I've been reading a retrospective about Peanuts, and Charles Schulz had some good ideas. Namely, it's all about characters. If you have interesting characters, then you can throw them in different situations and see what they do. The story and gags write themselves if the characters are effective.
Which makes me surprised that Tobor, who is ostensibly a one-note character, works so well for these things. But his mostivations are so basic that it only takes a simple situation (give him amnesia, invert his personality, send him to jail) to get some action out of him.
Strangely, I haven't been able to think up a character as good as Tobor on my own. Super Britainman is good in his own way, but he really doesn't have a consistent voice -- he's just a model on which to plaster superhero parodies. Awfully Brain Damaged Boy is good for a gag, but he can't communicate enough to be really useful in a sustained way.
Jeremiah T. Fogg has some potential, though. I think I have to work on his dialect, but the whole clotheshorse schtick works. Maybe I'll release him from prison and do a series about him.
I guess this is my long way of saying, forget the story, just find a good character. Honestly, the only thing I planned was how Tobor was going to get out of jail (the "robot years" gag). I knew there was going to be a court scene and that he would be in prison, but exactly how everything happened was made up as I went along.
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...Trot and Cap'n Bill were free from anxiety and care. Button-Bright never worried about anything. The Scarecrow, not being able to sleep, looked out of the window and tried to count the stars.
