Samuel Burke

"He told me that I got hit by a truck and died in the early version of his comic series."

– Gregory Burke, father.

"He talks to himself a lot, so... you know... a lotta things the Nazis coulda done with him."

– Unknown student, UMass Boston.

"Sam? Did he exist? Oh, yeah. I wanted to keep in touch with him, but hey: it was either him or my boyfriend. I think."

– Hannah S., Panara Bread employee.

"He's got potential, alright—and his thumb straight up DC's ass."

– Geoff Johns, DC Comics writer.

Introduction

Samuel Cohen Burke (AKA Winthrop "Blatto" Pork) is a sophomore student at the University of Massachusetts Boston, in Boston, Massachusetts. He's the youngest child in the disfunctional heathenous Burke family, as well as the least morbid and whiny of his immediate family, although this means virtually nothing, as he's been referred to as "a silly boy" by his parents, "a weirdo" by his siblings, "a psychotic, antisocial pain in the ass" by his fellow sophomores, and "almost intelligent, if only he hadn't spoken openly and negatively about anime in a whopping one sentence" by his professors. Burke has been writing a futuristic superhero comic series called ElectroNuke since 2015 that he's referred to as his "life's work". He's also discussed his dream to publish it at DC Comics as part of his future career in comic book writing, although his parents have responded to his ambitions by claiming that, when you live in what is essentially a town-sized retirement castle with an elderly hippie and a cat-obsessed hair stylist, you probably won't get very far in life.

Burke was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome at the age of three, as well as attention deficit disorder at age eleven, which gave his father Greg plenty of time to berate his poor algebra and arithmetic-processing skills until he himself was diagnosed with Asperger's at the early age of fifty-five. Burke has expressed pride in his high-functioning autism and gratitude for being made aware of it relatively early on, but it keeps all of his peers approximately twenty feet away from him at all times, so one Benjamin Baltazar's claim that he's a "smelly, constipated eunuch" may be correct after all.

Unbenownst to his family and associates, Burke acts as the supreme emperor of the Burkehead Realm, where everything he thinks about—existent and fictional—resides. During his reign, Burke is not so much overworked as he is bothered incessantly by his family's constant text messages, butthurt anime fans, and a selfish pink fairy that somehow continues to materialize around him, even after being sawed in half, getting blown out the side of a hospital by Dr. Gregory House, and dying from lack of nourishment while chained up in an alternate iteration of Hell by sweaty balaclava-sporting demons from the 1970 A Christmas Carol adaptation, Scrooge, starring Albert Finney.

Early Life and Childhood

Burke's life began not with a bang, but with a grand whimper. He was born two weeks premature to Marta Helane-Cohen Burke in the Newton-Wellsley Hospital in Newton, Massachusetts, joined by his two older sisters, Olivia Harper Burke and Emily Griffith Burke. Despite their fascination with their new baby brother, his father Greg was still working in Philadelphia and almost showed up late to the occasion. During the process of naming him, he was almost permanently referred to as Joe Burke, but that was before they realized that they could name one of their Siamese kittens Joe instead, as well as before Greg responded to the name with, "we either name him Sam or send him off to missionaries in Uganda," unquote. With that, the name stuck, and he was brought home to Ashland, Massachusetts a couple days later.

At around eight months old, the Burke family moved away from their condominium complex in Ashland and moved out to Exton, Pennsylvania two years after the town was complete, which already gave it a pristine, high-class aesthetic over the sleepy, deliberately derelict nightmare that was Ashland, a place that only vulgar weirdos like RedLetterMedia from Milwaukee, Wisconsin would call lively. The next twelve years of Burke's life were spent on 905 Tulio Drive, in the sloping, whitebread, bourgeois hills of Whiteland Ridge. At two years old, he experienced a speech delay and became completely nonverbal for almost a year, during which his therapist at the time noted, "I don't believe this is a speech delay. I believe this privileged little asshole's just hiding his father's Sports Illustrated swimsuit issues." This became ironic, as Greg did, in fact, keep Sports Illustrated swimsuit issues for his son to read in the bathroom. Although he eventually developed speech skills again, the combination of his lack of potty training, the onset of his antisocial behavior, and such traumatic experiences as a house in his neighborhood being struck by a small jet—which resulted in no injuries—and a harrowing children's song recording about bear hunting caused him to frequently switch preschool programs. This eventually prompted his disability testing at age three, leading to an official Asperger's syndrome diagnosis. His mother responded to this diagnosis by reading a year's worth of parent's guides on autism, support program reviews, and cookbooks specific for autistic children. His dad readied himself for this newfound responsibility by doing nothing.