Interesting Times Friday Mailbag: "Doin’ It For Marks"

Posted on by Nathan

Please send in your questions to
journalcomic at gmail dot com
and maybe you will get to see your question answered
in a Friday Mailbag!
Alternately, you may see them in a “Friday” Mailbag,
which happens when I forget or am otherwise preoccupied on a Friday
and write it on Saturday instead!
How Exciting

[BEGIN COMMENTARY] I am going to toot my own horn and say that yes, I am pretty good at writing essays. “But wait,” you cry, “I’ve seen all your report cards and you never really do better than like a B average in English classes. How can you claim to be good?” Well, the B was attained with no great effort on my part, and I get good grades on essays I’ve banged out the night before. So I always said to myself, just think what you could achieve with only a little more effort! But rather than put in that effort, I remained satisfied with knowing that I could if I wanted to. [June 12, 2012]

nooo, this place is a mess! this won’t do at all

Posted on by Nathan

I have no idea what would have happened to this comic in the long run, had I finished becoming a teacher. If there was one thing that the Faculty of Education impressed upon us it was that openly posting personal stuff, even something as relatively innocent as these comics, has the potential to be a liability to an educator. The professor I spoke to did report later that this site is “probably okay” given that it’s pretty tame, but did advise that I be cautious all the same.

The time commitment for posting, though usually less than an hour, was also something that became too much when I was actually in practicum. Go forward in time from here and you’ll see that I took a hiatus of several weeks while I tried to stay afloat in the wonderful world of teaching. More on that later. [June 12, 2012]

Eternal Clock-Radio Silencing Fist of the North Star!!

Posted on by Nathan

Okay so what’s happening in the last panel is a reference to the show “Fist of the North Star”, a cartoon about a denim-wearing superhero wandering a post-apocalyptic wasteland and using his incredible martial arts to solve problems. Every so often he uses a Special Move and the action freezes while the name of that move is displayed on the screen. Also a narrator shouts the name. So, yeah. That’s what I was trying to do. I just copied the Japanese characters straight from the show, which my household was very into at the time. [June 12, 2012]