How To Be A Supervillain

Look I’m not going to lie to you, those meetings are killers.  I can’t think of anything more boring, you have Dr Doom with his whole blah blah and Lex with the ohhh my nemesis is so much more important than yours attitude.  The meetings can go on for a long time, and if you don’t have much to add it can be easy to nod off.

Don’t.

Don’t ever turn your back on these people they are all very nasty and you will wake up with post it notes stuck to your face and an empty wallet.

• Posture - don’t slouch, make sure you sit up straight or soon Venom will be drawing weird eyebrows on you.
• Drink a lot of water - well not so much water that you want to go to the little baddies room constantly (but it is a good chance to get the circulation going).
• Pain - hurties can be your friend in this situation.  Not Wolverine after having giant ice cubes thrown at him levels of pain, little things like pinching yourself.
• Freeze someone - nothing wakes you up quicker than freezing Captain Cold’s boots to the ground, hilarious, he’s an idiot anyway and could use being brought down a couple of notches.  Thinks he’s so clever and started the whole cold thing.  Pfft.

If we all wanted to partake in fisticuffs with costumed do-gooders then the subtle art form that is super villainy would die a very quick death.  You don’t see Dr Doom or the Scarecrow engaging in plain fist fights as their first line of defence (or offence depending on the situation).

No there is a toolbox that is available to the super villain long before you roll up your sleeves and start hitting anyone.

One of the tools in this toolbox of evil is that of the giant prop.

Oh the giant prop!  The good memories I have of the giant prop.  Once I dropped an entire giant ice cube tray worth of ice cubes on Wolverine.  Best at what he does?  Had a cold for three minutes… it’s actually more impressive than it sounds when you take into account his mutant healing factor, but he did seem pretty irritated during those three minutes.  Of course that’s when the fisticuffs commenced and I don’t like to dwell on that…

Where was I?

Oh that’s right giant ice cubes.  But that’s not the giant prop I actually wanted to talk about today, no today I want to discuss why you want to get yourself a giant horseshoe magnet.  I mean these things are excellent, you can tie them up under your evil helicopter or load it up in the back of the evil pick-up and drive around.

Particularly effective against armoured heroes like Iron Man or Steel.  But honestly the thing is versatile enough to render Captain America’s shield useless or get Batman’s stupid pointy batarangs out of the picture.

Now word of warning though, don’t let the henchmen store the giant magnet near the computer (that’s four years of Gilmore Girls downloaded now gone!) or near the large screen tv (embarressing when you ring the UN on your big screen video phone and your skin is all purple).

It does happen, occasionally you will attract the wrong kind of henchman into your gang.  They fire before ordered, they destroy cash when stealing it and they can’t make a decent cup of tea.

What do you do if you are stuck with a henchman zero?

Well it depends on your organisation’s structure, if you are well financed and have a payroll then you can let HR deal with it and give him a don’t-come-Monday slip.  If you’re like the rest of us you may have to be a little subtler:

• Say something offensive - if the henchman happens to be of a certain religion or race then consider saying something rude, maybe he’ll up and leave thinking that your organisation is a bit racist.  If all of your gang happens to be of the same persuasion then you may wish to reconsider, it can be lonely in evil games room on your own.
• Do something inappropriate - I’m not talking about something that will get you hauled in front of the equal opportunity league of fear, try eating with you mouth open, talk loudly on your mobile during outings to the movies or slap them with your dirty socks.
• Move lairs - only if you were thinking of doing so in the first place, put in an anonymous call to the Fantastic Four and then do the bolt without telling the idiot henchman who broke your iPod.
• Pretend you’re allergic to them - extreme and hard to pull off, I’ll admit that I’ve done this myself, it didn’t really work but I imagine it could.

You’re standing amongst the ruins of the First National bank with millions of dollars at your feet, the police tremble, the SWAT hide and Captain Bloody Marvellous has arrived on the scene.  Mountains shake with your raw evil power (depending upon your power obviously) and Captain Bloody Marvellous demands to know who you are!

You can’t very well answer ‘George’.  It won’t do at all.  Captain Bloody Marvellous will laugh, he will laugh and point and you will lose all respect.

You lose respect, you lose the battle.

The exception was Baron Nuclear Pants who had a tea towel cape and a World of Warcraft t-shirt as his ‘uniform’, stupid name, stupid outfit, nuclear powers which flattened a city block, of course he did die from radiation sickness.  I don’t know if ironic is the word I use there but I’m surprised Alanis didn’t mention it, hard to fit into the song I suppose…

So how do you pick a name when first embarking on a life of super crime?

There are some obvious things that you can look for, I for example am the Ice Master because of my affinity with all things cold, the ice, I control it bahahahaha.

So on the other hand another example may be if you could control fire you could call yourself the Fire King or something along those lines.  Why, it has to be asked would anyone ever want to control fire in the first place is a mystery to me.  Frankly I find you pyromaniacs all a little off putting.  Maybe if you were made of rock you could call yourself Rock Man, Rocker or even Captain Rock.

I don’t know but you get the idea I hope.

I’m looking at you George.

Remember: When choosing a name, draw from your obvious attributes.

Pfft.

As if you didn’t already know, the greatest criminal mastermind that our generation has seen… retired.

You see being evil has been pretty good to me over the years, big house, nice car, cool phones and I’d be lying to you if I said that I haven’t considered taking my hardly earned loot and disappear to Iceland where I expect it would be quite cool.

But no, even though I’ve had my time in the evil sun I have decided to give back to the community from which I have taken so very much.

Well not all the community obviously, I mean that’s a lot of people, and you know, whilst successful and all I’m not made of stolen money.  There are expenses and ongoing costs to consider.  The warehouse where I keep the cold mobile and the ice bike for example, there’s the rent on that, it’s not cheap, but you can’t skimp on those types of things.  The clothes are all… well they’re not cheap.

Listen, we all got bills.

So I’m am going to give back to a much smaller segment of society, the section that I feel I know best; the super villain.

I want to share what I know and have learnt through a misspent youth, a beacon if you will, for all aspiring super villain masterminds and to a lessor degree henchmen or of course henchladies.

Do you want a career as an evil super villain and/or mastermind?

If you have:

• Personal initiative to be evil
• Professional ambition to take over the world
• Innovative spirit in ways to thwart your enemies
• Capacity to adapt when they thwart you
• An aspiration to engage in continuous professional development

And if you want to run or be in an Organisation that:

• Leads the evil organisation industry
• Understands what it’s like to be on the run
• That understands the value of henchmen or henchladies
• Is customer focused
• Is responsible in its management, always in harmony with its environmental concerns (just because we’re evil doesn’t mean we don’t recycle).
• Helps employees to achieve a work/life balance

Then maybe a life of evil super crime is for you.  I hope that you’ll bookmark this site or add it to your evil rss feed as I share my experience with you.

Tell your friends… unless of course that they are super heroes and then really what are you doing here in the first place!?