Family Guy's Stewie, American Dad's Klaus, The Cleveland Show's Rallo and Ted's Ted are all basically undersized sadists whose behavior would be outright horrifying if they weren't so small that we can't help but register them as underdogs. Some of that behavior is pretty horrifying anyway. There's a sadistic cast to MacFarlane's humor in general, and Stewie Griffin-like characters represent a perfect outlet for it: as vicious as Stewie wants to be, the laws of sitcom status-quo preservation and the fact that he's, you know, a baby generally prevent him from killing his mother and going on an orgy of destruction. Klaus may want to bring back the master race, but he's just a fish. But there's only so much that size can excuse. MacFarlane is so taken with the idea of tiny sadists that he doesn't see anything wrong with, say, Ted becoming a father in Ted 2, even though he casually laughs at others' pain (including John's) and wrecks a hundred samples at the local sperm bank.
T Campbell has written quite a few online comics series and selected work for Marvel, Archie and Tokyopop. His longest-running works are Fans, Penny and Aggie-- and his current project with co-writer Phil Kahn, Guilded Age.
