The Callous Blog

I do have another blog apart from this one called, "We All Need A Philosophy" which started as an editorial column in my medical school student paper, Medyaryo (another paper where Callous used to be published in print).  It jumped around different servers a lot since 2002 and it was an outlet for my voracious and intense introspection at the time.  I hadn't heard of the term "blog" back then and it served as an online diary of my musings on life.  Its current home is hopefully its permanent one. However, at least in my case, blogging isn't what it used to be.

Entries in that blog were once well thought out and I spent a lot of time on it.  Nowadays, with a wife, son, and the return of my comic strip series, the time I once had for blogging (and reviewing movies) quickly disappeared.  Enter, the Facebook "update" and the micro-blog Twitter, which served as great alternatives since I could spew my random thoughts quite easily and at short, 140 character bursts.

Today, in 2010, with the Callous comic strip production and website management fairly streamlined, I started this blog.  Callous now takes up a large majority of my spare time.  Since it's in my thoughts so much, I decided to write about it as well in this blog.  Suddenly, I felt like I could write endlessly about the philosophy, art, and overall production of the series.  Then it hit me, the real reason why I hardly ever write in my original blog anymore.

It is quite easy to write about something that you care intensely about.  From 2002-2006 I was meditating a lot on my own self-improvement as a person and was intent on sharing these thoughts.  Then once I got married and became a father, I thought less about that.  That's not saying I no longer strive for improving myself, just that it no longer was as big a focus on my life as it was back then.  Being a husband and father, which also occupies a great majority of my daily thought time, could be something I could write endlessly about but choose not to.  I have a bit of distaste for telling other parents how to raise their own kids and how to be a good spouse.  I've realized that a good formula is different for every family anyway.

Then, as if on cue, a Facebook group called "Let's Bring the Art of Blogging Back, Before Facebook Updates Replaced It", created by an old friend, Noelle Leslie Dela Cruz, linked to this blog.  She had good things to say about Callous, which she says, "reminds me of the good, clean, at times existential humor of Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes".  That's pretty high praise! Thanks Leslie!

I thought about the mention of an online comic series on a group professing the return of more profound blog entries as opposed to their 140-character counterparts.  Sure, Callous has a separate blog page.  I then remembered that a lot of webcomics have blog entries written right under their comics.  Furthermore, the comics themselves are often commentaries and speak volumes of the writer and artists' opinions.

So, webcomic sites are a bountiful resource of voluminous blog-reading material.  So if you're looking for a blog to read, there's a whole world out there to look at!