Placed in glorious but imaginary South Pacific islands off Micronesia, Sherman's Lagoon features Sherman, a Great White Shark, whose hilarious, and hungry, behaviour makes for an uproarious comic strip. His friendly demeanour may spare the "hairless apes" swimming in the water one day, or dine on them for lunch the next. Have you noticed a shark in pearls? That's Megan, Sherman's wife. She is thinking of going into the polymer business with Hawthorne, a crabby little creature. Really crabby - he's a Hermit Crab and joyously lives up to his title.
The Sherman's Lagoon comic strip has it all - a summer camp for the fry, an undersea newspaper edited by a sharply witty little sea turtle named Fillmore, computers and a young computer nerd, comfortable homes and a one-legged sea captain trying to catch the Great White Shark... Sherman's Lagoon is a detailed and complete world of invention under the ocean. There is even a bottom dweller who eats everything, absolutely everything that lands on the ocean floor. Guns included.
Using a shark for the star of Sherman's Lagoon was no random act for creator Jim Toomey. Being one of those students who couldn't resist drawing during class, Toomey drew a shark much like Sherman in his textbooks and notebooks when he was in grade school. His family took regular trips to numerous beaches from their home in Virginia. Toomey's father, a WWII pilot who continued to fly after the war, took his family by Cessna to the beautiful shores of the Bahamas, where sea life and in particular, a shark in a lagoon, caught his son's attention. "Little did I know that I would retain that image and base a career on that very shark," said Toomey in a Northwest Diver interview. *(1)
Jim Toomey took the round-about way to his career a cartoonist. He graduated in 1983 with a Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering from Duke University, working afterwards part-time with a Virginia engineering company. Having drawn cartoons for his school newspaper while a student, in 1983, Toomey also began a six-year stint of drawing political cartoons for two daily Virginia newspapers.
Since neither job filled his wallet properly, Toomey joined the Merchant Marine for a short time, then moved to San Francisco to build custom displays for museum exhibits and trade shows. He also delved into creating a comic strip. To find names for the comic characters, Toomey used alliteration with Shark to arrive at Sherman. He appropriated the San Francisco street names of Fillmore and Hawthorne for two more characters - and found there was also a Sherman street there too.
