• Non-Murderous Chemical Inc.
• Poison-Free Burger Hut
• Smiley Fun Blade Knife Manufacture
• Illicit Drugs Are Bad Ice Cream Delivery Service
• DeAnimated Mortuary, L.L.C.
• It Was Like That When We Got Here Security Concern
• Body-Sized Bags of Love Waste Management Co.
• We Give a Shit About Our Employees Mega-Mart
• Honest Honest Honest Honest Honest Honest Media
• What Kind of Dog and Pony Show Do You Think This Is? Look At Our Books If You Want Proof Accounting
• Altria Group
• Wholesome, and Delicious Candy, You Know, For Kids Worldwide
What shouldn’t you name your company? “Beats by Dre.” Who would want to take a beating from Dr. Dre; especially since that guy got all ripped? That’s just terrible marketing.
Start or Invest in Illegitimate Businesses
If you’re not so worried about whether you earn any money back from your business ventures, go in full force with evil intent:
• Start a company that makes Draculas, or find someone whose company mission statement is to burn up most of the world’s oil and hoard all the rest.
• Give that person or company an insanely large amount of money.
• Provide seed funding to a startup in another dimension where someone is breeding Murder Bugs. Fund experiments that replace peoples’ arms and legs with farm animals.
• See if you can build a giant working mouth in the middle of the Gobi Desert.
• Buy a bunch of Goldman Sachs stock.
• Fund Uwe Boll movies.
The more nefarious the intent, the better (worse).
Found a “Charity”
The badly kept secret about charities is that people donate to them not so much because they want to actually do things for other people, but to keep themselves from feeling guilty for living the charmed life. So give them something to funnel their money into. Start a ‘Caring Society for the Victims of Death Ray Blastings’; open up the coffers and start collecting funds. Then plow those funds back into your ‘ gala events and fundraisers. The more events you have, the more people out there will know that you’re a financial force to be reckoned with. No one will know where the money’s really going, nor will they care. And the real trick is that, as you’re holding more events, you’ll be creating scads of new death ray victims every week for people to feel guilty about. It’s a damn near perfect scheme.
WORST PRACTICE IN ACTION: Ra’s al Ghul Makes It Rain
For a 700-year-old, Ra’s al Ghul certainly knows how to spend his cash. He uses his funds not only for regular eco-terrorism—he gained much of his wealth by killing a king with contaminated fabrics—but for the upkeep of the “Lazarus pits” that keep him basically immortal and to run a criminal organization that is called, with no irony whatsoever, The Demon.
Teaching Moment: It’s hard to think of a cooler way to spend one’s money than creating giant organizations with names like “The Demon,” and maintaining immortality pits. Just saying.
Other “Largesse”
You could actually give money to people who need it, but only if they come to your big event in the city’s central square where monsters come out of the sewers and drag them into them. You ask me, I think that’s a pretty fair trade.
Start a Ponzi and/or Pyramid Scheme
If starting up an organization that’s nominally supposed to do good in the world makes you feel conflicted, that is, if you want to do nothing but unadulterated evil, then go ahead and boldfacedly swindle people. There’s no harm in that, except for the immense harm you’ll be doing to everyone involved.
Throw Extravagant Parties
Again, if charity isn’t a direction in which you want to go, you can at least have some big bashes. Fill a pool with champagne and invite people to swim in it. Have one of those parties where people bring losers and everyone laughs at them. Have an orgy. Whatever you want to do, just make sure that tons of people are invited and everyone knows about how much scrilla (that’s what the kids call money these days) you’re throwing around. Then, when it’s all over, shake everyone down for “donations” to fill your own pockets.*
Fund Important Research
Of course, by “important,” what I really mean is you should dump a bunch of money into paying idiot scientists to figure out a way to finally wipe your moron superhero nemesis off the planet. They’ll probably never do it because, if your genius isn’t enough to pull it off, how could theirs be? But you have to keep trying.
Bribe Elected Officials
It’s always handy to have some corrupt people in power in your pocket to help you slip the noose during trials or just walk out of jail on technicalities or unfair charges. Plus, whenever you turn on those officials and tell them that you’re taking over their city, they’ll be nothing but pawns of yours. And if they’re lucky, they’ll be so hilariously shocked. It’s a hoot to see.
Eat Increasingly Crazy and Expensive Food
Caviar? Pssh. Wagyu beef? Come on. Snark fin soup? Pedestrian. You’ve got to find the really, insanely expensive stuff to dine on. Like, maybe a casserole made with broccoli, cheese, and Mark Twain’s original hand-written notes for Huckleberry Finn. How good would a pizza topped with the Betsy Ross’s original American flag be? What about a milkshake infused with Napoleon’s remains? Maybe you knock down the Parthenon, grind it into dust, and eat that? Sanity be damned, you’re hungry!
Buy a Bunch of Bobble Heads of Me
I know I said earlier you shouldn’t waste your money on bobble heads of yourself, but that’s only because there are so many of me available and those are better. So buy those. Buy them, you stingy dirtbags.
Simply Destroy All Money
If what you want to do is incite anger and raw jealously immediately, consider throwing all your money (which was quite recently everyone else’s money) into a river somewhere.That will definitely do the trick.
Waste All, Want All: Protecting Your Assets
I’m encouraging you to waste your money; but that doesn’t mean it should go unsecured. Those dollars (or pounds, or EvilBucks, or whatever they may be) are yours to waste as you please. They’re not for some rabble-rousers or superheroes or, worse, other supervillains, to sneak up and skulk away with under your very nose. It requires proactive measures to ensure your holdings remain yours until such time as you fritter it away or destroy it. One or all of these measures will keep your money and other liquid assets safe until you use it for the devilish purpose of your choice:
Hire Armed Guards
A little run-of-the-mill, I know, but when you have a literal army of guys who dress similarly to the way you do, why not post them outside the various storehouses where you keep your stuff? What else are they going to do, spend time with their families and sleep?
Keep Your Accounts Offshore
For many rich businesspeople, this means putting your money in secret accounts in small island nations or that national fortress of “we won’t tell if you don’t,” Switzerland. For supervillains, it means piling all your cash, treasure, and other valuables into a submarine and tossing it into the ocean so no one else can get it.
Bury It
If dumping all your money into the ocean seems a bit extreme, take a cue from some of the earliest proto-supervillains: pirates. Dig a big hole in some woods or in a cave and put all your stuff down in there. If you create a map to locate your stuff later, you should probably just come to terms with the fact that some dashing swashbuckler is going to try to steal that map at some point in the future. To keep that from happening, bury your mapa.*
Build a Money Bin
Scrooge McDuck may have nominally been a hero— though he did defeat the Beagle Boys one too many times for my liking—but he was also a renowned penny pincher who kept all his money in coin form, piled high enough so he could swim in it, in a giant building with a dollar sign on it. If that’s not super
villain-style behavior, I don’t know what is.**
Wear It
If you or a close tailor friend of yours (who you’ll have to kill afterward, just FYI) design a suit of money for you to wear, you’ll never have to worry about your cash ever leaving your sight. That is, if you resign yourself to never taking your clothes off. I guess you’ll have to experience some uncomfortable visits to the gym and get very little sleep. You could also invest your bills into precious metals or jewels and have someone make clothing out of that for you. A ruby jumpsuit would be cool. Or you could get a sculptor to mold a solid-platinum facemask for you so you can finally one-up that show-off Destro.
Send it Back in Time
A bunch of wooly mammoths or Cro-Magnon people aren’t going to give two shits about some piles of green paper adorned with the faces of people who won’t be born for millennia.
Though you should be cautious to avoid fault lines and volcanoes.
And places where meteors could land.
And anywhere near an area where animals that might eat leaf-like paper would likely be roaming around. Maybe you should build that money bin back in 300,000 BCE, as well.
* This is a subtle way of saying you should rob them.
* Make sure to mark an X over your buried map, then cover the X with dirt, so that no one finds it.
** I do know what is. I wrote the book on it. Two books on it! My point is: Never doubt me again.
Epilogue
Leaving the Stage
This manual has offered many useful and proven tips for making your career in supervillainy a long and accomplished one, but even the most evil and/or immortal of us have to let go of the reins and step away at some point. Everything comes to an end. For some supervillains, that end may come after centuries of work in the field of organized chaos. For others, it may come sooner than they think.
For you, the end comes right now.
Listen. Why in this universe or any other would I, the leading supervillain the profession, want to go about creating thousands upon thousands of upstart evil doers to usurp me down the line? That would be madness. It would be against my very interests. And though I’m altogether insane, I’m not a masochist. Did you not read what I did to the individual supervillains I pumped for anecdotes throughout this text? How did you think you’d come out of this any differently? Plus, I stole your thoughts at the end of the last book. You’d think you’d learn. You’d think.
All I needed was a window of your attention, so I could creep into your minds and seize your neurons.
In the time it’s taken for you to thumb through these pages, inform yourself, look at some colorful illustrations, have a few laughs (I don’t know why but some people have told me these books were “funny” prior to my shoving them into a furnace), I’ve been using my improved Psychomonitor, which I have rechristened as the Cortex Controller, to not only collect your thoughts throughout, but also to slowly take charge of your motor functions.
You should know this already. I told you I was going to do it 200 or so pages ago. You thought just because I said I was joking, that I really was? You all deserve your fate, then. You should know full well that any joke a supervillain tells is the truth wrapped in a lie wrapped in further lies and truths. You should trust everything I say, as well as not trust it.
It seems you have learned nothing. Perhaps this is the way things should have happened anyway.
With this book, I have taken over your bodies, in addition to your minds. Now you are nothing but putty in my hands to be molded and shaped as I please. Not to say that you weren’t already under my power to a degree already; after all, you spent a modest portion of your money on this guide which you had to at least have an inkling might be a grand trick to take control of your every movement. You had to be at least somewhat aware of it, right? Are you all really that gullible?
No matter.
I believe my first act as your puppet master will be to send you to the nearest bookstore so you can buy a dozen, two dozen, or three dozen more copies of this guide. Then you will come to me, to serve out your time as perhaps a henchman or a footstool or a footstool for one of my footstools.
This will be your new life. Not as a supervillain, but as chattel. As a servant of the greatest supervillain to ever grace existence.
You’re welcome.
Those of you who read from the beginning
know full well that none of this exercise had any
real meaning; I have cut your legs out from under
you. You are powerless. What use do you have
now for knowledge of controlling the media,
something I am now free to do alone?
But some readers—rule-breakers by
nature—have an inclination to flip to the end
and discover the ending before they begin. And,
really, can I blame them? They wish to be
supervillains. I can’t really discourage them
from deviating from the mores of
book-reading culture.
To avoid spoiling the surprise of their utter
defeat, the following pages provide them with a
glossary of supervillain terms that media
professionals also use. They’ll think that information
has some use to them. You’ll know it’s nothing but
a mildly amusing distraction as you continue your
meaningless existence.
Appendix
The Supervillain vs. Media Glossary
You may have been somewhat surprised to discover, through this guide, just how important the news media is for supervillains looking to cement a reputation for evil so prevalent that it becomes a part of people’s day-to-day lives and thoughts. The media isn’t merely important; it’s necessary to any sort of mass messaging: The kind of messaging one must perform to reach the heights of super-evil.
And as much as we supervillains may find it more convenient to simply take over the satellites at the nearest broadcast station, we occasionally find that cooperation with the media of one kind or another is the only real course. Before one versed in the ways of professional calamity interacts with the media community, however, one should make themselves aware of the terminology villainy shares with the journalistic profession. It’s a surprisingly long list of terms, and mistake a request for a media-specific favor for something nefariousness-related could lose you a great deal of precious, precious publicity. Be mindful of these double meanings and get airtime rather than jail time.
anchor
What it means to them: A television or radio personality who presents the news.
What it means to you: What you tie to the victims of the deep-sea Weresharks you’ve been breeding.
angle
What it means to them: The aspect of a story a reporter chooses to highlight.
What it means to you: The term for the positioning of your giant fly-swatter to ensure you hit Moe Squito when he tries to attack your lair.
attribute
What it means to them: To give the proper identification of a speaker.
What it means to you: Something you never do for anyone else when it comes to credit, and do for everyone else when it comes to blame.
banner
What it means to them: The large headline at the top of a page.
What it means to you: That guy who turns into that big green thing you run away from.
beat
What it means to them: A subject a reporter regularly covers.
What it means to you: How you get your henchmen to listen.
blind
What it means to them: Term describing a source which is not named.
What it means to you: What you do to someone who refuses to penitently say your name.
breaking
What it means to them: Happening right now.
What it means to you: What may be happening to your bones right now if a bullying superhero is around.
circulation
What it means to you: The machine you’re developing to cut off in everyone’s hands and feet, creating an epidemic of cold extremities throughout the city so that they mayor will acquiesce to your demands.
clip
What it means to them: A short piece of audio or video.
What it means to you: What you’re going to do to any pedestrian superheroes next time you’re out driving.
column
What it means to them: An opinion article written by a credited author.
What it means to you: What Pliny the Immortal hit you with last month and are still smarting from.
dead air
What it means to them: A portion of a broadcast with no content.
What it means to you: The result of your short-lived war against air.
double truck
What it means to them: A two-page spread of content.
What it means to you: What the Burt Reynolds impersonator crime duo, The Bandits, drive.
edit
What it means to them: To revise, correct, and/or shorten.
What it means to you: Basically just to shorten; usually at the legs.
embargo
The Supervillain Field Manual Page 13