A washed up musician has to try to adjust to his waning fame and the pervasive thought that he may have lived a life full of regrets, while still milking his fame for whatever money he can get.

Michael Vernon

Michael Vernon is the lead singer of the band Eksplode and they were pretty famous for a while a few decades ago. Now he’s old, has lost his once luscious mane, and his fame wanes. With the failure of the band’s most recent album he has come to realize that he has no other skills and barely has the skills he needs to maintain his current occupation. He’s a little bit worried about his future.

Dex Rico

Dex Rico is the real reason for Eksplode’s successes. He is the band’s bass player, but he also provides vocals on a lot of tracks, and has written all of their most popular singles (with the exception of “Pet My Rock Snake” which was all Mike). In a lot of ways, Mike is jealous of Dex, but can’t hate him because Dex is the only person who is unwaveringly nice to him.

Callie Vitale

Callie is Mike’s love-child, who turned up recently because she was curious about her father. Once she met Mike, she was satisfied and tried to go back to her own life, but now Mike makes too much effort to hang around with Callie, as she could be the only good thing he’s ever done.

Mona Puncher

Mona is the band’s manager, and she means business. She wants the band to succeed, but she isn’t delusional about their situation. She has been trying to get Dex to put together some solo albums, but still has to coddle Mike to prevent him from having a breakdown or whatever. It’s annoying, but she cares just enough about Mike to go through with the effort.

Lefty Thompkins

Lefty is Eksplode’s biggest fan, and the head of their road crew. He’d do anything to please the band, and Mike takes full advantage of that.

I picture that this would be one of those shows that follows the characters as if it were a documentary, because there would be a documentary being filmed about the band as a way Mike hopes to make some additional money.

In the cybertechnotopia known as Network City, the crew of a radio station stuggle to keep the place going in spite of slipping ratings and the fact they are all weirdos.

Eugene White

Eugene is the station manager. Eugene doesn’t even really want to work at the Network City Radio, as its been nothing but a source of stress for him for years. But he needs money and has few other options. He is the type who would sell over anyone for a quick buck, and is prone to lying and get rich quick schemes that always end in disaster.

Clark Knight

Clark is the station’s most famous on-air personality. His duclet voice is beloved by listeners and Clark has a swelled ego because he knows how famous he is. He is constantly demanding special treatment, and usually gets it because the station can’t afford to lose him.

Nellie Neilson

Nellie works for Eugene to try to keep things running, but she’s also trying to get a career started as a journalist. She is much more interested in making Network City Radio a respectable business than a profitable one, and that causes friction with Eugene. She also hates to admit it, but she has a crush on Clark.

Ace Audio

Ace is the station’s head of technology and has cybernetic implants that let him control technology. This gives him a lot of power in the station, and he craves more, but he is a coward who will often bend to the whims of those with more personality. Don’t feel too bad for him, though. Any time things go his way even a little, he starts to act like a real jerk. He has also been sleeping in a secret room in the station so he doesn’t have to pay for an apartment.

If there’s one thing I know about sitcoms, it’s that radio stations are a prime setting for them. It worked for Frasier and Newsradio and WKRP in Cincinatti. Setting my show in Network City not only gives it a premise I am sure hasn’t been done, but also shows how I can still use my sitcoms to flesh out these fictional universes I’ve been building up over the years.

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.

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.

In a world where scientists got too careless and accidentally created frankensteins that were more powerful than humanity, the frankensteins have taken over. What humans remain have to eke out a on the fringes of their destroyed cities, their numbers ever dwindling as they are used as parts by industrious frankensteins who want to create even more of their kind.

But apart from those poor handfuls of humans that dot the landscape, what else is out there?

Gumbo

Gumbo is a representative of the “everyman” of the frankensteins. Though he hates humans obviously, he doesn’t go out of his way to hunt them down or conquer the world or anything. He’s happy just living in Frankenstopolis and helping to create the society that will rise on the ashes of humanity.

Griffinstein

When the Gravedoctor tried to study the magic that exists in the world, he found a means to create a great champion of frankenkind. By killing a human who was cursed to be a were-lion and another who was a were-eagle, the Gravedoctor sewed their corpses together to create Griffinstein. The magnificent beast is now the Gravedoctor’s chief agent and protector.

Naturally, since the talons of the were-eagle were the feet of the cursed human, if the Griffinstein is turned to a human form, it’s got legs coming from its shoulders and arms hanging from its back. It’s less impressive that way.

Halfwitch

With the success of the Griffinstein, the Gravedoctor sought more study of magics. To that end, he took the bodies of some skilled witches who might have a natural talent he could exploit. But to keep the result controllable, the Gravedoctor combined the witches with some complete idiots. The result is half witch, half halfwit. The Halfwitch works with the Gravedoctor, but she does indeed resent her subservience and intends to betray him. Still, she is an idiot.

Considerabot

It might seem like one lesson to be learned from the Frankenstein Apocalypse is that science is dangerous. While that can be true, we have to remember that science has its upsides as well. One upside is Considerabot, the considerable robot. Created by a team of scientists to oppose the frankensteins, Considerabot wages a war against the reanimated-corpse usurpers of Earth and tries to protect humanity.

The Mummy Eater

A mystic who gained great power by devouring mummies, the Mummy Eater is not at all happy that the frankensteins have overthrown the world and ruined his plans. With mummies now considerably harder to come by, the Mummy Eater has to wage war on the frankensteins, not out of love of his fellow humans, but solely out of his own self-interest.