Bring Sherman to Our Beach
Running out to get the Sunday morning paper to read the comics just isn’t worth the energy anymore. The comics section of our local paper has slowly taken away all our favorites. Probably the most popular comic strip never to be printed in our paper is Jim Toomey’s Sherman’s Lagoon. Picking up Toomey’s popular syndicated strip might just be a way to boost Sunday sales for our newspaper and restore laughter to people at the Beach. It would give people another reason to buy the paper besides the weekly sales ads. So what would make Sherman’s Lagoon so popular here? It’s simple, we are the hairless beach apes that Sherman loves to terrorize.
Since we don’t have Sherman’s Lagoon in our paper, I subscribe to it through DailyINK to satisfy my Sherman fix. To give you a quick idea of what the strip is about I borrowed their introduction.
“There’s a lagoon called Kapupu near the island of Kapupu in the sunny North Pacific just west of the Elabaob Islands in the Palauan archipelago of Micronesia. Sherman the Shark, his wife, Megan, and a host of other ocean occupants call it home. Occasionally, the hairless beach apes with their so-called civilized human ways try to encroach on the Lagoonies’ tropical paradise. So seven days a week, there’s bound to be high jinks in this coral-reef heaven…”
Sherman is a great white shark who’s not quite all there. No matter how hard he tries, things always seem to blow up in his face. Along with his wife Megan and son Herman, friends Hawthorne the hermit crab, Fillmore the sea turtle, Bob the bottom dweller, Thornton the polar bear, and Ernest and nemesis Captain Quigley, they will keep you laughing every day.
The Perfect Comic Book Character
About seven years ago, a friend of mine gave me a couple comic books to read. They were the first two issues of a new comic book series called Fathom. She had already read them and said the main character was perfect for me. That day I found the perfect comic book character and my fascination with her began. I followed the series through the end of volume one and collected every issue I could find. So who is this perfect character? Her name is Aspen Matthews.
Aspen Matthews is a beautiful woman with a mysterious past. She was rescued at sea from a cruise ship that had been missing for ten years by Captain Matthews, a navy officer who adopted her as his own. Having always had a love for water, as a teenager she became an Olympic swimmer who nearly won Gold until she was disqualified amid controversy after a blood test revealed unusually high levels of oxygen in her blood. She decided to focus on college where she earned multiple degrees in marine biology. She became an expert in her field and earned a position at Deep Marine Discovery, a high-tech underwater research lab studying species that inhabit the bottom of the ocean. This began her double life above and below the surface. Her search to learn more about her unknown past revealed that she is really the daughter of the former leaders of an aquatic race that dwells in the depths of the ocean. This discovery will change her life forever as she battles an evil aquatic race that’s trying to annihilate the human race. Through it all, Aspen continues to search for clues from her past in order to balance the turmoil between the two worlds she inhabits.
It’s easy to see why Wendy said Aspen was perfect for me. Let’s see, a female marine biologist who battles evil in the ocean. Did I mention she is an awesome surfer and loves dolphins? It’s as if her character was created just for me. That’s why I’m working on getting up to speed with volume two. I’m glad they’re finally continuing with the series. It’s the perfect comic book with the perfect character.
