The First New Supechum Project this Decade

"It's a dark time for the rebellion ..."

That's how Star Wars The Empire Strikes Back begins its opening crawl. And for the past few years I've felt the same way. It's a dark time for our entire society. There's so much negativity, hatred, rage, vitriol and arguing going on. Especially on social media; which is capturing more and more of our culture every single day.

I read a statistic about Facebook use last year that I ended up using in my day-job as a digital marketing manager for Continental Finance Company in Delaware. While this stat was exciting for me to use in my work, it's significance is also deeply disturbing: Almost 2/3 of the population of the United States uses Facebook daily.

Combine that with Twitter, YouTube, SnapChat, InstaGram and more, and essentially most of the United States is plugged into a social media platform.

But while these environments supposedly have an ideal where friendship, relationships, connections and all other sorts of positive effects are the goal, the reality of Social Media platforms is that they are a battleground. People are inundated with rants, trolls, bots, rage, hatred, and bullying.

At its best, social media is an entertainment device where people are bombarded with indifference and sarcasm turning their lives and opinions into punchlines. At its worst, social media is a black hole of despair where people are being manipulated on purpose to feel bad, engage in negativity and continue to engage in that negativity as it spirals.

That's pretty much the opposite of what Superchum stands for. And I have an idea that I hope will help.

I'd pretty much retired Superchum after my last attempt to sell it as a comic book property. Superchum was originally designed as satire, poking fun at the tropes of super hero comics and making light of American suburban life.But Superchum didn't make any money. And the last comic con I took it to, I was in artist's alley between two artists selling prints of scantily clad women or other companies' licensed properties (or both). I just wasn't reaching my audience. I wasn't sure I even had an audience.

So I retired the comic and moved on to other projects.

Now I'm back. With a Children's Book . Because it's very strange but I feel that everyone, children and adults alike, need to be educated on how to be nice to each other . The Paths of Chumliness are, this many years later, no longer a joke. They're serious.

The pure hope and kindness that Superchum was the harbinger for is actually needed in the world.

So I'm back at the drawing table. I have a loose outline of a plot formed. The basic premise is that Baron Bad Guy defeated the Befrienders. Because he learned his lesson. He stopped making destructive robot minions to attack them in the real world. Instead, he took his technological talents and unending malevolence online. And created bots. That infected Social Media, turning the world against the Befrienders and everything they stood for: Friendship, kindness, truth, and Chumliness .

The Befreinders are going to find that social media works against them and they have to take their mission online.

But more than just Baron Bad Guy and his army of bots await the Mighty Befrienders!

There's also an army of trolls.

For me this is a strange turn of events. I was happy with having moved on. I felt Superchum was always a clever concept but that it just never had a chance to find its market properly. And now here we are in 2018, and I'm looking at a world that has completely forgotten how to be friendly the moment people are staring at a phone screen or a computer keyboard.

The market may have come to Superchum, instead of Superchum going to the market.