 |
|
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.
When I get back to Canada I have decided I will make some sort of book.
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
It’s with a heavy heart that I have decided to put Filibuster on an indefinite hiatus.
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
I’ve added two new articles to my Writings From Japan page, from the month of February.
Howdy.
As my previous post confirms, I moved to Japan some time ago. Being the prolific little writer I am, I have so far composed a handful of Facebook notes on the matter, which I have now compiled into a section of this site so that more than just my intimate circle of 400 closest friends may read ‘em.
Please visit my brand new Things I Wrote in Japan page.
Dear friends,
Tomorrow I am moving to Japan, and plan to stay there for at least a year. Like many young college grads, I got a job in that country teaching English to wealthy orphan-children. Or maybe just ordinary children, I am not sure yet.
I fully intend to continue Filibuster despite my change of scenery, though I hope you’ll understand if in the next few weeks the site falls into something of disarray as a result of my move.
I am planning to get a subscription to one of the Japanese English-language dailies once I get settled, which will will hopefully allow me to start cartooning on Japanese issues in substitution of my present Canada-focus (though homesickness will likely force me to keep up with Canadian affairs as well, especially in the wake of this particularly ill-timed political crisis).
If you have ever thought about donating to Filibuster, now is a time when I would really appreciate your generosity. Moving to Tokyo is not exactly the low-cost endeavor I had originally anticipated.
See you in the funny pages,
— J.J.
jjmccullough@gmail.com
I’ve updated my presidential election predictors page, your one-stop-shop for all the superstitious nonsense that has nevertheless proven itself highly reliable in predicting who is going to win American presidential elections.
There is exactly one scene in An American Carol that is even slightly amusing or clever. Appearing on Bill O’Reilly’s talk show, a Rose O’Donnell clone explains that she finds Christian extremists just as scary as Islamic extremists. To prove her point, she airs a clip of a documentary chronicling the numerous instances of Christian terrorism in action, and we’re treated to a montage of men in black suits and collars hijacking a commercial airliner, as well as an elderly nun suicide-bombing a tourist bus. “Hail Mary full of grace!” she yells before pressing the detonator. It’s a great scene because it jarringly illustrates just how bizarre and dumb it is to compare the bigoted excesses of evangelical Christianity with the murderous psychopathy of fundamentalist Islam. If American Carol was just a YouTube video of this one scene I’d give it five stars. But alas, it is not, and to view this one brilliant minute you have to suffer through the agony of 129 others.
The ostensible point of An American Carol, is that it’s supposed to be some sort of humorous right-wing rebuttal to everything that’s wrong with contemporary American liberalism. So the film follows the antics of a fictional character named “Michael Malone,” a fat, unshaven, far-left documentary filmmaker (he’s supposed to be Michael Moore, in case that’s unclear) who hates his country for all sorts of ignorant reasons. He hates America so much, in fact, that he’s decided to stage a protest to cancel the 4th of July. Before he can get around to this, however, he conks his head and is visited by three patriotic ghosts who attempt to teach him the errors of his ways (get why it’s called “Carol” now? eh? eh?). There are also some terrorists involved, and ACLU zombies and a bunch of other nonsense.
Look, ideologically, I sympathize strongly with where this film is coming from. I consider myself quite conservative, I hate Michael Moore, and I think the film’s main message — that the war on terror is a just war and we should all support it — is a good one. But An American Carol is just such an incredibly atrocious, vapid, unfunny, over-the-top, awkward, monstrosity of a picture I am embarrassed to even be nominally on the same philosophical side of whoever made this.
It’s an old adage that you don’t fight bias with more bias. Yet that’s precisely what An American Carol does. We all know that Hollywood leans left, but surely the absolutely worst way to point that out is to make a film that is as absurdly right-biased as this one. Like an Ayn Rand novel, all the liberal characters in Carol, from Moore on down, are ugly, crude, and stupid. The conservatives, meanwhile, such as the many heroic soldier characters (who always make much of the fact that they “enlisted” out of their own free will) are always upright, attractive, and moral. There is absolutely no self-deprecating humor at the expense of the right, nor any suggestion that conservatives have been anything but 100% loyal to the American cause.
Then there are scenes that are likewise so heavy-handed and childish in their politics they actually cross the line into jaw-dropping offensiveness. And the worst part is, these are the scenes that are intended to be the most powerful (I think). There’s a scene depicting an alternate pacifist universe in which the South won the Civil War, for instance, featuring a number of black actors running around yelling “massah!” that is literally painful to watch. Another, later scene displays the smoking remains of Ground Zero in a moment so corny it seems like something you’d find in a liberal movie mocking right-wing jingoism. Except, of course, it is actually supposed to be the exact opposite.
I suppose there are probably communities deep, deep within rural America that would be sheltered and close-minded enough to like An American Carol, but I doubt there are very many. It’s simply a bad, bad movie, and any conservative, except the most hysterically dogmatic, should be able to see that.
It especially baffles me that anyone would even think a movie as nauseatingly pro-Republican as this could possibly be a profitable movie to release in Canada. When I went to see it last week there was only one person other than myself in the theater, and he walked out. He had the right idea.
With the Canadian federal election mere days away, I thought it might be a good time to release an updated version of an essay I wrote a while ago for my Canada Guide, talking about the various political parties of Canada, their histories and ideologies.
Check out my new Guide to Canadian Politicial Parties.
Wow! As you can probably seen, Filibuster has undergone a much-overdue full site redesign. Much thanks to my good amigo John for basically doing 90% of the work. The site is much more web 2.0y now, and will hopefully be easier to update. Content and information is much more consolidated, and there are all sorts of fun new gimmicks that will make it easier to find the toons you want from my archives.
Highlights include: a fancy new RSS feed, sweet taggin’ clouds, and a fancy new search option!
If you encounter any problems with the site, please e-mail John at johnlr-at-gmail.com, or post the issue at this forum thread. Being a brand new site, there might be some bugs crawling around in unexpected places, but we’ll do our best to squish them.
Enjoy.
In honour of this historic election yadda yadda, I made a special wallpaper that you can download. It’s 1280 x 1024. Someday I will make a widescreen wallpaper as well.
