More on being a Super Villian..

Chapter 1 - Henchmen
"It takes a big man to cry, but it takes a bigger man to laugh at that man" - Jack Handey

Your first task is to assemble an entourage of brainless thugs. Thugs will be a major part of your plans, as you don't want to be tackling any heroes first off. You will need some excessive drawn-out violence to soften them up first. Wave after wave of expendable, drivelling idiots are obviously critical to this. Finding buffoons of a low enough calibre is always a problem, but if you follow the tried and tested checklist below, you can't go wrong.

Things to remember when picking your henchmen:

Intelligence
First you will need to give them an IQ test. If they score any higher than 60, ditch them. If your henchmen have a mental capacity greater than a squirrel, they may realise that the odds are stacked against them when faced with a man who has just killed 30 other henchmen with his bare hands, and turn on you.

Moral status
It is vitally important that your thugs have no moral status whatsoever. Test this by running over a small furry animal in front of them. If they react, they're out. If faced with a tough dilemma, these thugs may have the audacity to help the under-dog or save the kid. This is clearly unacceptable.

Attraction
It's important to make sure that your henchmen are castrated as soon as they are initiated. If they fall for the girl, you'll be in a whole heap of trouble. If they don't have to think about sex, their mind will be on violence, 100%. Because they have had their testicles removed, their testosterone levels will drop. Inject them regularly to avoid disappointment.

Love of mindless violence with no regard for personal safety

Henchmen need to be able to react to any situation. With violence. This is good for two reasons:

1. Thugs should always resort to killing the person who is mucking about with your plans.
2. In a heated melee, you should be able to escape un-scathed, leaving your henchmen to fight on regardless. If they are obsessed with their own safety, they'll be running too, leaving nobody to distract your attacker.

Lack of imagination

If your henchmen have imagination, they may try to think for themselves instead of following your orders. You do not pay these people to think. You are the evil genius, so you do all the thinking. Ask them what they think it would be like to fall off a cliff and hit nasty rocks. If they can't come up with an answer, they're in. (You will also know that they won't be afraid to fight around dangerous machinery, shark infested waters etc, as they are too stupid to imagine danger…)

Counting
It's important for your business that henchmen cannot count for two reasons:

1. Large numbers of armed guards should not intimidate your brutish entourage. If they don't know the odds, they won't care.
2. You can pay them less.

Wild fire

All thugs need the ability to spread hundreds of bullets in all directions. With their level of intelligence, you wouldn't expect them to be able to hit a dead elephant at point-blank range. (If they can shoot straight, and have passed the other tests, they are a rare find indeed.) For this reason, you need to make sure that they can hold down the trigger of a machine gun until they run out of bullets. Extra ammo isn't usually a problem, as they would either have been killed, or killed the enemy after the first salvo. Experiment with sticky tape behind the trigger, or pick thugs with arthritis in their fingers. The next thing to remember is that they will need to produce stupidly wide arcs of fire. Make them practise this random flailing on a plastic sheet smeared with butter.

The ability to drive badly
All henchmen need this skill in order to drive madly through a town square attracting the attention of police cars. Once they have crashed and exploded, the hero may be caught and slowed down by random policemen.

The boss is always right
If your henchmen ever question your insane logic, or even your apparently senseless outbursts, you should kill them straight away. That way, you'll always be able to gloat, laugh, scream or kill without ridiculous enquiries. NB: Questions detract from wide-eyed guffawing, don't let it happen!

Appreciation
Remember that your henchmen need your love and appreciation, or they will not feel valued as an employee. You can show your appreciation by not beating them every day.
You can let them pull the secret lever once in a while. Exactly what effect this will have will differ depending on your super-secret base of operations.
The last thing that you can do to show your appreciation of good thuggery is to promote a henchmen to the status of evil assistant. You should kill this person for failure every now and again so that your other employees get a chance to progress. The "dead man's shoes" ethos is very appropriate here.


Chapter 2 - Evil lair - part A

Your evil lair is very important. If you are merely squatting in a back alley, you will not be very credible as an evil genius. You need to have an impenetrable lair of doom. Your enemies need to be filled with a certain level of angst before entering. Take Dracula for example. No hero ever entered his castle thinking it would be as simple as stake-and-go. In order to make it as inhospitable as possible, follow these simple guidelines:

Location
Pick the location of your staging grounds with care. If you set up in the middle of town, you may find that you get untimely visits from health inspectors, or occasionally from the RSPCA if you are working on genetically enhanced animals. A barren wasteland, a hidden nuclear bunker, or an abandoned castle on a rock in an obscure European location, are ideal. NB on castles: Avoid properties owned by the English Heritage. Guided tours are a nuisance.

Lighting
Lighting is important. Your guests or invaders need to be walking into a foreboding environment. You can achieve this with dribbly candles and wall torches. Alternatively, you can confuse them horribly with disco lighting, strobe effects and smoke machines. Which ever you choose, make sure that you apply some thought, your unwitting victims will appreciate it.

Traps
Traps are crucially important. A devious super-villain will always have need for traps. Your traps will also need to come in layers for maximum effect.

Layer 1 needs to be reasonably challenging. Giant rolling balls, poison darts fired from the walls and falling weights are important parts of this layer. They will weed out the chaff and save you from having to re-arm the particularly fiendish traps.

Layer 2 traps need to be ridiculously easy to work around. They will constitute mantraps, slippery floors, lots of winding staircases and pools of rather hot oil. These traps are merely there to give the clever heroes a false sense of security and leave them un-prepared for the next level.

Layer 3 is the epitome of intellectual deviousness. Huge spinning blades of death. Lots of them. Exploding pigs and laser guided halibut flying from the walls. These are the pearls of irrefutable insanity. More fiendish than a fiendish thing in the middle of fiendish season, your level three traps should be clever and random enough to wipe out an army of Oxford graduates.

NB: Don't waste your expendable thugs on testing traps. They usually can't work out how to use the toilet without peeing on their own shoes, let alone work out elaborate traps…


Chapter 2 - Evil lair - part B

Elaborate execution area
This is the crowning glory for any evil super-villain. Painfully slow moving lasers and tanks full of sharks are a favourite. Be as inventive as possible with your execution area. You will want to savour the moment as you laugh maniacally in front of the world summit after killing their best agent. It is usually a good idea to install a lever or big red button that activates a nasty device such as a falling weight. That way, you can let your henchmen take it in turns to execute people.

Pointless untidy looking barrels
These are not the most obvious of furnishings, but are as important as the badly strung chandelier. You can fill these barrels with all manner of chemical death. Highly flammable chemicals are a favourite, as are oozing nuclear waste. They have two functions.

1 They provide obvious cover for budding spies and soldiers hell-bent on stopping you. They will realise all too late, with the random spray of bullets from your brainless thugs, that barrels are the last place to hide.
2 They look nice at dinner parties when covered with a frilly tablecloth. (You must be cultured as well as having an insatiable lust for power and destruction….)

Hidden escape facility
This speaks for itself. Without a hidden escape facility, you may as well give yourself up to the UN peacekeepers straight away. You could use a jet propelled escape pod, a large trampoline and parachute, or even a particularly fast dolphin if you've chosen an underwater base.

Weapon store
Weapons! Lots of them. Find the biggest baddest weapons you can get and make sure that every henchman has the keys to the store. Flame throwers are a must, but the real cherry on the cake is a chain fed machine gun mounted on the back of a JCB, or alternatively a bear.

Ominous hidden orchestra
This adds real character to your lair. The invaders who try to take your base will not only have to deal with henchmen and traps, but the incessant hum of a cello and the odd sporadic burst of violins in an ear piercing crescendo as a thug turns the corner firing wildly. NB: make sure that your thugs are equipped with earmuffs. This has the added bonus of making any would-be hero laugh instead of fire.

Insignia
An evil emblem is great when it comes to tying all of your efforts together. This is most important to your base of operations. Without the evil insignia, other super-villains could rip-off your ideas. I have found that it's often a good idea to patent some of your more fiendish traps. You can leave your emblem at random intervals, so that everyone knows the carnage was instigated by you. It's the little touches that count.