Smiling Sweeny was a lot of things. He was a madman, a genius, and something else that was not entirely a man. He was also a children's TV show host, and a damn popular one at that.

Every weekday, the children would clamor in front of the television set to watch Smiling Sweeny's Sunshine Serial, a public broadcast show that was as addictive as crack, as annoying as nails on a chalkboard to anyone over the age of 7, and as educational as a brick to the temple. For 30 uninterrupted minutes, Smiling Sweeny would sing and dance wearing clothes that would make even the colour blind wince, on a background that was the bane of every epileptic. And his songs were all horribly altered with computerized musical equipment, to heighten the pitch and tempo of his already whiny, cracking singing voice, with which he sang songs that were not only repetitive and stupid, but which had a horrible "sticking" quality, compromising the listener's ability to forget them.

All of these things considered, Smiling Sweeny's show should have been the most annoying, and reviled thing on television. And it was. All men and women on their way into pre-pubescence or older despised Smiling Sweeny with an instinctive, irrational, and burning passion. Every time they'd hear one of his songs or see his smug face, their viscera would scream in nausea and protest. Their hands would clench into white-knuckled fists, and in their heads they would scream in bloody protest.

But for the young ones... For the little boys and girls at whom the show was targeted, the show was an opiate of the highest order. They would watch the show when it came on, and then they would watch the tapes of it again and again until the footage became scratchy and they were forced to watch through the static. Sometimes their parents would refuse, and would try to prevent them from watching, but the children would scream bloody murder. They would throw temper tantrums of magnitudes never before realized, and scream at decibels requiring scientific notation to describe. Their parents had no choice, in the end, but to deal with the insidious presence of Smiling Sweeny's flashy colours, aggravating songs, and sickeningly sentimental story lines and "life lessons", or confront the unbridled rage of a toddler scorned.

But the horror wouldn't stop at the television set. Had the good lord intended that, he wouldn't have invented merchandising. Merchandising, Capitalism's incestuous, dripping moist slut of a daughter, had given birth from its sultry depths to Smiling Sweeny dolls, Smiling Sweeny Cigarettes, and Smiling Sweeny Liposuction Machines. 6 year old crack-babies were selling themselves on the street not to pay for their drug habit, but to put the next few greenbacks towards their Smiling Sweeny tattoo.

And through all of this, the parents clenched their teeth in horror. They yearned that it would simply not BE. They dreamed of worlds where Smiling Sweeny was a bloodied, raped corpse on the floor of a skuzzy gas station. They had nightmares where he chased them across his dizzyingly flashy rainbow landscape with a portable karaoke machine, begging them to join him in a "Sweeny Song", from which they would wake up screaming and soaked with tears. And through it all, Sweeny merely smiled more.

For as it was mentioned earlier, Sweeny was not a man. Perhaps he was a man once, but he forsook his soul and his former life for mystical power. Or perhaps he was born something more than a man to begin with; some sort of demon, or god. A thing that required simultaneous worship and pain to exist, to draw its power. A thing that not only felt no remorse for the shattered lives of those forced to live in a world that contained him, but actually got off on it. Whatever it was that Smiling Sweeny happened to be, it was gathering immense power, and whatever it was he planned to do with it wouldn't necessarily be evil, but it would definitely be a nuisance.