Well, it looks like “GoGo Weekly” is turning in to “Go Go every second weekly” because I keep forgetting to weekly update the blog and put everything in one place. My bad. The shading video is one where I attempt to work in some of my ‘learning how to be a teacher’ in the EASY mode, and truth be told, the same is true in the unicorn video as well! Two somewhat pedagogically sound easy modes! The unicorn video is probably my favourite video I’ve made so far this school year, mostly because the donkey unicorn turned out exactly like I hoped it would.

Here are some comics:

That last comic is actually a legit concern of mine. You see, while I consider my comics to be fairly tame, when I posted a collection of them to an aggregate, they censored over half of them for violence and for concepts deemed generally inappropriate. All of that to say- people are offended by different things, and HAVE found me offensive. Not only that, sensibilities change over time: what is generally okay to joke about now might not be in five years. I was watching some ‘stoner comedy movies’ from my youth and I could not believe how sexist/homophobic/lazy they were- they would never get made today (and I happen to think we’re better off now then we were then). I would hate for some thoughtless comic that I made to jeopardize my future as a teacher.

When I was a pastor, I ALWAYS had to self-censor the stuff I was posting… not that I was going to post wildly off-side stuff, it’s just, it wasn’t worth explaining to anybody why I thought a joke was worth posting when they find it offensive. I remember a few staff meetings where I was asked to take a comic down, and I did.

It seems, as I am becoming a teacher, I will have to self-censor even more. I will need to worry about not just a religious subculture, but the entire broader culture’s sensibilities. And not because they might be offended, but because it will undermine their trust in my role as a person who is trusted to know things. Maybe that’s just a requirement of the province I am being educated in (my teacher friends from other provinces have varying degrees of caution on what they are known for publicly) but it does make sense to me.

The ‘pen name’ situation I’ve articulated in the last comic is exactly accurate: I don’t think that would work for me. I’ve come to realize that I get equal parts satisfaction MAKING and SHARING the comic. I don’t think I’d feel satisfied if Augustus Skywalker was getting the credit for something I made, even if it is only a handful of likes on facebook, or a few hundred upvotes on reddit, or whatever. Vanity, thy name is: Shauf.

Anyways, it has me considering (yet again) what place the creation of comic strips have in my future career. I could very easily justify short stories or graphic novels, but the sort of funny thoughtless comic strips I’ve been making (and generally have time to make) aren’t gonna fly.

Here is some other stuff I made for a contest:

Thanks so much for reading! Catch yah in a week or two, or whenever I remember that I haven’t updated the blog in a while! Haha