Beginning from the End

2008-12-01T04:25:00.000-08:00

It seemed appropriate to begin with my last action as a professional miscreant, so I give you a selection from my work-in-progress, My Stroke of Evil: A Supervillain's Personal Journey (Monkeyman Press, 2010):

It was a cold and rainy morning in September of 1987. A month earlier, there had been the Harmonic Convergence; a week or two later, a plucky young cast would debut the television show Full House on ABC; and Magic Johnson was the NBA's Most Valuable Player. And I was at the Toronto Harbourfront, fighting a pitched battle against the superhero group that had plagued me most of the summer of that year, the International House of Protectors. (Or, yes ... IHOP.)

It always seemed unfair to me that superheroes were expected to team up, but villains were expected to lead solitary lives, their lairs populated perhaps by henchmen, but never by equals. Thus, I had proposed a cooperative effort to The Tempest, an evil (or at least, evil that year) Mistress-of-the-Sea type, hoping that we could conquer the IHOP once and for all. So it was she and I against the seven, I believe, heroes who were bound to oppose us.

We'd chosen the Harbourfront in Toronto as our staging area; being both close to the water for Tempest's powers to do us the most good, and because at that point it was a bright and shining example of the city's future, not simply a location for halfhearted concerts and second-rate fairs. I'd rented some warehouse space not far from the docks, and it was from there that our assault began.

Tempest refused to settle on a theme; in fact, one of our major shortfalls as a team was her refusal to see the usefulness of theme in a villain's choice of location and method. So it was up to me and I must say, the weather may have been gloomy, but my Breakfast Bunch Bots were bright and shining as they began to lay waste to the sailboats and condominiums of the rich. The Quisp bot* stood proud and tall, its propeller whirring at devilish speeds; Cookie Crook scooped up whole parking lots two hands at a time; and Toucan Sam moved like a rainbow-coloured whirlwind, its beak leaving destruction in its wake. It was a glorious moment.

Only made more glorious when IHOP showed up and the battle truly began (not, of course that I mean to glorify my evil past). That was when destruction truly rained down upon the city's edge: the Bots moved like demon-possessed, and of course I was the demon, perched atop a roof nearby, frantically pressing buttons. The Tempest brought down tidal waves, tossed The Rocket and several of IHOP's sidekicks into the lake in one fell swoop.

It was at that moment that I felt the heights of glory that had always been denied to me as an evil mastermind before; but of course, it was also at that moment when I was knocked out by a flying frozen fish (most likely cast my way by Captain Codthrower). When I came to my senses again, I was in police custody, Tempest had disappeared, and even my beautiful robots were nothing but a pile of smoking rubble and one last exploding Lucky Charm, the red balloon, floating out over Lake Ontario and rising until I had to squint to follow its flight.

* The Quisp Bot, of course, was left over from my Alphabet Heists, a series of 26 crimes linked to letters of the alphabet. By the time I reached Q, I was quite frankly growing tired of the concept, and simply created giant robot doubles of Quisp, Q-Bert and Queequeg and sent them rampaging through the downtown core.

The Nefarious Bed & Breakfast

Beginning from the End