The Supervillain Field Manual

by King Oblivion, Ph. D.

  Second: Scratches

  They are going to happen.

  Third: Do you mind looking kind of effeminate?

  Don’t worry if you do. For a lot of villains, that’s their thing. It can work for you. If you’re already a woman, this shouldn’t be a problem at all, though you should be mindful of how people will perceive you if you have more than one cat on or around you.**

  Fourth: Litter smell

  You will smell like litter.

  Fifth: How big is the cat?

  If you’re reaching up into leopard or even bobcat territory, you may be overreaching.

  Finally: Consider what you’re trying to say.

  It could just be, “I like cats.” But you’re probably going to want to say more. Nothing else immediately comes to mind, though.

  You’ve managed to disgust me so thoroughly that I feel like I shouldn’t even bother to tell you all the different methods you can consider for your Earth-shattering escape plan, but I already set aside all this time to write this stuff out, and I really love to throw my weight around as an authority about these topics; so I guess I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt, you lucky rat bastards.*

  The Easy Ways

  With access to the right equipment—conceivably brought in to the prison via a cake your henchmen baked for you— it’s reasonably trouble-free to remove your shackles and step into the light as a free villain. The hard part, quite clearly, is getting your henchmen to bake anything convincingly, let alone a cake large enough to contain one of the very large and difficult-to-come-by apparatuses listed below. At the very least, tell them very early on in the process to bake the cake first, then insert the machine of your choice after the fact. There’s not much good a baked time machine can do you.

  Use a Time Machine

  You can go back in time to before the prison was even there, move a mile or two in one direction, and then come back to your own time. Easy peasy. Be careful not to go back to saber-toothed tiger times, though. Those things were awful.†

  Use a Reality-Altering Device

  If uncertainty and fear regarding a savage past often creeps into your mind, skip the time travel and simply change the building you’re in from a prison into, say, a Target. Then you can grab some snacks on the way out. But be careful to not to change the building into a lowercase-t target. Like, a nuclear test site. You could also use a reality alterer to simply make it so that the crime you committed never happened. Just make sure your conviction doesn’t also happen.

  Use a Memory Eraser

  Erase everyone’s memory of your crime and trial. Except mine, of course. I’m immune. I got all those thoughts stored up here in case I need them.

  Use an Identity Switcher

  If you’re not all that invested in the face you have now, simply zap yourself with a handy-dandy device to change it, along with your DNA and fingerprints. Then the state won’t have any choice other than to concede that you are not a person who has committed a crime and let you go.*

  Use a Bulldozer

  Not the most subtle approach; and it’s really tough to fit one inside a cake, but is most effective.

  WORST PRACTICE IN ACTION: The Kingpin Springs Himself

  As rumors swirled that attorney Matt Murdock was, in fact, the superhero Daredevil, Wilson Fisk, a.k.a., the Kingpin, seized upon the moment. A prisoner at the time, Fisk offered the FBI special access to what he called the “Murdock Papers,” which was smoking-gun proof that the famous blind lawyer was a superhero. Turns out there were no such papers, but Fisk got them proof of a sort as a result of the investigation. For cooperating, the feds let Fisk walk a free man (until they turned right around and arrested him again for a different crime).

  Teaching Moment: Making shit up works.**

  Higher Difficulty

  Not all supervillains have access to high technology like memory erasers and bulldozers,* so they have to be a little bit more creative in how they go about removing themselves from their prison predicaments. If you are just such a super-villain, consider a plan of somewhat expedient escape such as one of these:

  Warden-Rigging

  With a series of increasingly urgent notes from the warden’s “spouse,” (which was written by you or one of your lackeys forging their handwriting, or maybe the warden’s actual spouse, who you’ve kidnapped), convince the prison boss that they really ought to retire and get out of the whole jail business. Maybe they should consider opening a farm stand by the side of the road to sell dates or some such?* Once the warden inevitably announces their impending retirement, create a robotic version of or disguise a henchman as the next person in line for the job (it should be fairly obvious who’s got their eyes on such a prominent position). Then, when that person is installed in the job, they can “accidentally” leave the door to your cell, block, and the prison itself open the next night, and you walk free.

  The Pardon Switcheroo

  Train one of your assistants/lackeys in the ways of politics (basic instruction: talk a lot about “issues” but really make everything personal) so that they can become the governor’s chief of staff or secretary of butt shape or whatever they have these days. Then, have that assistant/lackey mention your name to the governor once an hour, every hour . . . even when the governor is sleeping. Make your name a word that the governor can’t help but say without even meaning to say it. That way, when it comes time for the state’s chief executive to issue his or her next pardon, you’re sure to be the one to get that pardon, no matter whom the state executive meant to pardon. (Also, you’re likely to get your name unwittingly put on any number of pieces of legislation, so prepare yourself for the Megaton Blast Master Anti-Gang Violence Act.)

  Siege of the Walls

  Rally your hench-troops to bombard the prison walls with whatever ordinance you may have available.* (Though, if you don’t have a bulldozer, who knows what pittance of destruction that might be.) You should be aware that this technique is not designed to bust you out through force. The assault is merely a distraction to keep the guards and prison brass busy while you crawl through a tunnel you’ve been digging under your toilet for the past four months. If all goes right, you’ll pop out next to a Target where you can buy some snacks.

  Vampire Ambush

  Make friends with some vampires before you go to prison. (Go to all the regular vampire hangouts, such as high schools and the woods.) Have them come bite everyone in the prison. Then the authorities will have more important things to worry about than keeping you in.

  The “Legitimate” Way

  If you have a top-notch attorney (and you should, I mean, come on, you’re a supervillain), then their number-one job ought to be to make sure that, even if you’re sentenced to 700 life sentences for sending an entire stadium of people into a black hole, you have at least some chance of parole. Parole is the lifeline of the supervillain who doesn’t have a time machine or vampire friends or henchmen they can teach about government. It’s pretty easy, too. All you have to do to is act as though you’ve reformed! Simply say, “I’ve learned my lesson and I want to go out into the world and do some good” at your hearing, and with the help of some basic hypnotism training or an attorney who can control minds (it really helps if your attorney can control minds), you’ll be back out there sending whatever you please into black holes in no time.

  Life of Riotly: When You’re Incarcerated

  Earlier, I made some facetious comments* about how drinking wine made out of pee in prison and people trying to have sex with you and reading books are things people actually do in prison.** But what is one really to do in jail when he or she isn’t planning a route to the nearest place to buy snack foods? There are, in fact, lots of opportunities to learn some important stuff up in the hoosegow. Take advantage of it! You may never get the chance to learn these things again (though odds are you’ll have dozens of jail trips over the decades to get to know this stuff).

  Organizational Skills

  It takes a lot of know
-how to get twenty-five different people to gang up on the guy who looked at you funny in the cafeteria and stab him with a sharpened toothbrush. But if you build strong relationships with your inmates and can communicate clearly, you’ll become a leader of those assorted ruffians. It’s a project that you can make happen.

  Self-Defense

  If you aren’t so great at building relationships with your fellow inmates and you accidentally look at one of the popular prison clique leaders funny in the cafeteria, seemingly everyone in there is going to try to stab you with a sharpened toothbrush. So it’s pretty important that you learn judo or some type of hand-to-hand combat; either from the martial arts master they keep locked up on the top level of the prison (you have to fight your way up there) or, you know, just take a class sponsored by the community college.**

  Crafts

  You might think that you’ll never use the toothbrush-sharpening skills outside prison, but you’d be surprised how far reinventing yourself as a supervillain with a stabby dentist shtick can take you. (Call yourself the Malicious Molar. You’re welcome.)

  The Art of Distraction

  It’s late at night. You remember that you left your best sharpened toothbrush out in the yard, and you wrote down in your planner that you were going to get to stabbing your cellmate before breakfast. What to do? Only one thing to do! Get a riot going so you can slip out and go grab it before the guards tackle you and stick a billy club up your butthole. Frankly, it’s pretty easy to start prison riots. All you really have to do is shout, “Your mom!” to no one in particular and you can get one going. But you’ll learn some creative ways, too! Stuff like yelling, “Shut up!” or “How uncouth!”

  Coded Language

  It would be big trouble for you if a guard overheard you in the visiting room telling your top henchman to beat up and tie the superheroes they’ve apprehended to a couple of torpedoes so they can blast them out of a submarine into a colony of sharks. So you’ll have to figure out some sort of code. “Oh, so you got the hams? Good work. Be sure to tenderize them for the submarine sandwich by tying them to some torpedoes and shooting them into a colony of sharks.”

  Advanced Egotism

  Even if you work your way into a leadership position in the slammer, you’ll come to discover—without much pushing—that the only person you can trust in there is yourself. As I said before, no one else in there is as evil and brilliant as you are Many of them are plain old idiots; people waiting out their time and thinking about how wrong they were to knock over that liquor store. You are not like them. You’re already planning your next masterpiece. The one in which you’ll replace the mayor with a living wax figure who looks just like him, and who’ll name you city manager so you can repave the roads with poison-filled syringes. These people are worthless. They don’t deserve to breathe the same air as you! Occupy the same space! What peons! What inconsequential ants! You hate them! You hate everything they stand for!

  Thoughts like these will get you through prison, and you’ll come out as big-headed as ever. Swell that head, supervillain! Swell it until it won’t fit in the bars! (And consider recruiting those worthless idiots you’re stuck in there with as henchmen—it’s not like they’re going to get hired anywhere else.)

  * Okay, maybe it was me. In my other book, I may have said something about how you shouldn’t worry, because you’ll always get out of jail no problem. But you should know by now that I am a liar. You don’t know what I’m gonna say! But trust me this time. You have to plan for your escape.

  ** They will perceive you as a crazy person.

  * I’m not really giving you the benefit of the doubt. I just want to hear myself talk. Read myself write? You get the idea.

  † If you’re feeling particularly capable, you could try to capture one and make it your personal pet. More on pets at the end of this chapter.

  * You should also make up a fake name in this scenario. I suggest Vincent von Innocent.

  ** Until it doesn’t.

  * If you’re looking for some, though, I can set you up with a guy who can get some for you at a sweet price, only about 75 percent of which goes to me.

  * All wardens secretly have a dream of starting up a roadside farm stand to sell dates or various other fruits.

  * More about destructive tools in Chapter 10.

  * Or maybe they were serious? Just trying to keep you on your toes.

  ** We all know the only good prison wine uses safe, pee-less toilet water.

  ** A full fighting style guide is available in Chapter 11.

  Chapter 8

  Acquiring Power

  So, what are you in this for?

  That sounds like an obvious question, and it is, though I don’t need you sassing me about it, you pustule. I know your thoughts and don’t appreciate them right now. And when I don’t appreciate something, I often incinerate it, so FYI. Anyway, the question of why you got into this whole supervillain game is a pretty important one. It’s so important that I dedicated two whole chapters to it in my previous book, which, I swear to God, if you’ve gotten this far into this book and haven’t read the other one, you should mail me double the price and a written apology in hopes that I allow your nearest bookseller to provide you with a copy. (I own their thoughts, too.)

  My point, and I do have one, is that most of us supervillains are looking for one of two or three things. Some, as Batman’s butler pointed out in that horrible, propagandaish movie, just want to watch the world burn. Others have strictly pecuniary interests. But a good many of us supervillains— myself included—have ambitions beyond dancing on ashes or diving into giant piles of coins. We want to seize power. All the power.

  Supervillain FAQ: Should I take drugs?

  It’s easy to think that, just because we supervillains do a lot of stuff that is illegal, we’re supposed to do everything that’s illegal. That’s simply not so. For example, I have never driven drunk, because I’ve never driven, because I’ve always forced people to do that for me . . . often at ray gun-point. You can pick and choose the laws you want to break and obey the ones you like. It’s not a full throttle shitting all over the law, it’s more of a selective pissing on those parts that keep us from money or throwing cape-wearing individuals into open sewers.

  So when you think about something like taking drugs, you need to consider more than just the fact that it’s an illegal activity which much of the polite society looks down upon. You need to really think about whether the drug in question will actually make those illegal activities that are really important—the stuff about the money and the sewers— any easier. With that in mind, let’s take a look at the pros and cons of some major ones, shall we?

  Marijuana

  Pros:

  Potentially relaxing after a long day of screaming death threats at henchmen; could help you make a breakthrough in your “hypnotize everyone with one incredible, really sweet tune” plan.

  Cons:

  Demotivating; could inspire you to replace any plans you may have had with one that involves watching Three’s Company reruns while you eat a whole thing of Danish sugar cookies.

  Cocaine

  Pros:

  Can really boost you through that frantic period of setting a takeover plan in motion; is a drug lots of business guys use, so will probably make you better at business.

  Cons:

  Might make you jumpy, which may cause you to abort a plan prematurely or punch a mirror when you see your own masked reflection in it; could cause a stroke, and not one of the kinds that only makes you supervillain-appropriately disfigured.

  Steroids

  Pros:

  Will give you enough muscle power to give you a fighting chance against obnoxious superheroes; can increase aggression, which is a downside for most people, but should probably be a plus for someone who wants to go around throwing safes at people who pass by.

  Cons:

  Testicular shrinkage or loss of femininity, and therefore wiles; won’t do much good if
the superhero you’re fighting contains the power of 1,000 suns.

  LSD

  Pros:

  Opens pathways of perception to potentially free your mind to new ideas and avenues for villainous plans.

  Cons:

  Is hippie shit.

  Methamphetamine

  Pros:

  Again, can help you push through those long work nights; it can’t hurt to jump on that already-diminishing Breaking Bad popularity bandwagon while you can.

  Cons:

  Tooth loss could make all-important evil pronouncements more difficult to make; some other hot new TV show will showcase some other drug and then where will you be?

  Opiates

  Pros:

  Great for relieving pain in the aftermath of a superhero punching your jaw off or numbing you to it as it occurs; use of opium is known as “chasing the dragon,” which means if you catch the dragon, maybe you can attack a city with it.

  Cons:

  It’s hard to conquer anything from the (floor of a bathroom; all forms come from a flower, which isn’t particularly evil on its face.