Mike Gold: Doctor Doom Is Obsolete
A great many of our finer super-villains in the heroic fantasy world are bent on world conquest. Admittedly, a few simply want to destroy the planet, but at Lord Cumulous said to Prince Chaos in Warp, “Destroy the planet? Where are you going to live?”
For the life of me, I don’t understand why anybody would want to run a single nation, let alone the entire blue marble. Nonetheless, everybody from Doctor Doom to Ming the Merciless have tried time and time again. That’s how we know they’re insane: they keep on trying, and they never succeed.
These people spend a lot of money on their sophisticated Jack Kirbyesque machinery and even more money on henchmen. I’m sorry; henchpeople – just because you are evil, you don’t have to be sexist as well. And, by the way, are your henchpeople covered by minimum wage laws? How about health insurance? Obamacare? But I digress. Add the cost of your hidden lair, costume design and manufacture, those little flying television cameras that allow you to read the hero’s word balloons (today we call them “drones”), and you’ve spent the gross national product of Latveria and then some.
There is a better way to take over the planet. It’s probably less expensive and its got the benefit of being safer than, to site merely one example, the stunt the Masked Meanie pulled on Wonder Wart-Hog (Help Magazine #26) where he dug a hole several miles wide and as deep as the center of the Earth, filled it up with gunpowder, and lit the fuse.
If you’re a super-villain-in-training and you’re thinking about taking over the world, here’s what you do, in eight easy steps:
1) Start a Super-PAC http://www.fec.gov/pdf/forms/ie_only_letter.pdf.
2) Decide which of your henchpeople will follow your orders in the Senate and the House. You’ll need at least 60 Senate seats and 218 in the House. Make your henchpeople trade in their villain costumes for Brooks Brothers suits.
3) Use your Super-PAC funds to get your henchpeople elected.
4) Abduct and terminate the vice president.
5) Have your henchpeople vote you in as the replacement vice president.
6) Have your House henchpeople impeach the president and then have your Senate henchpeople vote to remove the president from office.
7) As president, go to the next U.N. opening and, during your welcoming speech, have your henchpeople slaughter all the representatives.
8) Declare yourself “King of the World!” Don’t worry; James Cameron won’t sue you. You’re king of the world! Tradition dictates you have a crown and you place that crown on your own head. It’s also a swell image on the teevee.
It’s just that simple. No muss, no fuss. And it has the benefit of not destroying the place where you live.
Any villain can do it.
REVISED COLUMN SCHEDULE FOR THIS WEEK:
FRIDAY MORNING: Dennis O’Neil
FRIDAY AFTERNOON: Martha Thomases
LATER FRIDAY AFTERNOON: Michael Davis