It should be noted that I have completed the process of moving to my new apartment. I’ve still got a lot of organizing to do (I thought I didn’t own a lot, but actually I own a lot), but I have stopped paying rent and handed over the keys to my previous apartment, so I’m pretty sure that suggests I don’t live there anymore.

Haiku!

It was fifteen years.
I lived in that apartment.
Not a single ghost.

Let’s hope I meet a nice friendly ghost here.

I am running behind on every possible thing I put on this site (Phone Guys, SecGov, Superman Thoughts), but I will try to get back on track as ASAP as possible.

A show about the occupants of a haunted dormitory at a crappy university.

Gus Ghost

Gus is the ghost that haunts the dormitory. He died only a few years ago, when he drunkenly (and nakedly) tried to climb a statue on campus, only to fall off and land on burning keg (which he had lit on fire). Now he haunts the dormitory that looks down on the scene where this all happened. Is he embarrassed? No way! He was having fun and that’s all he wanted and all he still wants!

Simon Shlaw

Simon came to university to reinvent himself. He was never popular in high school, so he wants to rise to the position of king of university. He’s an absolute idiot, though, so it isn’t easy, but maybe with Gus’s help, he’ll finally get what he wants. In addition to popularity, Simon is also constantly seeking wealth and sex.

Dirt Billy

Dirt is a big dumb oaf who is the most kindhearted of the cast, but he’s also dumb enough to support his friends in whatever dumb scheme they are trying any given week. He is Simon’s roommate and he is only even able to go to college because his father is an extremely wealthy industrialist.

Morgan Goode

Morgan is a girl that the guys know. She met them when Gus tried to haunt her in such a way that she’d end up wanting to date Simon. That didn’t work, but she still hangs out with them for some reason. She is openly bisexual and Simon and Gus just use this as ammunition as they tease her for being a slut.

This would absolutely be one of those animated shows I don’t like. The animation would be terrible, and instead of any wit or cleverness, the jokes would rely on randomness and the characters being mean to each other. It’s the kind of show where the jackass traits of the cast are treated as if they are right and I don’t think they are. It’d probably run for a while, just to spite me.

The classic sitcom staple of a family made up of spooky weirdos. As would be expected from me, this show is much darker than the usual.

Mummy Spookerson

The woman now known as Mummy Spookerson was pregnant in the 1930s, when a demon-worshipping cult member murdered her and her husband. While her husband’s body was chopped up and used in an occult ritual, the woman was mummified and her remains left hidden in a crypt. Whatever sinister purpose the cult originally had for the remains body was forgotten when they were all slaughtered by the demons they summoned. Ten years ago, the mummified corpse woke up. Uncertain what to do with her mysteriously returned life, she just decided to get back to living. She took ownership of the mansion the cult once owned, gave birth to the twins she’d been carrying, and got a job working at a grocery store nearby, where she is now the night manager.

Deady Spookerson

Mummy’s husband was dissected and most of body parts ended up who knows where. His skull, however, sat safely in the cult’s mansion. When Mummy’s woke up, some mystical energies present in the mansion allowed the husband’s spirit to animate the skull. The couple was reunited, and now Deady is a stay-at-home father of the twins. Still, even ten years later, he has trouble corporealizing, so he’s a bit clumsy.

Sally Spookerson

Sally is fascinated by the supernatural, so it is good luck for her that she’s growing up in a cultist mansion with a library of books on occult rituals and artifacts. She’s has trouble behaving in school, and frequently tries to use mystical short cuts to make her life easier, which only gets her into more trouble.

Billy Spookerson

Billy is nerdier than his sister, so he prefers to make his occult dabblings more scientific in nature. He wants to discover things that aren’t in the books in the library. New things. And he wants to be famous for it. He’s got a big ego, and is trying very hard to live up to it.

Uncle Hunchback

Uncle is not actually the uncle of the Spookerson family, he’s a cousin, some times removed or whatever, who happens to actually be named Uncle. He was lonely when he was the only surviving member of his family, so when the Spookerson family popped up again, he was happy to join them. He now dotes on the twins and helps them with their various rituals and experiments.

Ken Curtis

Mr. Curtis lives next to the Spookersons’ mansion, and he is a paranormal investigator. He makes internet videos in which he hunts for ghosts and monsters. He has no idea that there is anything strange about the Spookersons. He thinks Mummy is a burn victim, and has been too embarrassed to ever bring up her late husband. And he thinks all children are strange monsters, so he takes no especial notice of the twins. As far as he can tell, they’re just a normal family. This infuriates the demon once worshipped by the cult, because it is constantly sending messages to Mr. Curtis, trying to get him to kill Mummy so it can be freed from the otherworldly prison where it is trapped. Mr. Curtis is just completely oblivious to the demonic messages.

As a child, I enjoyed the Addams Family (both the movies and the original show), but I have not seen any version of the Munsters. Still, I doubt that that show had the in-depth exploration of the supernatural I’d be trying for here.

The “Supernatural Sunday” theme has been going on for more than a year now, so I think it is time to switch things up. But before we get into the next year’s theme, I will do another superfluous post of characters that aren’t even new:

Zappo

Mike Titus was a regular, ordinary young man who got caught in a science accident that gave him electricity-based superhuman powers. In Zappo’s world full of superheroes, this was not that uncommon an occurrence. It’s been known to happen. Following the examples of all the other people it happened to, he crafted a superhero persona for himself and got to fighting crime.

When I was in elementary school, I created Zappo. Drawing him at the time, his face looked like the mask he wears as I draw him now. Just inexplicable Bart Simpson-spikes on his head. I don’t know why I did it that way, but I think this mask at least makes sense of it. It would be very important to Zappo stories that he is not very powerful. A lot of superhero comics try to do stories with underdogs where the lesson seems to be “you might actually be the most powerful hero of all” and I hate that. It may go against a core tenet of superhero comics, but I don’t equate physical power with worth. Zappo would have some minor electrical powers and that’s it.

Also, we must never forget that a frog was also caught in the science accident and it also gained powers and it is now Zappo’s pet and he calls it Zap-Frog.

Clownsassin

The Clownsassin is the still-living spirit of a human who abandoned their birth-body to take on the forms of other people. Atypically for such people, when the Clownsassin takes on a new body, it immediately begins to get dressed like a clown and then go on a killing spree. Gotta have a hobby, after all.

The Clownsassin has made some cameo appearances in Secret Government Robots, including the currently running final storyline. I wouldn’t usually do a Super Sunday post for a currently-appearing character, but I wanted to talk about the origin of the Clownsassin. If it isn’t obvious from how often I mention finding information about characters in “my notes” dating back all the way to when I was in elementary school, I think up a lot of ideas but don’t follow through on stories as often as I ought. One of those things was to be “Wizard Ghosts”. They were meant to be a big part of a bunch of PDR stories, but they just sat in my head as I failed to tell those stories. And then, around 2008, the webcomic Dr. McNinja by Chris Hastings introduced Ghost Wizards (that image is from a later story). These Ghost Wizards were way cooler than my Wizard Ghosts, who were just magic users who had no permanent physical form of their own. I didn’t completely abandon the idea, Wizard Ghosts are mentioned a few times in Secret Government Robots, but I felt like I had to lessen their role. After literally years of internal debate (as I said, these things take a long time for me), I decided I can still use the ideas and just not call them Wizard Ghosts anymore. That is the term that SecGov uses for them, but they don’t call themselves that.

Muscle King Grotorr

On planet Deltoi, everyone is tough. You may think you’ve met some tough people here on Earth, but you are wrong. The Deltoids can slap rocks into dust, jump into orbit, and shrug off explosions. They are a warrior people who find all reasons to fight among each other and other reasons to attack other worlds. And strongest of them all is Grotorr. This is most fortunate, because Grotorr is a peaceful king, more likely to save other worlds from disaster than to conquer. Also, he has a gold tooth. There are Deltoids who crave violent invasions of weaker species, but Grotorr won’t allow it. After all, if those species are so weak, they wouldn’t be enjoyable to fight. Since no other species (that remains) is stupid enough to try to invade Deltoi, the only fights Grotorr gets that are worthy are would-be usurpers.

Grotorr appeared in a single Hover Head strip. I couldn’t pass up the chance to make that character into something bigger now could I? I picture Deltoid society being like the Saiyans on Dragonball. And not even what Saiyans are actually like, but what I assume they are like based on my limited knowledge. They fly around space with no ships and fight each other in world-shattering combat that takes hours.

Today’s beekeeper appeared in an episode of Mission Impossible titled “Zubrovnik’s Ghost”. First, let’s have a quick summary of the episode: Some enemy agents are trying to convince someone to defect to their side by telling her that her husband’s ghost wants her to. That’s a lie, though. Her husband, the titular Dr. Zubrovnik, wasn’t even dead for real. For the purposes of this ruse, the bad guys killed a beekeeper and burned his body to pass it off as Zubrovnik. That was a mistake. The beekeeper’s ghost takes its violent revenge on his killers, and the agents that Mission Impossible sent (I’m not going to bother learning which organization stars in the show) get to stand around wondering why this show isn’t about beekeeper ghosts every week.

We never get to see this beekeeper alive, or even learn his name. He’s an unfortunate victim of a murder before the episode even begins, which suggests he may not be the best fighter, but from his position in the afterlife, he displays some real power.

The first suggestion that things are not as they seem is that the bees around Zubrovnik’s mansion are active at night, and even during thunderstorms. Of course, they also wind up swarming the murderers, so it is pretty clear they’re doing the dead beekeeper’s bidding. The ghostly apiarist also displays control over smoke, another standard supernatural beekeeper weapon. Furthermore, his ability to shut and lock doors from beyond the grave should be mentioned. Sure, that’s more Ghost Power than Beekeeper Power, but it is his Beekeeper Rage that brings him back from the grave in the first place.

We do have to address that Beekeeper Rage, though. Now, I’m not going to say getting murdered is something one shouldn’t get a little ticked off about, but as is so often the case, Beekeeper Rage goes above and beyond rational anger. Mission Impossible’s psychic agent tries to contact Zubrovnik’s ghost, but instead find’s the beekeeper, whom she describes as having “unquenchable power”. “It hates,” she says. “It hates!” The beekeeper is using his ghostness to strike out at some bad guys, so I can’t say he isn’t using it in a productive way, but it sure seems to have completely overwhelmed his humanity. Hopefully once the murderers are dead he can find some peace.

It is my understanding, from Internet research, that the Mission Impossible franchise has maintained a continuity that goes all the way to the movies that still come out to this day, rather than having been rebooted like so many franchises. I also understand that the truly supernatural events in this episode are not in keeping with the general tone of Mission Impossible. Since this is supernatural beekeeper exists in a world where that sort of thing is not common, it is actually more impressive that he has these powers.

Three Honeycombs out of Five.