Some might say that it was inevitable that Toby Radloff would one day be seen on DVD having a delightful romp with a female corpse he finds in a dumpster.

After all, his early education, before he discovered his calling as the Genuine Nerd, before he befriended Harvey Pekar and started appearing in both the magazine and the movie American Splendor, Radloff was in the Sagamore Hills Children's Psychiatric Hospital. The five days a week of residential care and education was the price his mother paid for having a son who was so gifted that regular school bored him from the time he was in kindergarten. He was too young for the Cleveland schools' programs for the gifted, and so frustrated in class that he was often disruptive unless his grandmother sat with him.

At Sagamore Hills he was surrounded with other brilliant children, but also with the retarded and the severely mentally ill. The location lends bemusement to that portion of Toby's career involved with low-budget horror films, but was emotionally devastating at the time.

"Those years were hell," he says in his unique, almost ploddingly deliberate speech. "I missed my freedom. I missed my mother. I missed my grandparents."

Toby's first champion was an unlikely one. Hal "Dick" Fisher had known his single mother for a decade, falling in love with her and having her move in with him during the time Radloff was in Sagamore Hills. He was outraged to learn that Toby was denied a normal public school education, but until he married Toby's mother in 1970, legally becoming Toby's stepfather, he had no say. After the marriage he moved the family to Bedford where Toby was enrolled in Carylwood Elementary, happily enjoying a normal education experience for the first time.

That happiness did not last. Both the junior and senior high schools had no dress code in the 1970s, and the popular kids gravitated toward T-shirts with beer slogans, jeans of questionable cleanliness and aromatic athletic shoes. Toby's fashion sense was offended and he would not conform. "I dressed pretty much in the finest clothes that Atlantic Mills and Uncle Bill's and Tops and K-Mart would have. Sort of like the school uniforms today. And if my mother wanted to splurge, we'd go to Sears & Roebuck and JC Penney's or even May Company."

To the cool kids, it was like he was wearing a sign that said, "Please mock me."

And then there was his speaking voice. His intellect raced faster than he could form words for a conversation so he had to deliberately slow himself, creating a speech pattern not unlike that of a man trying to explain the meaning of life after two days of constipation.

Radloff, harassed daily, began hearing the term "nerd" in 1974 when Happy Days debuted on television; The Fonz used it to ridicule those he deemed socially inept. Toby would later adopt the name as a badge of honor, but that was when a new generation witnessed the rise of Apple's Steve Jobs and Microsoft's Bill Gates and decided nerds were deserving of respect. At the time, though, the pain of that name and others, including "drug pusher," proved emotionally overwhelming.

"That was when I started losing my temper," he recalls. "There were times when I'd throw a chair at a student because the harassment was getting bad. The shop classes were worse. I've had more problems with the teasing and the harassment in the shop classes than any other classes. There was one point where a kid was teasing me so much that I ended up grabbing a hammer and I was almost ready to hit the guy when the teacher stopped me before I could do anything."

Radloff's grades dropped. His stepfather was a strict disciplinarian, and father and son were frequently in conflict during the teen years. Suspension from school meant grounding at home, and emotions were high in both environments. Eventually Toby took to long-distance bicycling to escape both worlds, and when he found he could graduate a year ahead of his class by taking one summer school course, he finally found peace by enrolling in Cuyahoga Community College as a business major. The more mature CCC students accepted Toby's eccentricities and the fact that he was someone who did not feel the need to be part of the crowd.

Still, he wanted acceptance for who he was.

He worked in a pizza restaurant for five years, quitting when he realized that the family operation would never advance employees who weren't relatives. He then followed his mailman's advice and took the civil service exams for government jobs. This led to part-time, temporary employment with the Veterans Administration. He impressed his boss, and when a full-time opening came up, Toby was called and happily returned. This time he was placed in the records room with Harvey Pekar.

Toby had never read American Splendor, then a self-published autobiographical comic that had a circulation of approximately 10,000 copies, but he'd heard of it. But Harvey took to the eccentric new hire and they became good friends. Toby even accompanied Harvey on his many weekend excursions to yard and library sales to buy used books and records that he could resell elsewhere at a profit. This was how Pekar financed American Splendor until Dark Horse Comics got involved.

"We started talking about things in my life," says Radloff. "We talked, for example, about lentils and Lent, about what lentils have to do with Lent. I mentioned that during Lent you can eat fish or chicken but you can't eat meat. Lentils, I think, you can eat all year. I don't remember exactly how lentils and Lent appeared when used in an issue of American Splendor, but that was one of the first stories that included me."

Those who have seen the movie American Splendor have a fairly accurate picture of Harvey, Toby, the VA, and Pekar's early fame from appearances on David Letterman's show. What did not appear were the parallel and divergent paths Toby began taking as he made appearances at various fan conventions and met other eccentrics who were pursuing their own dreams.

One of these was Wayne Alan Harold, a low-budget renaissance man writing, producing, filming, editing and marketing not only traditional commercials but also movies that will never reach prime time, most done through his company Lurid.com. Oddly, while Toby, who proudly calls himself the Genuine Nerd, a persona in defiance of the kids who once teased him, holds a traditional job in addition to his film work, Wayne Alan Harold, seemingly the more mainstream of the two, lives rent-free in a small apartment in his parents' home. He also was the creator of such films as Townies in which Dickey (played by Radloff), an eccentric bum, finds love with a female corpse left in a dumpster. Discretion is used when showing that Dickey's seduction was successful, for as Toby notes, the scene with the corpse was "tasteful. Very tasteful."

The movie, and Radloff's character, follows in the tradition of another Radloff role, Harold Kunkle, whose adventures are recounted in Revenge of the Killer Nerd and Bride of the Killer Nerd. The latter, a light-hearted tragedy, has a scene that follows the bathtub death by hair dryer of Kunkle's beloved. In addition to exacting revenge, there is a moment of tenderness that finds Kunkle with the skeleton of his long-dead bride tenderly feeding her from a bowl of oatmeal teeming with maggots. (Troma Pictures, the New York-based production and distribution company of such classics as the Toxic Avenger series, Class of Nuke 'em High and Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead, bought the rights to Revenge of the Killer Nerd and Bride of the Killer Nerd and offers them through both their Web site and any retailer quirky enough to stock them.)

As with most of Radloff's early work, the cult films were the indirect result of his adventures with Pekar. "In 1987, it was right after Harvey appeared on Letterman for the first time, an MTV crew came to the VA to do a story about Harvey. He introduced me to this MTV crew. One guy was Stuart Cohn. I talked about my being the Genuine Nerd, because I had gotten this Genuine Nerd badge from the Coventry Street Fair. It was like when they did the "Revenge of the Nerd" story for American Splendor, I showed Harvey the Genuine Nerd badge and they did the story on that. I wore it proudly for a while. And I wore the Genuine Nerd badge when MTV came to town. I appeared and I talked about my being a nerd and how I was perceived as different, how proud I was to be different. It aired on MTV News in July of '87 to coincide with Revenge of the Nerds II which came out around the same time. So they put my segment along with footage from Revenge of the Nerds II. And I appeared on MTV like a dozen times from '87 to '89, a little segment between the music videos. It was a mini-feature. I was probably one of the first non-musical [segments] to appear on MTV."

It was during a joint appearance with Pekar at a Superman convention that the two men met Wayne Alan Harold and his then-partner, who were planning to create a full-length, low-budget film about a nerd who takes revenge on all the people who had teased him over the years.

"Working on a full-time, full-length film was new to me. Having to do scenes over and over again. Having to do multiple takes. It was hard. The three of us had illusions of grandeur when this came out because, at the time, the video business was still based on rentals. There were 36,000 video stores out there, and if 18,000 of these stores bought only one copy at $60 a pop, we would be in the money. Then reality set in and we found out that getting the product out was a tougher nut than we thought. The movie was rejected by practically every company. A small outfit out of Florida decided to take it on, and they sold about 3,000 copies. We had this big premiere up at Peabody's Down Under, and Wayne had some friends of his picket the place. He had people dressed as stereotypical nerds picketing Peabody's Down Under. And they brought in camera crews from Channel 8 and Channel 43 to appear in it.

"I appeared in a limousine with a couple of models for the premiere. They wanted to set it up as a big Hollywood premiere. And Killer Nerds screened at Peabody's. The rock bands that were in the film providing soundtracks played. They put me up at what is now Embassy Suites."

In person, Toby Radloff comes across as intelligent, well-read and interested in all facets of life. His speech is faster than when playing the persona he developed for the screen, from MTV to the American Splendor movie.

"I felt very odd being on the big screen for the first time," he says. "I felt very odd having other people see it and react to it. A lot of people liked me and hated Harvey. They thought I saved the film."

Toby disagrees, but appreciates the compliment. More important for him, though, was that he finally realized how far he had come from the days when he was perceived as the class loser. The release of the critically acclaimed movie provided an emotional healing that had nothing to do with money or his daily life. "I was able to get on the big screen, which the people who picked on me never have. Everybody wants to be famous. Everybody wants their 15 minutes of fame that they're [the bullies from his past] never going to get. But you can say, "Hey, Toby Radloff was on the big screen. Nyah, Nyah, Nyah Nyah Nyah!'

"People dream of being in the movies. I finally made that dream."

And it was only the beginning.

A little over a year ago, Toby's character-acting skills came to the awareness of Austin, Texas-based Lance Fever Productions, run by award-winning animator Lance Myers (Prince of Egypt, Quest for Camelot, Aladdin's Magic Carpet, Space Jam and others, both for major studios and his own creations). Myers had an idea for an animated series about a group of young adults whose lives revolve around role-playing games, science-fiction movies and each other. The concept, now fully formed as The Ted Zone, delighted Superdeluxe.com, one of the online ventures of Turner (as in Ted) Productions. The idea is to explore the most effective way to use broadband, the Internet, iPods, etc. Some of the material used will have appeared on one of the other Turner media operations such as Adult Swim, the late- night segment of the Cartoon Network that dominates late-night cable ratings. Other material will be created for broadband, then expanded for more traditional sale. The Ted Zone fits the latter.

Lance Myers has never met Toby Radloff, never felt the need to do so. He wanted a talent who could take his idea and make the nerd leader Ted come alive. Each story segment would run four to five minutes, a little like the introduction of The Simpsons on the Tracy Ullman Show.

Describing the first episode, Toby explains the simple premise: "My foul-mouthed mother drops me off at a convention but she refuses to take a bath until I get laid. While I'm at the convention, I'm dancing with somebody, and somebody knocks a trash can or something and it knocks a truck off its emergency brake and it goes down a hill, knocks down a water tower, and at the same time that the water's rushing in, a door-to-door salesman knocks on my mother's door offering to sell bubble bath, and the water hits the house the moment the salesman introduces the bubble bath so that's how my mother ends up getting clean. That's basically the plot of the first Ted Zone."

(Okay, but try to explain the plots of The Family Guy, American Dad or even Beavis and Butthead. To watch all the episodes, go to Superdeluxe.com.)

The second segment provides more information about Ted's mother, who works in a video store and refuses to rent to her son because of his late fees. This time the story revolves around Ted and his friends trying to recreate the impact of Orson Welles's War of the Worlds, failing miserably.

The human cast lives in different cities and each records alone with an Austin hook-up for Myers. Locally Radloff goes to the Lava Room recording studio. He does a run-through, receives suggestions from Myers, then records different takes of the same material until his reading fits how Myers imagined it should sound. The same work is done with each character. Then Myers takes the best of the material, edits it together, and does the animation. By starting with voice instead of drawing, it is easier to make the characters walk and talk in as believable a manner as you can have when one of two regular women characters has the stubble of a beard, a cigarette forever dangling from her lips, and the general demeanor of an overweight outlaw motorcycle rider looking for a fight. The drawings and animation are completed after that.

The future for Radloff's new venture looks positive. His eccentric movie work and his appearances in American Splendor make him popular at comic book and related conventions where he has talked about his acting and sells DVDs of past work. The Ted Zone episodes are being developed so that they can be compiled onto a DVD or lengthened, either for new media or traditional cable. Because Turner Entertainment's New Media division is pleased with what it has seen to date, there is a chance that Ted will eventually become the new Homer Simpson. And since Hollywood's newest status symbol is having your own cartoon character, something the Genuine Nerd has achieved while his classmates can only look on in awe, well, just how cool is that?