The Horror of Supervillainy

Once again, dropped right in the middle of a well-established series. The Horror of Supervillainy, however, really worked out incorporating new readers.

Designed as a complete homage to the comic book world of superheroes and supervillains, The Supervillainy Saga series plays fast and loose with character development, tangible timelines, and, most importantly, recaps. Mr. Phipps starts the story with a foreward that explains directly to the reader just what comics have inspired this book, and how our main character, Gary Karkofsky, got into his current situation, and, briefly, what that situation is. Kudos for the recap, it has a super “True Believers” feel to it.

Jumping into the story, we find Gary, aka Merciless: The Supervillain without Mercy™, attempting to maintain a conversion from villain to hero, and, oddly, getting hired by a talking raven to go rescue the President’s daughter from Dracula. Yeah, that’s one hell of a setup.

From there, the hilarity ensues.

Gary is one of those perfectly balanced characters. By his own admission, his alignment is Chaotic Neutral, and that just allows for a whole lot of fun to happen. Couple this with Gary constantly spouting smart-ass pop culture references while being accompanied by companions from other timelines/dimensions, and it really falls into that familiar comic book scenario. Having had a significant comic book habit for a very long time, it is absolutely obvious that I am the target audience for such an adventure.

And now, of course, I’ve fallen for it. Mr. Phipps has succeeded in piquing my interest in the previous six books. Mission accomplished, sir.

What really gets me is the very serious tone and plotting that happens around all the goofiness in this novel. There is some very fantastical superhero-y things going on, but there is also some very serious morality issues being addressed. Maintaining that balance with the high “fun factor” of this book is no small achievement.

I guess, from here, I’ll be off to find out a bit more about Gary.