The Supervillain Handbook
Page 1
Good (Bad) Praise for The Supervillain Handbook
“Contained within the pages of The Supervillain Handbook is an easy-to-follow blueprint for villainy and world domination. If it should fall into the wrong hands, it could threaten the very foundations of our society. Those of us who value decency and the rule of law must rush out and purchase every copy we find! Every copy we buy is a copy that won’t end up in the clutches of some aspiring supervillain.”
—Chris Roberson, former writer of Superman
“At long last, everything YOU or your loved ones need to give themselves over wholeheartedly to the meaningful and lasting pursuit of villainy has been recorded in these pages. Had I this book in high school, you’d be wearing a grey uniform right now and your hair would be shaved into a, like, reverse-monk sort of thing I had figured out, as, if I had this book in high school, you would all be my minions and the world would be my playground. My loss is YOUR gain. Hail King Oblivion!”
—Matt Fraction, writer of Iron Man and Thor
“A darkly clever book invaluable to the supervillain community. And I’m not just saying that because the author’s hyperphotonic deathray is pointed at my loved ones.”
—Mark Waid, writer of Daredevil, and formerly The Fantastic Four, The Flash, and Captain America
“This book is going to elevate otherwise common criminals like CEOs and hedge fund managers into full-on world menaces—oh wait, they already are. At least now they’ll know how to rock a cape and boots though, so well done! Carry on.”
—Jeff Parker, author of the supervillain team book, Thunderbolts
Copyright © 2012 by Matt D. Wilson
Illustrations copyright © 2012 by Adam Wallenta
This book is intended for entertainment purposes only. In fact, its credited author is a totally made-up person (seriously!). Not even close to being real. Nothing contained herein should be construed as an indication of advocacy on the part of its ghostwriter and publisher for breaking laws, violence against anyone, or messing with anyone’s water supply. Any mentions of real people or organizations are for purposes of satire only, so laugh with us, everybody!
All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York,
NY 10018.
Skyhorse Publishing books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contactthe Special Sales Department, Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or info@skyhorsepublishing.com.
Skyhorse® and Skyhorse Publishing® are registered trademarks of Skyhorse
Publishing, Inc. ®, a Delaware corporation.
www.skyhorsepublishing.com
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The supervillain handbook : the ultimate how-to guide to destruction and mayhem / King Oblivion, Ph.D., founder, the International Society of Supervillains (as told to Matt D. Wilson).
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-61608-711-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Criminals—Humor. 2. Villains in literature. 3. Superheroes—Humor.
4. Comic books, strips, etc. I. Wilson, Matt D.
PN6231.C73S87 2012
818’.607—dc23
2011045687
Printed in China
For Vic von Doom, my hero (villain)
Pathetic fools! You dare to think that the tome you now hold is anything but the key to your impending doom? Do you not understand the severity and brilliance of the trap you have set for yourself by purchasing and reading a volume by the very villains who hunger for your demise? Have you no idea that the money you have so frivolously spent on these pages will inevitably fund worldwide chaos?
You shall soon pay for your insolence! You shall soon learn from your mistakes! But not before this conveniently packaged, essential villain’s how-to guide shall bring about your complete destruction!
MWA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA!
* * *
Got you, didn’t I?
I’m King Oblivion, Ph.D., founder and overlord of the International Society of Supervillains (ISS). You’ve made the right (wrong) choice in picking up The Supervillain Handbook, the best and only resource for cads, scoundrels, ne’er-do-wells, and heels looking to go professional. The chilling mini-monologue I just used to kick off this guide is only a taste of what you might soon be able to achieve if you decide to enter the competitive, yet, rewarding world of supervillainy.
People everywhere are looking for viable alternatives to the average, ho-hum job market and its constant cycle of hirings and firings, pay cuts, and pension reforms. supervillainy offers just that. Adventure! Maniacal laughter! Dynamic outfits! Death rays! Underwater lairs! A sensible retirement plan! Punching! All these things are within your grasp.
But it isn’t all just fun and torture. There’s a lot of preparation involved, and creating mass hysteria and fear for a living isn’t for everyone. Still, being a career scoundrel can be the most satisfying work in the world, if you’re up to it.
If this sounds like what you’re looking for in a career, then read on, recruit, and be prepared to enter the world of wrong, wrathful wickedness!
CONTENTS
Prologue: All You Need to Know About the International Society of Supervillains
Chapter One: Motivation
Chapter Two: Qualifications
Chapter Three: Goals
Chapter Four: Persona
Chapter Five: Rhetoric
Chapter Six: Abilities/Equipment
Chapter Seven: Staffing
Chapter Eight: Facilities
Chapter Nine: Planning
Chapter Ten: Limitations
Conclusion
The ISS Timeline
Glossary
Prologue
All You Need to Know About the International Society of Supervillains
When you picked up this book for the first time and felt its overwhelming power over you, its undeniable magnetic pull daring you to thumb through its pages and glance through its passages, you likely noticed the many mentions of the International Society of Supervillains in the text and wondered, “What the hell is that all about? And why’s the abbreviation the same as the International Space Station’s?” That’s good (bad), because our goal all along has been to operate just under the surface of public notice, doing evil without wide public knowledge (the one obvious exception being when we stupidly bribed all those space agency officials for the naming rights to the International Space Station).
I know you had these questions, because I pulled out my patented Psychomonitor thought-reading device to get a sense of the questions people buying and/or reading this book have. To answer the question that just popped into your head: the ISS attorney, The Litigatron, says reading this sentence equals compliance with Psychomonitor use, and it’s not like I’d care if it were legal anyway, so there.
For a timeline of our exploits, I suggest you read through the entirety of this book to get to the history of the ISS, near the back. (No skipping ahead. You should be aware that we have included special traps to spring on readers who skip ahead and try to get the advance supervillainy tips before reading about the basic stuff. Don’t be gettin’ presumptuous all in here, for serious.)
If you absolutely must know some juicy information about the worldwide evil organization I head because you’re some kind of paranoid maniac who feels like you hav
e to see some sort of proof of expertise before you read an entire guidebook written by someone claiming to be an expert—which makes you a rare reader in the self-help genre, and we’ve got the research to back that up—then, fine; I’ll give you some of the highlights, Mr. I-Won’t-Blindly-Believe-Anything-Anyone-Tells-Me-So-I’m-Gonna-Make-It-Hard-For-Everyone. But you should realize that you’re delaying gratification for all the other readers who just want to find out how to tie teenage do-gooders to giant piano strings.
Statistics
• The ISS has been creating worldwide chaos for over fifty years. Things got a little shaky in the 1990s, when we all mysteriously lost our feet in a freak accident, but they’ve picked back up in the last decade or so.
• Our membership has grown 100-fold since our founding in the early 1960s. Much like the members of the Screen Actors Guild, most card-carrying villains work as waiters while awaiting their big break. (And we know they’ll get there soon! Keep reaching for the moonbases, folks!) This is the cause of the recent poison-gas-and-also-urine-in-food trend in most fine dining establishments.
• At least thirty percent of the people who have turned to villainy and/or henchmandom in the past fifty years have done so voluntarily.
• Supervillainy is a $900,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,0 00,000,000,000,000,000 per year business. Most of that money comes directly to the CEO (me). Many of you are thinking, “That income disparity is terrible!” To which I reply, “Supervillains.”
• There are exactly zero legitimate superheroes still in existence. Comic books and movies would have you believe that superheroes are still a big deal, but they are terrible propaganda and present a patently false portrayal of reality. They are the last remaining remnant of the League of Right Rightness, which we vanquished in 1986 (see timeline). A few independent superheroes remain, and do continue to pester/beat up/arrest supervillains worldwide, but their strength and numbers are greatly exaggerated by the culture at large.
• One guy’s got all the answers (me again).
Testimonials
To show you just how important the work we do is, I rounded up some recent ISS customers (victims) to ask about their experiences with our evil organization. Here’s what they had to say:
“He turned my entire family into statues!” – Hans Francis, Pebble Beach, talking about his day with Evil Rodin
“I mith the tathte of brueberrith.” – Alith Weith, Rochethter, after being visited by The Tongue Collector
“I wish it had been The Tongue Collector.” – Pete Johnson, Lower Columbia, following his encounter with The Junk Shrinker
“Ah-ha. Ahahahaha! AHAHAHAHAHAHA!” – No name given, Gotham City, found mysteriously on a fishing boat.
“I’ll tell you this much: When they label something as a death ray, they really mean the death part.” – Ron T. Foot, Miami, upon his resurrection at the last universe reboot
“I wish they’d stop rebooting the universe just because they decided to go to a casino and they weren’t getting sevens.” – Maxine Fukimoto, Boston, historian
“Year crazy one been has this.” – Official statement from the nation of Papua New Guinea, on the last day of the year in which time there progressed backwards
“Thou must help me! I ain’t had a good supper in weeks! Deus non succurro mihi iam. Send mad help, yoooooooo!” – Alex Boccaccio, Florence, lost in time
“She made a monkey out of me.” – Popo, formerly Henrietta McDougal, turned into a talking Bonobo chimpanzee by a stray raygun blast when Grrlrilla attempted to turn every band at the Warped Tour into her primate lovers
“Owwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.” – Luis Trevizo, Chattanooga, while being shot with PrankTank’s Purple Nurple Cannon
The Bottom Line
Hopefully, these figures and testimonials have convinced you that the International Society of Supervillians is the top villainy organization in the world. For the one reader out there who the Psychomonitor is telling me is still doubtful about our legitimacy, enjoy this gift from PrankTank’s new Purple Nurple Satellite.
Chapter 1
Motivation*
Meet Max Badguy. He’s decided to live up to his full potential and become a supervillain! (His parents, Herb and Candice Badguy, are in real estate.)
* Chapter 1 is sponsored by CRISPY CREAM, “Your teleportation destination since 1938.”
Let’s make one thing clear right out of the gate:
Revenge isn’t enough.
You quite possibly bought this book (or, if you really wanted to get a head start on things, you stole it, and then burned down the bookstore) because you were mad at somebody and wanted to exact some sweet, cold retribution on him or her. Now that’s perfectly fine, as anger is a great place to start. But you can hate your boss at Orange Julius all you want, have all the daddy issues in the world, or really want to kill your husband because his breath stinks, and not be anywhere near supervillain material. It might make you a perfect case for the American psycho-pharmaceutical industry (which we supervillains run, naturally), not cathartic therapy sessions in which you threaten children while wearing a domino mask and purple and green jump-suit while flying around on some mysteriously propelled levitation device.
Hell, somebody may have just up and shot your parents one night while you looked on. That would probably drive someone to some crazy lengths. But honestly, those circumstances would probably make you way more likely to be headed for herodom, and specifically Batmandom, than on the verge of planning out a convoluted plot to poison the city’s water supply.
Or let’s say you’re one of those people who, for no real reason other than your violent urges, bursts into a 7-Eleven, shooting wildly, kidnaps a baby, or robs a card game.
Professional tip: Never rob a supervillain card game. We will kill you, appropriately, with the cards themselves, and then continue playing on your corpse, even though the cards will be all bloody and gross, just to prove a point.
Are you a criminal if you do those things? Oh, you bet you are. Perhaps you’re even a terrorist.
Further Pro-tip: Don’t confuse terrorists and supervillains. That’s slander, pal.
Are you a supervillain? Not even a little bit. You’re a standard-issue thug. Deal with it.
SUPERVILLAIN HISTORY FACT:
Many Americans know George Washington as the father of our country, but few are aware that the first U.S. president was actually an early version of what would, in the 20th century, be considered, a supervillain. General Washington’s membership in the Freemasons and his wooden teeth, which gained him the nickname Splinterchomp, made him widely known as a “nefaryist,” which was a sub-sect of people known for having deformities and being parts of shady, world-conquering organizations. Also, he once viciously murdered a mutated do-gooder who could shape shift into various kinds of fruit trees. That story is often told erroneously.
Beyond simple vengeance and/or psychosis, supervillains need an extra something, an extra drive to do those things that the general populace, or even general criminals, just won’t do. You need to go to extreme lengths.
You know who understood that concept pretty damn well? Shakespeare.
No, seriously, check it out:
Hamlet was a guy whose dad got killed by his uncle. So what did he do? He barreled right back to his home country of Denmark and killed the ever-living shit out of his father’s killer and whomever else he thought might have had anything to do with the murder. That’s some ugly, vengeful stuff right there. But in Shakespeare’s world, Hamlet, a cold-blooded killer, is the hero.
In The Merchant of Venice, the main character, Antonio, goes out of his way to screw up the life of Shylock, for no other reason than that he is Jewish. Not to boil a classic five-act play down to a sentence or anything, but he essentially makes it so that Shylock either has to give up everything he owns or convert to Christianity. He also spits on Shylock early on in the play, just for kicks. That’s some pretty evil stuff, but it falls shy of supervillain
y. Antonio’s basically a dick, or maybe just a plain old villain.
Macbeth, on the other hand, is a different story. He isn’t totally motivated by jealousy, and he isn’t just a dick . . . that dude wants to be king. So what does he do? He murders the current king; then he tries to kill a bunch of other guys in jerkins, too. He does it all for power (and because he’s pretty crazy). He is a supervillain. (As for lady Macbeth, bitch is also crazy. She’s a supervillain, too.)
Now don’t get me wrong, just because you want to rule your country and speak in highfalutin language (that is still mostly thinly veiled sexual innuendo), doesn’t necessarily make you a prime candidate for the supervillain arts, either. It might conceivably make you a budding politician (evil, yes; supervillainous, no). Neither does outright murderous rage, avarice, a violently skewed sense of justice, or for that matter, plain old insanity. Not even the old-fashioned need to simply prove you’re better and smarter than everyone else is a ticket into villainhood.
All those things do help, of course, as sanity is simply just another roadblock to global domination. And without the desire to murder, well, it ain’t villainy without murder (or at least the threat of murder). That goes for greed as well. And, come on, every supervillain eventually wants to prove that he or she is the best in the world at everything. Hell, it’s in our blood. That’s why it’s so difficult to get us in a room together without the cleaning crew having to tidy up henchman guts the next morning (more on them in Chapter 7). If I could be frank for a moment, showing up others is a pretty key reason why supervillains generally pick the track of evil instead of the way of red-and-blue tights, cheesy romance, and thinly veiled homoeroticism known as super-herodom. Those guys work together far too well, and they’re all humble and shit.