Okay, here it is! Super Sundays’ theme for 2018 is Sitcom Sundays. Every week, I’m gonna come up with the Situation for a situation comedy and sketch the cast. I’m not saying I’d actually be trying to make these shows, this is actually just a further pretense for me to fill out fictional universes with characters, but it could be a fun pretense, I hope. Look, it’s this or I spend all my waking hours committing burglaries. I’m slightly less likely to be arrested for this. So, here we go!

A woman marries a mother of two, thus becoming the third mother those kids have had.

Hannah Pogley

Hannah is a teacher who has just recently fell in love and married Evelyn Snyder, a widowed mother of two. Always full of self-doubt, Hannah is very nervous about “replacing” the lost mother of those kids and hopes that her wit and sarcasm can get her through.

Evelyn Snyder

Evelyn was a hard-working businesswoman until her first wife, Danielle, died in a car accident. The tragedy not only took away her life partner, it also derailed every plan Evelyn had and for her life. This led to some hard times for Evelyn. Falling in love with Hannah has brought her back to herself and, now that the two have married, she is ready to get back to work. Every few episodes she’d have to learn a lesson about not prioritizing her work life over the family, you know how it goes.

Grant Snyder

The oldest of Evelyn and Danielle’s children, Grant likes Hannah well enough, but is still coming to terms with his mother’s death. Hannah is convinced that Grant hates her, which itself is something Grant finds annoying. He’s also just reaching an age where he wants to be spending more time with his friends than his family anyway, which just exacerbates things. Now Grant is constantly nervous, trying to act the way he wants to live, but also not give the impression that he’s unhappy with the family situation. It’s rough on the poor kid.

Jordan Snyder

Jordan, the youngest of the Snyder kids, doesn’t remember Danielle as well. Hannah thinks that is especially tragic and has started to overcompensate in this by trying to inundate the boy with pictures and videos of his late mother. This confuses Jordan more than it helps, which is a shame because Jordan is kind of an idiot to begin with.

Cecily Morrisford

Grandma Morrisford is the mother of the late Danielle. She’s a bitter, manipulative woman who wants her grandchildren to be happy, but also wants to punish Hannah, whom she treats nice at first, but constantly tries to mislead into embarrassment. When Hannah finally catches on to the schemes, Grandma is forced to downgrade to acerbic mockery, but she’ll put her whole self into it.

One of the more common setups for a sitcom is to take “unusual” lifestyle circumstances and mine them for jokes. This can be done mean-spiritedly, to mock the unusual for not being normal, or it can be done in such a way as to normalize the “unusual” so it becomes more accepted by the mainstream. In our current world, gay marriage is less “unusual” than it once would have been considered, but let’s pretend this show started a decade or so back and roll with it.

I must now face the wrath of the Dark Lord Char’Nagh, for I have failed him this year. I set a bunch of goals for myself at the start of 2017 and I not completed them all in time. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised about that, considering that I apparently labelled last year’s End of Year post as the “2017 Ender” so, as far as this site knows, the year was over before I even started on those goals. I doomed myself!

Realistically though, I did alright. Only three goals on my list were not completed. The sad thing is that two of them were the biggest projects I set for myself:

Obviously, one of those is Secret Government Robots. My webcomic is now several years past the time it was supposed to end. I swear I have worked on it. I’ve even got pages fully completed and ready to go up, but it remains incomplete. One obstacle I’ve got here is that I’ve finished the story in my head and in my notes, so all that is left is the drawing. The drawing is my least favourite part of doing a webcomic. I am a reluctant artist. And I don’t really have an audience here. This is a story I told for myself, and myself knows the ending. But I’ll get it done.

The other of my largest projects this year was to read the Decameron. I didn’t even get halfway through. Other reading-based goals included just “Read Ten Novels” and “Read Two Collections of Short Stories” and I beat those easily enough, then exceeded them. I spent lots of time reading extra books when I ought to have been reading the Decameron, because it was a written goal of mine. This is a symptom of my second obstacle toward getting these goals done, they were both pretty daunting. I put them off as long as possible, to focus on other things, and then as the end of the year drew close, I knew I wasn’t going to get them done, so I just didn’t do them.

Clearly I need to find another way to focus on large projects. Perhaps the best thing about setting those goals is that it’ll train me to recognize how I focus on things and I’ll be able to plan accordingly in the future. Perhaps.

(I mean, also I was sick for three months of 2017. The kind of sick where even reading was hard for me to focus on. I didn’t want to use that as an excuse, but I have to admit, it did happen. Let’s hope I won’t have that in 2018.)

As I said, there was a third project I did not complete. It’s just a minor little thing (though it got more complicated as I went on), and is about half done. I don’t feel as guilty about not finishing, and still intend to do so this year and put it on the site. I will say no more at this juncture.

So this year, I’ve set fewer goals of some kinds, and more goals of other kinds (expect more Beekeeper Reviews this year than last, for example), but I still feel like I’ve got two big projects (and one small one) hanging over my head. Let’s try this again…

To end this calendar year, I am going back to the “Superfluous Sunday” idea, where I take minor characters from existing PDR stories and flesh them out more.

Zoftak

Zoftak is a space cop. He often works undercover (such as when he posed as Space Pirate “Zoftak the Mighty”). While the Space Army has been able to relax since the end of the war against the Flartians, there is still plenty of Space Crime to keep Zoftak busy.

Since last we saw Zoftak, the powerful cop has been infiltrating a galaxy-spanning robot-smuggling syndicate. The rules of the Space Government lay down some very clear restrictions on the use of robots and how they are allowed to be spread about to various worlds, but some scofflaws just don’t care about that. Zoftak, posing as a bodyguard to a particularly scummy trader, has been gathering information to bring them down, but has just been hit with a major curveball: the biggest stolen robot shipment Zoftak has ever seen was just made, and the buyer was none other than the Chief of Space Police. If corruption goes that high up the ladder, who can Zoftak trust?

Churg

Churg is an immigrant from the Underground Kingdom of Mederex to SecGov City. Life in that underground realm is not great for Lizard People, so even though Churg was a highly respected medic among his people, he still thought it better to take his family above-ground, to the Robot city where he was convinced he could help more people while shaking off the shackles that would have held his children. But SecGov City wasn’t so kind to Churg and his kin. The robots there, already primed to think that Mederex’s citizens are primitive and the Lizard People most of all, found that this guy who had no money was hardly likely to be useful in any kind of medical field. Still, Churg persevered. He started a store where he could sell organic food to the few humans that existed in town (he had to import food for his own use anyway), and though it isn’t he life he wanted, he is making the most of it.

Churg was first seen on this page of Secret Government Robots.

Gus White

In the opposite of Gus’s situation, Gus White has left SecGov City to live in Mederex’s Kingdom, where he has been given a position as a Baron by Mederex, and gets to live in his own subterranean cave/castle. Though there is a Baroness (popularly known as the Black Baroness), Gus does not see much of her. She does her own thing, while Gus works mostly as a representative of either SecGov or Mederex’s Kingdom to the other group. Though the two forces remain at peace, there is always the chance things could go awry, so Gus deftly tries to make and keep allies in both locations, and across the other Secret Factions across the world. He is not trying greedily to gain power, but he is deathly afraid of losing what he has.

Gus made exactly one appearance in Secret Government Robots, turning up at a war meeting on this page.

Unable To Fly Man

Carlton G. Carlton is one of those superheroes with way so many powers that it isn’t fair for the bad guys. He’s got super strength, super speed, super senses, sonic screaming, ice beams, fire breath, lightning control, nigh invulnerability, telepathy, raygun reversal fields, invisibility, ghost-smelling, phasing, the ability to talk to animals, turn undead, water knowledge, recipe summoning, computer affinity, cloud loyalty, emotion vision, and that is just the tip of the iceberg.

But he can’t do everything. Carlton is completely unable to fly (he also can’t hover or levitate or even super-jump). When it comes to getting off the ground, Carlton is just out of luck. Still, in spite of this terrible problem holding him back, he has made good of his life. He is now the leader of the Team of Superheroes, and though he does worry a bit too much about public opinion of the team, he gets to help them do a lot of good.

If I’d been better at drawing comics, my plan had been to do a story of Hover Head and friends every couple years, but it hasn’t worked out that way. Still, I have mentally fleshed out the characters a lot and hope to get back to them at some point.