* It’s a good idea to keep some cash on hand at all times, because there’s going to be lots of stuff you do that you don’t want your lady and/or fella to find out, either, and pretty much everyone you know is going to try to use it against you.
Chapter 10
Limitations*
This will happen often. Invest in nose splints.
* Chapter 10 is sponsored by CONSOLIDATED RESURRECTORS, “Guaranteed to bring you back with all your limbs intact or your giant laser-hook is free!”
So, you’re now excited beyond all belief to jump right into the bustling world of supervillainy. You’ve got plans for a headquarters all drawn up. You’ve come up with a logo for yourself and a catchphrase and everything. You’re ready to go. I know that because the Psychomonitor is blinking and flashing and even smoking a little right now. But don’t get it twisted, blinking, flashing, smoking readers: There’s some stuff in this game you ain’t gonna like.
Look, I’m not going to sugarcoat this for you. When you go into villainy, you will get punched in the face. Like, every day. Sometimes, you’ll just be walking to the corner store for some Moon Pies and Fanta, and then BAM! All of a sudden your jaw is vertical.
Now, upon that revelation, I see that the Psychomonitor has calmed down considerably. I can also see that many of you are more or less infuriated that I waited until the last chapter of the book to make this clear. “I had to muddle through nine chapters’ worth of your blabbering about superpowers and costume types and death rays, and now you tell me this?” is the specific question many of you are thinking.
Allow me to remind you at this point, if you didn’t notice or have somehow forgotten, that I am a professional supervillain. If I didn’t do something at least a little bit evil in the process of me writing and you reading this book, I wouldn’t be doing my job. Learn from my example, folks. Learn from me.
And unfortunately for you, I’m not done yet doing my evil deed of informing you of some of the downsides of professional supervillainy. While punching is almost certainly the liability you’re going to have to deal with most often, and probably the most physically painful of the bunch, there are lots of other things you’re going to want to be aware of, too. Here’s some of the biggest:
Incarceration
I’m sad to say that one thing that tends to happen after a face-punching incident is that you will often be taken to local, federal, or worldwide authorities and put into some kind of jail. If you’re lucky, say, your costume is ridiculous enough or you laugh at inappropriate times or you keep talking to an invisible, floating man who keeps playing tricks on you and everyone around you, you may instead get trundled off to a home for the criminally insane or, in the best-case scenario, get no punishment other than to be ordered into some kind of rehab-style treatment program (thanks, Democrats).
Luckily, it’s pretty easy to break out of just about any of these various prisons, even the ones where they cryogenically freeze you and shoot you into space. I mean, come on, superheroes need us as much as we need them, if not more, and their fans don’t want new, badly-thought-out characters filling up their comic pages. They want their straight-up nemeses in there, getting punched in the face for their enjoyment. So the heroes’ associations make sure the guards look the other way, we break out, and the cycle continues.
Dealing with henchmen
I talked about this quite a bit in Chapter 7, if you’ll recall, but to reiterate: They smell bad; they’re very stupid; they’re probably going to screw things up; they eat all your food; and they smell really, really bad.
Public hatred
The average shlub doesn’t get that balance is necessary for the universe, and that for every good, there must also be an evil. The regular Joe out there in the world just isn’t very Zen, you know? They’re not going to understand you. Especially considering all the anti-villain bile that’s out there in the popular media. Comic books, movies, TV shows, every book except for this one, and about everything else out there in the zeitgeist is against us. Be aware, then, that you’ll never be popular, and, odds are, you’re going to get spit on when all you’re trying to do is go out to the Redbox to rent Seven, every villain’s favorite feel-good (bad) film.
SUPERVILLAIN HISTORY FACT
The entire nation of Belgium is, in fact, a supervillain. We don’t mean its people when we say that. We mean the actual land itself is a supervillain. That’s because, in 1985, the superhero then known as Captain Vacuum spread the Dirt Dervish all over the country after sucking him up into his super-powerful giant vacuum cleaner. Now, Dirt Dervish has seeped into the land of all of Belgium and resides there, as the country itself. That’s why Belgium occasionally shoves France, or creates really bad smells that seep into the Netherlands.
Rivalries with other villains
These can actually be a lot of fun sometimes, but they can also sometimes lead to sabotaged headquarters, dead henchmen, and stolen significant others. We supervillains are a territorial bunch, and if we feel like we’re threatened, or we just kind of feel like threatening you, watch out. No, really, literally watch out . . . because we’re coming after you with our car; or maybe one of our Terrordactyls.
General bad luck
Get ready to have your equipment fail, for accidents in which a gun goes off during a struggle to never go your way, for your minions to betray you, for security cameras to always pick you up and for serendipity to otherwise never smile upon you. Or let’s just say, for example, that you’re a reptilian bad guy who lives in a castle for some reason and has a thing for kidnapping princesses. Your ethnic stereotype plumber nemesis will always, always find the conveniently placed axe behind you, which he will then use to chop down the badly engineered bridge on which you always stand. Why? Because writers or God or whoever’s in charge of plotting out the goings-on of the world simply have some kind of axe to grind against those in the business of evil. They’re totally biased and it’s totally unfair. But we have to be up to the challenge. We’ll show them one of these days that the bad in the world deserves a fair shake.
Frequent deaths and rebirths
The good news is: If you’re popular enough, you can pretty much never die. You can be in all kinds of situations in which it totally looks like you should be dead, like, maybe you go down with an exploding blimp or you eat a bomb and it blows up inside you or your entire body gets enveloped by spider-snakes (that’s a snake with eight legs). But you’ll come back a few months later, no worse for wear, just like you’ll always get out of prison.
The trouble here is that, well, you do actually kind of have to die. Yeah, you may get your thought patterns placed inside a robot body. Or maybe you can transfer your brain to a clone of your arch-nemesis (always a nice touch). Or, if you’re really good (bad), you’ll up and get better for no good reason. But that blimp’s gonna blow up. And that bomb’s going to tear up your insides. And those spider-snakes are going to ensnare you in their webs, toy with you for several days, and then ingest you in one big bite. It’s gonna happen. And that shit’s gonna hurt.
PROFILES IN LAME SUPERVILLAINY
Kite-Man
History: Charles Brown was a two-bit hood who devised a way to escape from the sites of his many petty thefts: by flying away on a kite strapped to his back. It should be noted that he thought this idea to be better than possibly flying a small plane or developing some rocket boots or figuring out a way to move really fast underground. Nope. A kite was his first choice.
M.O.: In addition to flying away on a kite, a terrific way to attract the attention of Batman, Superman and Hawkman, by the way, Kite-Man really stuck to the gimmick by attacking his enemies with small kites. Imagine the horror of having a barrage of kites hurled at you. “The sticks . . . if they hit you just right . . . are kind of pokey! Aaaaaaaaaggh!”
If you feel like you can handle all these setbacks—and we implore you not to forget the whole punching-in-the-face aspect of all this—then you, dear reader, are all set to enter
the villainous arts.
If these issues seem like too much for you to deal with, well, it might be time to look into other lines of work. Maybe being a circus clown? You get to wear the same type of ridiculous (um . . . we mean, awesome) costume as we villains do and you still get the opportunity to be creepy as hell. Or why not start a private military company, like Blackwater? You’ll get to blow plenty of shit up that way and, bonus, you’ll never be held accountable.
Or you could finally write that novel you’ve wanted to get cracking on for so long. Here’s a plot-starter for you: The president of the new one-world government holds Earth’s last rainforest hostage, and only one man, an ex-black-ops specialist who now lives in a secluded cabin in northern Greenland, can recover the cure for cancer, which, incidentally, is in the rainforest.
That’s free, readers.
Training Exercise 5: Bringing On, Working Through, or Going Around the Pain
For this exercise, you’re going to need to do something big and public. Like, let’s say, threaten to shoot a rocket at the mayor’s motorcade. That should work. So, threaten to fire a rocket at the mayor’s motorcade, and as you make public your threat, probably best done via a TV station you’ve overtaken, make sure it’s pretty clear where you’re broadcasting from and that the local superhero(es) have lots of clues to figure out where you are (they need all the help they can get). Then, just sit back and wait for them to arrive. Read a magazine. Twiddle your thumbs. Do whatever you need to kill time before the superhero or superhero team gets there.
When they finally do get to your broadcast location and bellow out some silly battle cry, you . . .
A) . . . respond with your own battle cry and jump right into the fray, loaded for bear . . . with your fists!
B) . . . pull out your particle cannon and start blasting away.
C) . . . send waves of henchmen after them. Once they are laid out, send hundreds more.
D) . . . immediately use your arm-mounted teleportation device to quickly escape to a Crispy Cream.
E) . . . try to negotiate a truce with the heroes.
F) . . . drop to your knees and whimper. When they turn their backs in disgust, hit them with a folding chair.
G) . . . throw your hands in the air and go with them willingly before anyone gets hurt.
H) . . . drop onto the ground, assume the fetal position and cry until they feel sorry for you and leave.
If you chose option . . .
A) Your gung-ho attitude is admirable, but you may want to look this hyphenate up: “self-preservation.” Also, you’re probably very obnoxious at parties.
B) You’re doing a good job of keeping your distance from the fight, but you’re also risking irreparable damage to all your expensive and cool stuff, which, by the way, you should have with you at all times.
C) A very worthwhile option. It keeps you out of the brouhaha, takes the fight to the heroes and is really the best of all possible uses for henchmen. The only problem with this option is that you will eventually run out of henchmen, and will have to sneak out of a back door at some point.
D) It’s fine to be a coward, but you’d be better served if you at least gave the slightest appearance of bravery, even if that means taking at least one punch before teleporting out of town. Also, you may want to watch the diet, chunky. Try teleporting to Whole Foods or something.
E) Heroes never keep truces. And you’d probably never even manage to get a word out, anyway. If heroes have their heart set on punching, they’re gonna do some punching.
F) The old Ric Flair maneuver. Sure, it makes you look like a sniveling, heartless coward, but you get to hit some people with a folding chair, so it basically evens out.
G) Lame. At least try to give ‘em a little kick in the shins or something, guys.
H) Shameful, certainly. But you get to live to fight another day, and it sets some really low expectations for your next scheme. Prove them wrong, supervillain! Prove them wrong!
Conclusion
And so ends The Supervillain Handbook.
Do you feel prepared for the fast-paced world of villainy? Have you been thinking very hard about it? Think harder, readers. Think about your full lives. Re-think every idea and conception that has ever crept into your shallow brains.
And now, dear readers, we wish to thank you. Because we have now stolen all of your thoughts.
The Psychomonitor is no mere measurement device, gullible book-buyer (or borrower, or thief). It is a thought collector. And now that those thoughts are ours, we plan to use them against all of you.
Yes, that’s right, fools! A worldwide blackmail scheme designed to bring you all to your knees! We know about that time you accidentally crapped the bed and that time you intentionally crapped the bed!
Prepare for the new-world revolution, peons! You will now bow to us and only us! Give up your lazy, unoriginal dreams of supervillainy! Did you dare to think we would allow you to enter the profession we have striven for so long to control without opposition?
Serve solely as our minions, answering to our every beck and call, bowing to our every whim, jumping before we even have to say it. You have no choice but to obey.
Your thoughts are now ours.*
* This time, I really got you (and your thoughts), didn’t I?
The ISS Timeline
1907
The Western Association of Ruffians is founded by Heinrich Misanthroach, William Howard Taft and others whose names are lost to history (the Association’s record keepers were a vindictive bunch). Its founders succeed in replacing Theodore Roosevelt with a robotic version of himself.
1912
Unfortunately, robot Roosevelt is cursed with faulty memory circuits. After a lengthy battle with its original founders, he briefly takes over the Association and re-names it “The Bull Moose Party.”
1916-1918
Association members fight on both sides of the Great War, not because of any ideological ties to the parties involved, but with the express intention of prolonging the war until the creation of the Ultimate Mustard Gas.
1921
Disappointed with the mustard gases created during World War I, the Association develops a gas that combines all condiments into a cornucopia of deadly death. They are disappointed to find that the mayonnaise matrix is incorrectly calibrated, and it only kills about halfway.
1925
Mr. Wonderful and a group of other heroes gather to form the League of Right Rightness. At their first induction ceremony, the League battles the Association in a month-long fight in the middle of Vatican City. The fight doesn’t end until the Illuminati show up and yell that they’re trying to get some sleep.
1928
A short “supervillain craze” hits Europe. At the Amsterdam Summer Olympics, athletes compete in Laser-Ray Shooting at live human targets in the first and last villain-based Olympic event.
1929
The Association stages a stock-market “crash” in October in a plan to get the business-minded League to jump out of tall buildings. They all did, but then they flew away. It wasn’t the smartest plan. The faked crash has some minor economic implications over the following decade.
1932
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, cousin of the Theodore Roosevelt robot, is elected president of the United States. FDR, a supervillain by trade, often has to hide from the public that his robot cousin had used his Polio Ray on him when he was a child.
1933
FDR creates the first “New Deal,” an economic plan based on the ruse of the 1929 stock market crash. FDR’s intent was to funnel all of the world’s remaining money into the government, then steal it. But the plan backfired and the economy began a decade-long recovery.
1939
Adolf Hitler becomes the largest employer of supervillains in history after supervillains FDR and Mussolini lobby him to invade Poland, just to see what happens.
1945
The end of World War II leads to long negotiations regarding how the w
orld should be divided up amongst the Association, the League and the normals. In the midst of the fist fighting, the Association breaks up into two factions: The Western Association of Ruffians and the World-wide Conglomeration of Super-Criminals, who don’t matter and we won’t ever mention again.
1952
Dwight D. Eisenhower, the first superhero American president, is elected to office. The Association enters a period of decline in which members’ largest accomplishments are the occasional malt shop robbery.
1961
Following a very slow decade, two enterprising young supervillains (one of whom is both a doctor and a king, ahem) seize control of the Association and rename it The International Society of Supervillains. A new era of villainy begins.
1963
After months and months of planning, the ISS carries out its first major plan: To use its Freak-Out Ray to turn most of the United States’ upstanding teens and kids into sweaty, dirty hippies. The plan is a huge success, though its effects aren’t truly seen until years later.
1966
The ISS’ very own Vincent Price guest stars as the villain Egghead on the Batman television series. True to form, Price turns several crew members into wolf men.
1968
Supervillain puppet Richard Nixon is elected president of the United States.
The Supervillain Handbook Page 11