Filibuster Cartoons
Rejected cartoons
For every 10 toons that get published on the site, there’s usually one that I start working on, only to reject halfway through. Often an idea that seems good in my head just doesn’t work on paper, and once I start coloring I begin to realize that no amount of polishing will make it any clearer or funnier.
Most of my reject toons are deleted, or never saved in the first place. Here are some that survived.
This was an early version of what would later become this 2003 toon, about one of those many Iranian youth uprisings that are supposed to Change Everything, but never actually do. In the early days of Filibuster, I often tried to cram in too much historical context and trivia into everything, mostly because I assumed this kind of knowledge would substitute for actual insight. That realization hit me while coloring this, so I just stopped.
This was drawn in early 2003, around the time that Trent Lott was forced to resign as Senate Majority Leader, in the wake of his supposedly racist comments at Strom Thurmond’s birthday party. In editorial cartoons, it’s a common trope to depict someone who’s involved in racism in some way, or is acting in a racially subservient manner, as a “lawn jockey” lawn ornament. However, upon drawing this I realized that I was only making this gag because I’d seen it done before in other contexts, and that my readers were not likely to appreciate such a dated, cliched reference (who under the age of 60 has ever even seen a lawn jockey?).
I drew this in the aftermath of the 2006 midterms, when the Democrats swept both the House and the Senate. I quickly realized how lazy I was being with such an uninspired idea, so I abandoned this toon and made a much better one.
This is obviously about Jeremiah Wright and Senator Obama, but I never liked the visuals here, which seemed too simple. I wish I had come up with a better idea, but once I abandoned this one, I never wound up tackling Wright at all.
Looking back, I’m not exactly sure why I censored this one. It makes a good point about the Harper government’s needless overspending in this quixotic quest to “defend” the arctic. I guess I just thought it was too wordy.
I like the idea of this toon, which was made at a time when a lot of former prime ministers were releasing their memoirs. But for some reason I didn’t think it worked as well in print as it did in my head, so I never published it.
This is a similar case to the one above. I was working on the premise of “honest names for Sarah Palin’s memoirs,” but I realized there was no real structure to the idea, and that I was drawing before I even knew what the cartoon was supposed to mean. Also I think the books are drawn a bit sloppily. Scrapped!
I can’t exactly remember when I drew this, but it was obviously in the context of some sort of currency fluctuation. The visual metaphor here seemed fairly lazy and uninspired, so I never published it on Filibuster, but I think it did run in some other publication that was using my cartoons at the time.
I spent a lot of time trying to make this cartoon work, and drew a ton of revisions before giving up. Basically, the story at the time was that the Conservative government, led by minister of whatever Stockwell Day, was phasing out affirmative action in the federal bureaucracy for every community except French-Canadians. So I tried a number of different metaphors to illustrate the hypocrisy, such as this one, where Stock is pushing all the little birdies out of the nest prematurely, but the French-Canadian birdie has balloons… before surrendering.
Not really a “rejected” cartoon per se, this was something I drew during my 2009 hiatus, and only posted to my friends on Facebook. During a public ceremony with Inuit leaders that year, then-governor general Michaelle Jean ate a seal heart, which is considered a delicacy in that community. It was controversial, I guess, but mostly just weird.
Unused ideas
Sometimes, for reasons of time, or a fast-changing news cycle, or whatever I never get an opportunity to expand an idea sketch into a full cartoon. Which can be a shame.
This was an idea I was working on during the Paul Martin minority government. I was struck by the wastefulness and in-denial pomp and ceremony of the lavish state opening of parliament, considering how short-lived that parliament was likely to be. So here we see the big, long, costume parade, and at the back Harper says to Layton “I give it two months, tops.” This might have worked better if the parade was walking in the other direction, now that I think about it.
In early 2002, it seemed possible that India and Pakistan would go to war with each other once more, which obviously freaked out many, since it would be the first war in which both parties possessed nuclear weapons. I’m fond of cartoons done in this format, where each panel has a guy saying one word, and the panels span a long time period. Each panel in this particular one was supposed to depict a leading figure from that decade; Lord Mountbatten, Churchill, Kennedy, Indira Ghandi, Reagan, and Kofi Anan.
This was an idea I had intended to use during the Danish Mohammad cartoon crisis. Here we see some Muslim rioters burning a Danish flag, a literal Danish, and a picture of the Danish prime minister. And a Danish foreign aid cheque, which Muslim nations tended to have in abundance.
This was drawn sometime during the Bush administration, after the Republicans failed to get their anti-gay marriage amendment through the Congress.
Harper imposes term limits on Canadian senators.
When the Wikileaks scandal broke, I really wanted an excuse to have a general-type saying this to the President. Sadly, no opportunity presented itself.
I forget the exact context of this one, but it involved Harper meeting Mulroney and pretending to like him. I also forget what the dialogue was supposed to be. I just like this drawing.
Cartoons published elsewhere
For the exceedingly curious, here are some Filibuster-type cartoons I’ve drawn for outside publications.
First, here are some toons I did for the Tri-City News, which is a local newspaper in British Columbia, where I live.
The 2008 Democratic primary for president occurred around the same time as the city of Vancouver’s primary for mayor. The fellow in the wheelchair is the badly-disabled former mayor of Vancouver, Sam Sullivan, who lost his own party’s nomination for re-election.
British Columbia is famous for having a lot of labor unrest, and the teachers in particular are always going on strike. Though these constant strikes are terribly disruptive for classes, the teachers’ union (the BC Teachers’ Federation, or BCTF) continuously maintain that they’ve really got students’ best interests at heart. I did a lot of teachers’ union-related cartoons for the Tri-Cities.
On a related note, here’s Gordon Campbell, the BC prime minister, working furiously to sign all of BC’s public sector contracts before the time bomb expires, and strikes erupt o’er the land. Campbell was a Liberal, and thus very despised by the province’s unions, who are allied with the NDP.
In 2007, there was a big scandal in British Columbia when it was revealed that crooked corner store clerks had been secretly stealing winning lottery tickets for years. But, as I learned from a recent episode of NBC’s Dateline, this is apparently a problem that plagues all lotteries everywhere.
Now, here are some toons I drew for my university newspaper, back when I was editor of the opinions page:
In 2008, the Campbell administration went on this blitz of renaming BC’s colleges, upgrading almost all of them to full “university” status, in order to make them seem more prestigious. This came off as a fairly transparent PR move, considering that, until now, “college’ had been understood in British Columbia parlance to refer to smaller, lower-class schools mostly attended by kids who didn’t have the grades for one of the province’s better institutions.
This was one of my many cartoons mocking the Simon Fraser University student union, or “SFSS.” At the time, the board of directors was coming under fire for doing very little work, but still clocking in full hours through creative definitions of what constituted “billable time.” Fun fact! The guy with the big ears is my friend Earl, who often posts things to the Filibuster Facebook page.
This fellow was the president of the student union, and a kind of outlandish, eccentric character. The week before, as part of the student paper’s special “welcome to campus” September issue, he had authored a smarmy editorial blasting his fellow students for dressing so unfashionably. Many questioned his priorities.
