Here They Come to Save the Day!

Another in the series of undeveloped ideas, concepts, and works-in-progress that may or may not ever see further development.

What the world really needs right now is another group of superheroes here to save the day. Sure, we’ve already got more than a few of those around — but you gotta admit we need all the help we can get to save the day, given the days we’ve been having these days.

And while your typical superhero team of may be constantly busy saving the World, let’s consider the need for some part-time superheroes. Kinda like a set of relief pitchers standing by. And you gotta figure their superpowers might be a bit, well, unusual, or they’d be in the Big Leagues. They pretty much focus on minor major emergencies and leave saving the Earth — or the Cosmos! — to the Avengers or the X-Men or the Justice League or whoever’s on call this crisis.

Enter the people of PLUSH, the Part-time League of Unusual Super-Heroes.

These folks are never going to save the world, much less the Universe. But somebody ought to be out there saving the small towns and cities of the world, maybe even the neighborhoods. We all  face what look like overwhelming problems and every day has the potential for a minor catastrophe or two. You know we could all use a little bit of extra help now and then. So, let’s meet the superheroes we really want for the everyday rescues we all could use:

• Inert Bert — an apparently homeless fellow with the ability to stay so immobile he blends into the background, rendering him invisible. This allows him to eavesdrop on nefarious people plotting evil.
• Dolly — whose huge, beseeching eyes can render you immobile and completely open to suggestion, unable to refuse her requests, directions or commands.
• Goggles — twin teen dweebs, one boy, one girl. They seem impenetrably dull, but actually their thicker-than-Coke-bottle spectacle lenses hide a sophisticated networking system far beyond any networked AR we can imagine now. They also share a telepathic link, so they can think together like dual parallel processors to quickly unravel mysteries.
• The Librarian — has the power of super-silence. With a stern stare and a harsh shushing, she can render anyone silent and unable to speak or move.
• The Docent — the Librarian’s brother, the Docent has the ability to over-explain simple ideas and situations such that he can either convince people of something wildly untrue or baffle them beyond their ability to react, or simply to drone on until they doze off mid-explanation.
• Wheelz — an augmented human hybrid who looks disabled due to his wheelchair, but the chair is actually a super-sophisticated, rocket-powered, brain-controlled, all-purpose power center capable of coordinating the team’s efforts to combat evil.

As you can see from the brief descriptions, these remain rudimentary character sketches. Further development would require some great graphics and some stories to tell, including the team battling an arch-enemy or two. So far, all I’ve got for you are the bare bones of a quirky set of characters as a concept for a comic book series.

Anybody out there want to help make it “real”?