The first time I was cancelled

My Jerry Falwell cartoon

In 2007, I was working as the full-time cartoonist for the now-defunct Halifax Daily News. Yes, I once had a job—complete with benefits—drawing editorial cartoons for a living.

At the time, the internet was still in its adolescence. Cartoons didn’t “go viral” the way they do today. Social media, at least as we know it now, was barely a thing. Facebook existed but had yet to take the world by storm.

But in 2007, I was about to get a sneak preview of what “viral” would look like for a cartoonist—even if the term hadn’t yet become mainstream.

On May 15, 2007, Jerry Falwell died.

Falwell was a towering figure in American evangelicalism. He founded the Moral Majority in 1979, a key player in aligning the Christian right with the Republican Party. He was the pastor of Thomas Road Baptist Church, the founder of Liberty University, and a staunch advocate for conservative Christian values. His work galvanized a political movement, but his polarizing views—on issues like abortion, homosexuality, and the separation of church and state—made him a lightning rod for criticism.

To put it bluntly, I thought he was a dick. So did a lot of progressives in the U.S. That sentiment fueled the cartoon I drew for the Daily News, which appeared the day after his death.

But after someone died people are used to seeing this kind of cartoon:

But I drew this:

In Halifax, the cartoon received minimal backlash—just one letter to the editor complaining about it. Letters to the editor were the primary feedback mechanism in those pre-social-media days. If a steady stream of letters kept coming, it signaled a problem. But in this case, they didn’t.

I thought that was the end of it. I was wrong.

A few days later, Darryl Cagle—who runs one of the most popular editorial cartoon sites in the U.S.—saw the cartoon and posted it on Cagle.com. Back then, most cartoonists gave him permission to share their work because it meant exposure to a massive audience. Cagle included the cartoonist’s email under each cartoon, making it easy for readers to reach out.

https://cagle.com/deadder

By the next morning, I’d all but forgotten about it—until I opened my email. My computer, not exactly state-of-the-art, sputtered and froze. The problem? Over 10,000 new emails had flooded my inbox overnight. I assumed it was a glitch. Rebooting didn’t help. Every time I tried to open the inbox, the screen froze again.

When I finally managed to open the folder, I saw thousands of emails from Americans reacting to my Falwell cartoon.

“You’ll answer to the Lord for that blasphemous drawing of Jerry Falwell!”
“You may think you’re clever, but only God can judge a man’s soul.”
“You’re a f$%#^ moron. You should rot in hell.”

Deleting the emails was the only way to keep my computer functioning. But no matter how many I cleared, more poured in. For days, I was stuck in a Sisyphean loop of downloading and deleting emails just to keep my computer alive.

This chaotic episode was my first real taste of how the internet could amplify outrage in real time—and how unprepared we all were for the scale of that amplification. It was an omen of things to come. Within a year, Facebook would take off, and the online world would become a far more interconnected, volatile place.

In hindsight, that moment was a crash course in navigating a digital storm. It forced me to adapt quickly to a world where feedback could arrive not just instantly, but in overwhelming waves. It was a harbinger of the future, one I didn’t yet realize was barreling toward us all.