Skalman

Character from the Swedish comic strip Bamse.

Skalman (Shellman) is a green turtle who's a mad inventor and a friend of Bamse. His most famous invention is "mat och sovklockan" (the food and sleepwatch) which rings when he has to sleep or eat. He follows it blindly (he has been found sleeping on the moon) even it could lead to death or severe injury to him or his friends. Fortunately this hasn't happened yet. When he sleeps, NOTHING can wake him up. This also causes a lot of trouble to his friends.

Skalman is a borrowing of the concept of Gyro Gearloose into the swedish comic strip Bamse. He is a turtle, and keeps an incredible lot of stuff inside his shell. Many of these tools can be very useful when he and his pals Bamse and Lille Skutt have gotten into troublesome situations. One example is the portable mini-helicopter which they used in The red rubin of the elephant temple.

Judging from the episode The magician's red flower it appears that Skalman did some wild things in his youth.

While Bamse and Lille Skutt with time have gotten family and kids, Skalman has stayed single. To a question from a reader about this, Bamse creator Rune Andreasson answered that "not all people are supposed to get a family." It is possible to interpret this as meaning that he devotes his life completely to his scientific research for the good of humanity (i.e. he is a socially incompetent geek).