Just to review and flesh out the characters thus far mentioned, we have:
Super Personnel Person: Tremendous force of HR competence, and the hero protagonist. His most impressive power has to do with never forgetting, misspelling, or mispronouncing anyone's name -- ever.*
Bad News Monsters: Nickname for the shock troops and space craft crew of an alien extra-terrestrial invasion force.
Good News Guys: Nickname for a USAF unit of interceptor fighters whose mission is to shoot down extra-terrestrial invasion craft. The interceptor fighter aircraft have a very very high altitude limit
Michaels Dipetrillios - Works in IT. Is excellent at "Halo". Until Super Personnel Person fixes the situation, he is constantly getting both correspondence and other documents intended for Michelles DiPetrelleous.
Michelles DiPetrelleous - Works as a purchasing agent at a molybdenum solube recovery facility, was recently promoted to be the commodities family manager for solvents. Secretly huffs ammonia. As an added joke, he has shaved and waxed his head. For whatever reason, is never mistaken for Michaels Dipetrillious, but did know a person named Creighton who worked at the Crate and Barrel.
Captain Bombastic - Foreman of a private security subcontractor assigned to protect a corn processing plant that produces high-protein feed for cattle, microwave popcorn, and a biofuel slurry. Wears a cape all the time, has an absenteeism problem because he dreams that he is off "fighting crime."
Dr. Obvioüs - Provocative college professor forced to take a sabbatical after his derision of Lakoff & Johnson gets too personal. Tends to insult people with ironic euphemisms.
Unnamed companion to Super Personnel Person, an attractive female with little or no dialog, and whose relationship to Super Personnel Person is never explained.
Colm Meaney. "I'd have to license the name and likeness rights. Anyone know his agent?"
The Joke Ex-plainer. A cable news commentator who ruins the plots of a "gallows humor"-based criminal terrorist through painfully dull explanations of why particular jokes are funny.
*Crabby Aunt Whatshername. Neutralizes Super Personnel Person's powers.
Likely Supreme Court Justice Nominee. A jurist so concerned about avoiding controversy in her expected Supreme Court nomination that for years she has hidden behind erudition and circumlocutions. "Eschew obfuscation!" she proclaims with unintended irony during an oral argument .
Isomniac - when you don't sleep, its always "me time"
The Sudukoan. A super-villain whose schemes combine the elements of the portmanteau after which he is named.
Hackney Cliche aka The Arch-nemesis An enduring stereotype of the former super hero turned criminal mastermind
Jargonizer. A robust, proactive, results-driven, facilitator-challenger with an outside the box vision of incentivizing productive synergies by task-orientatating best practices from lessons learned and gap analysissies to achieve total quality in a collaborative workflow without borders! I find this villain to be especially horrible.
Morris Bergeron aka Bergeron Morris aka Cartaphilus . From Houma, was visiting New Orleans when Hurrican Rita struck. Was mistakenly relocated to Wasilla by Red Cross hurricane relief workers after FEMA transposed his first and last name. He has been trying unsuccessfully to get back home. Morris Bergeron, it turns out, has been relocated a lot, and has changed his name many times. The oldest name he can remember is Cartaphilus, he had "like, maybe 20 other names before that." He was "the man carrying a jar of water" outside Jerusalem and essentially was the caterer of the Last Supper. Like many caterers, the significance of the dinner and the diners is totally lost on him. When the Romans rounded everybody up for arrest, he truthfully said, "Jesus? I can't seem to recall anyone by that name" because his only direct interactions were with Peter and James. As the buzz went around Jerusalem, he ultimately is able to put 2 & 2 together, such that he realizes who Jesus is, and actually ends up the on the Via Dolorosa with his water jug, trying apologize to Jesus. Jesus, who at this point is really tired (and had just fallen), drinks some water from the jug, and realizes that he hasn't been listening to the apology. But because he's Jesus, he's catches the general drift (Jesus is a sharp guy) and says, "Listen, I forgot your name, too. Its not important. Anyway, its not a problem, and I am certain that people will forget all about this." Cartaphilus makes an anxious face, so Jesus says to him "Look, I really have to finish up what I'm doing here. I can see that you are anxious, so just to give you some perspective, by the end of the day, you'll come out of all this with eternal life, how does that sound?" "Good, I guess", Cartaphilus replies with some confusion. Then, handing the jug back and patting him on the shoulder, Jesus adds in a rare show of biblical sardonic pique, "You guess? Ok, Great! Thanks for the drink. I'll see ya at the end of the world..." [take that, Dan Brown, you two-bit hack] Super Personnel Person unfolds this story over many episodes. Aspects of this story which are not critical to human resources work are not uncovered through Super Personnel Person's superpower. So for example, when Super Personnel Person looks at Morris Bergeron's personal information form and knows that the Red Cross messed up by transposing the surname and family name, or that Bergeron is mispronouncing his own name... that's superpower. But when Unnamed Companion realizes that Morris converted from Judaism to Christianity "a long time ago", and asks why Super Personnel Person didn't know that, Super Personnel Person replies, "I don't see how that's important. Oh... am I being culturally insensitive?"
Super Personnel Person works for the business services division of a company that makes Mecha. Like all people in the business services division of a company that makes hardware (e.g. HP), his mission is ambiguous. Some episodes find him managing HR for an external client, sometimes he resolves labor or employee problems for an internal business unit, and sometimes he finds himself in a non-HR function but applying his HR superpowers; Basically anything to put Super Personnel Person into an absurd business setting where absurd people work and absurd problems are only fixable through absurd solutions.
My inspiration for this comes from The Flinstones and The Jetsons. I watched these shows a lot before I was in 2nd grade and was subsequently disappointed to find that no cartoons since have taken on the workplace so often or in such a loony way. I even like some of the later junk, like that Flintstones movie where Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm are preparing for their baby ("Hollyrock-a-Bye Baby"). That's the one where Bamm-Bamm is under pressure to give up being a screenwriter and to instead go back to his old job in construction. Meanwhile, Pebbles must prevent the office sycophant from stealing her position (as the VP of an advertising agency) while she is on maternity leave. Seriously, that's the plot.
Although The Simpsons and King of the Hill take on workplace humor (sort of), I find them both to be deficient as workplace cartoons. The obvious contemporary standard-bearer of workplace humor is Dilbert. However, Dilbert is often deeply and deliberately unfunny; I don't like that.
The Mecha thing is because I like fighting robots. Although not just used for fighting in Super Personnel Person's universe, that's their plurality use. I admit that I have a certain amount of "disarmament agenda" here. In the story universe, a triumph of free-market capitalism has enabled very affordable personal robotics, but mainly because of mass production. As a consequence, the Mecha industry requires there to also be a big the consumer demand for robots. This drives a lot of corporate and cultural ideology. This "robot consumer" mentality is coupled with a culturally conservative civil-rights perception of Mecha as a hybrid of personal property and firearms (i.e. an important and inalienable individual freedom). As such, the proliferation of armed Mecha is an unstoppable social force that has resulted in a diffusion of geopolitical influence that has severely disrupted and eroded the ability of the traditional "superpower" nations to project force or impact economic markets. Rich individuals become recognized as de facto nation states based on a combination of the their Mecha-created wealth, the sheer military strength of their Mecha armies, and their ability to produce more Mecha. The protect their supply chains and production capabilities, there are ongoing private wars between the Mecha industry players. Like all wars, this causes much collateral damage and general misery.
I haven't tried to draw this comic. After the disappointing failure of "The Inside Joke" I would rather write it.
And of course, I can't think of any series or episode main-line plots, which is why I've only done characters, subplots, settings, and general premise.
