOX News released an official apology last week for offending Canada’s delicate sensibilities some weeks ago during an episode of their unpopular late-night chat show “Red Eye.” The episode in question featured a brief segment about the Canadian military’s (real) proposal to withdraw from all peacekeeping and combat missions for at least a year, with such a breather period being used to reorganize and recuperate for future missions. The “Red Eye” people thought this was very comical, and bantered about it in the usual manner that comedians banter about small countries with underfunded armies.

Canadians are not known for their thick skin, especially when it comes to criticism in the American media (to say nothing of the right-wing American media). So in the days that followed “Red Eye” was furiously denounced in every single national newspaper, facebook groups and petitions sprung up, and even the Defense Minister himself eventually joined in, declaring solemnly that the heroic men and women of the Canadian armed forces do not deserve such ignorant mockings, etc.

If only Canada could somehow harness petty national insecurity into a destructive weapon. Then we’d have a military nobody would mock.

So President Obama was a guest the Jay Leno show this week. He gave a good-humored performance some critics have likened to that of a “sitcom dad” — witty yet square.

The question is, why? What did he have to gain from the apperance? The American presidency has not-too-arguably been further cheapened from the encounter (which I know was not a first for a sitting president), but it’s hard to see what the resulting benefit was.

Would it surprise you to see Obama appear in a Pepsi ad someday? It wouldn’t surprise me…

The Republican Party in the post-Bush-McCain-Palin era seems to be suffering from a decided lack of leadership these days. As a result, a lot of characters have been coming out of the woodwork lately, each claiming to represent the true heart of the beleaguered party in some unique way.

They include:

Michael Steele, the newly-minted chairman of the Republican National Committee. As a funny, moderate African-American known for his media savvy, many initially had high hopes that’d bring a breath of fresh air into the party. Unfortunately, as the weeks progress he’s increasingly earning a reputation of a bit of a bumbling bonehead who doesn’t really know what he’s talking about a good percentage of the time. Like recently, when he cited the fact that Greenland is no longer green as evidence that the planet is getting colder, not warmer.

Rush Limbaugh, the ultimate conservative talking-head. Emblematic of the so-called “angry right,” Rush recently quipped that he hoped Obama would “fail,” and was a big opponent of the president’s stimulus package. Is hoping the economy, war, and country in general collapse into chaos out of spite for the White House a viable ideological strategy for the next four years? Some clearly do, others think Rush needs to go back to his pills.

Bobby Jindal, another great non-white hope for the Republicans. Governor Jindal is a fairly average politician who happens to have a slightly interesting personal biography, so needless to say the party establishment now declares him to be one of the most fascinating men in America today. His first big moment in the national spotlight was a flop, however. Given the task of offering a televised rebuttal to President Obama’s address to Congress, Jindal spoke to America like an over-Prozac’d Mr. Rogers instructing the special needs class how to use fingerpaints.

Jonathan Krohn, a 14-year-old who is on TV a lot for some reason. Krohn is a little homeschooled weirdo who, like most homeschooled kids I’ve ever known, is incredibly socially awkward and maladjusted. But he also likes talking about conservatism, so Republicans have declared him the Next Big Thing. So I’m sure he’ll be on “Fox and Friends” a lot in the near future, slurring about Ronald Reagan and stem cells and other matters it is physically impossible for him to understand.

EDIT: A number of readers have written to me disagreeing with my characterization of Rush Limbaugh’s comments. Apparently he did not wish for President Obama to “fail” per se, just for his crazy and descructive socialist schemes to not work, for the self-evident reason that they are crazy and destructive policies. Having read his comments myself, I think that’s probably a more accurate analysis of the what the man actually said, whether you agree with him or not.

Interesting piece by the conservative pundit Charles Krauthammer in last week’s Washington Post. The money-line is when he describes President Obama’s plan to deal with America’s worsening economic crisis, a plan which Obama always pledges will involve heavy reform to the nation’s education, environment, and healthcare regimes, as “greatest non sequitur ever foisted upon the American people.”

There are many roots of the economic mess, Krauthammer writes, “but the causes of the collapse of the financial system does not include the absence of universal health care, let alone of computerized medical records. Nor the absence of an industry-killing cap-and-trade carbon levy. Nor the lack of college graduates.”

It’s good for the President to have a plan to address America’s woes. But some cause-and-effect logic is required as well. At the end of the day a leader’s first priority should be to solve the urgent problems of the present, not simply the more ambitious, long-term problems he may personally find most interesting.

There’s a second story being alluded to in this toon as well:

Obama apparently most teleprompter-dependent president ever.

After a very close election and weeks of parliamentary wrangling, it looks like Benjamin Netanyahu is poised to become Israel’s next prime minister.

Netanyahu served in the post once before, from 1996 to 1999. He went down to a solid defeat in the ‘99 election, and it’s one of history’s great political comebacks that he was able to fully revive his once discredited political career a decade later.

Of course, what’s good for Netanyahu may not be good for Israel. Netanyahu’s revived political career has been all about positioning himself on the hard-right of the Israeli political spectrum, denouncing the moderation of fellow conservative politicians like former PM Ariel Sharon. Specifically, Netanyahu has consistently refused to endorse the idea of a Palestinian state, and has more or less opposed every step of the entire “road map” of getting there. He was a firey critic of Sharon’s decision to withdrawl Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip, and opposes any talk of sharing or dividing the city of Jereselum. As prime minister, it seems reasonable to assume such positions will only harden, as his fragile coalition government will be forced to rely heavily on the support of various fringe ultra-Zionist parties in the Israeli legislature for its survival.