Cartoonist Ruben Bolling took to his blog today to reveal that the online magazine Salon has canceled his long-running political/editorial comic strip Tom the Dancing Bug.

According to Bolling, the comic was canceled due to "severe budget constraints" rather than lack of traffic -- indeed, as Bolling points out, Tom is frequently one of the site's most-read features. He later added that Salon, which had hosted the strip since the site's 1995 inception, seems unlikely to reverse the decision regardless of reader outcry.

I'm sure Tom Spurgeon will have further analysis, but even for someone with my casual dislike and distrust of all political cartooning, the cancellation seems notable for two reasons. First, Bolling is an obvious talent whose imaginative end-runs around the cliché-ridden visual vocabulary of your average political cartoonist made his comics that much more entertaining and his points that much more hard-hitting. Second, it's almost creepy to think that editorial cartoonists may have just as hard a time making a go of things online as they do amid the staggering carcasses of America's newspaper industry.

At least he'll have an easier time getting health care.

(via Greg Pak)