It is centered on the misadventures of a lazy, overweight great white shark named Sherman, along with his controlling, hot-tempered wife Megan and the friends and foes who share their tropical home.
The strip's humor is aimed at late teens and adults, with frequent lampoons of famous pop culture icons, and occasional jabs at political figures.
His immaturity and childlike personality frustrates his wife, Megan, to no end, and provides ample opportunities for some of his friends to blindly rip him off.
Although not the most intelligent of all the characters, Sherman is a good-hearted great white shark and often tries to please his friends and family, but most of the time falls short because of his low IQ.
On rare occasions, he has been shown bringing Megan gifts for no special reason and acting romantic; however, these instances are few and far between and most of the time he's obnoxious, lazy and hopelessly out of touch with his wife.
He often baits "hairless beach apes" with a variety of items attached to the end of a fishing rod, including beer bottles, wallets, and other props.
She seldom if ever listens to her husband (which is implied in a strip to be part of the reason Sherman married her since he says a lot of stupid things).
Her activities include cooking, shopping, caring for Herman, fishing for humans with Sherman, and often threatening Hawthorne for a number of practical jokes played on her.
She almost always ends up coming to her husband's rescue, whether saving him from a swarm of tiger prawns or preventing Hawthorne from stealing all his money.
He appears to be a good, well-behaved child, only going out of control when Fillmore volunteered to babysit him (although when he was given a bucket in which to put his toys, the only thing he managed to do was pee in it).
When the other characters found Sherman's brain (which had been taken by a fish during surgery) they decided to freeze Herman's in tin foil rather than try to return it.
Fillmore's hobbies include reading, caring for his adopted son, and having as many conversations with the other sea creatures as possible.
Most of the time he is seen simply leaning against a rock reading a novel, and acts as sort of a straight man for the other more outgoing characters.
However, he strikes out every year, due to his hopeless nerdiness, his complete lack of ability to even engage in a simple conversation with a girl, his overpowering cologne, and his pompous, arrogant attitude.
He has come close on a few occasions, but the only female to ever fall completely in love with him was an enormous sea elephant, thanks to Ernest's 'pheromone cologne'.
He was found hatching on the beach after Fillmore arrived on Ascension Island for nesting season (only to find that the entire event had been canceled).
Clayton attends boarding school, though he occasionally comes home to visit his father and figurative "Uncle Sherman".
Ernest can gain access to virtually any computer in the world and has hacked into almost every file on the internet (he once ordered Vermont to declare war on Canada).
He has gone on many adventures with Sherman to exotic places in the world, such as the sunken RMS Titanic, the Amazon River, the Ganges, and a Russian lake in Abkhazia.
On one of their adventures they found themselves in a fountain in Las Vegas and ended up gambling away all their money in a casino (as well as several of Sherman's teeth).
He once used his computer skills to crash a tanker filled with Prozac in the lagoon to stop a pod of suicidal whales from beaching themselves.
Bob has returned to the strip in his original largely mute form: a spotted, big-lipped fish with bulging, misshapen eyes and a belching habit.
His interests include scamming the other members of the strip out of money or resources, cracking jokes and insults, and pinching hairless beach apes (and Sherman).
Some of his businesses have included a general store, a photo lab, an airline, a bank, a nuclear power plant, and a casino.
Early on in the strip it was shown as a posh cave mansion with chandeliers, rugs, china cabinets, and luxurious furniture.
Among other things, he sometimes serves as a guinea pig for Ernest's experiments, once testing a mousse that made his hair fall out (he apparently has a tattoo on his butt that he got in the army).
He loves to eat frozen tundra-lemmings, and has bragged of devouring an entire team of Russian scientists and their sled dogs.
Quigley has used a number of different tools in his quest to catch Sherman, ranging from an ordinary fishing pole to a killer robot dolphin.
A recurring story element involves him transforming various characters (usually Sherman, Fillmore, and Hawthorn) into humans so they can attend activities such as a Rolling Stones concert, a Super Bowl, and others.
Revealed in a series of 2020 strips, Kahuna will lose his powers and turn into a normal statue unless he stands under a magic waterfall on a certain island in the lagoon every 500 years.