Oddball Magazine has run on WordPress since its creation by Publisher Jason Wright a decade ago. I've worked on the magazine for over eight years.
Geoffrey Fallon is a contributing cartoonist for Oddball Magazine.
His comic "The Secrets of Skinny People" was scheduled to be published this morning with the tags "Abortion" and "Pro-Life" added to the ones we usually put ("Comics, "Comic Strip," etc.)
It was pro-life riff we've heard before, but with a Marvel Cinematic Universe reference to keep it fresh, funny and overall innocuous.
The comic missed its scheduled publication time this morning. Not an uncommon error for WordPress. However, once published manually, we weren't able to view it on the front page.
The post was recreated from scratch. Still no way to view it.
Jason thought something might have needed to be updated, but all our other work scheduled for today went up as scheduled. All of it on the front page.
Finally, I created yet another original post without those tags and instead of uploading the same JPEG from Geoffrey, redownloaded it and renamed it.
Instead of the original title of the file (same as the cartoon title, "Oh, Snap") it now read, "Comic and Original Post Banned by WP."
This worked. You can now view the comic on our front page or by clicking here.
I'm glad I was able to publish Geoffrey's comic and have it be seen, but I am left feeling disgusted.
Maybe I am partly at fault for overtagging, but I don't feel good about the prospects of publishing poems and artwork on the ongoing abortion issue in the future.
I also feel nervous about the overall future on online publishing for small literary magazines like ours.
