They look nice.
The Horror Of Supervillainy is the seventh book in The Supervillainy Saga by C.T. Phipps. The series is published by Crossroad Press.
Gary Karkofsky a.k.a Merciless: The Supervillain without MercyTM is now trying to be a superhero and failing badly at it. However, salvation appears in the form of a talking raven that offers him the chance to finally prove his worth as a hero: rescue the President's daughter from Dracula. Unfortunately, it requires him to go to the place where he suffered his greatest defeat. But is this really a chance to prove himself or a trap that he's walking right into?
There's a lot going on in Satan Swamp with a haunted Summer camp full of Supers training to be heroes, a seemingly cured Mandy, and Cindy becoming a educator! Old friends are also back from across the Multiverse! But can Gary trust these events?
All of Gary's sins are remembered as he finds himself surrounded by old friends, enemies, and powers he has no idea how to deal with.
This book contains the following tropes:
- Actually a Doombot: Leslie Trust and President Trust are Human Replacement Droids working for President Omega even though he's been (seemingly) killed.
- A God Am I: Gary is stated to be a god as a reward from Death for winning the Eternity Tournament but the absolute lowest level of power they can possibly be, possibly due to having no worshipers. He even compares himself to the God of Pocket Lint. Subverted as he does have a powerful domain and is in fact the God of Death in his universe—whatever that means.
- Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: Gary apparently has this option from Death at any time. However, he's not eager to go.
- Ambiguous Situation:
- Is the Big Ass Time Disaster something that's really happened/happening or was it just Merciful making up a story to get Gary involved?
- Did Mandy just grow out of her Blood Knight stage, changed because of Cindy's potion, her contact with the Primal Orb of Order, or did Merciful give her a new soul?
- The Baroness: Leslie Trust attempts to go full sexpot variety, even getting compared to the Baroness from G.I. Joe by Gary, but this just gets her exposed as a robot.
- Big Bad: Dracula seems to be this. He's part of a Big Bad Ensemble with Merciful and Diabloman.
- Comic-Book Time: And Soap Opera Rapid Aging Syndrome are addressed as something that's actually happening in Gary's world and the result of a flaw in the universe. It needs to be corrected or the entirety of reality will collapse.
- Cosmic Retcon: What Merciful is planning to do. Gary manages to warp it enough that it becomes just a slightly better version of reality.
- Defiant to the End: Gary reveals he's this when he spends what he believes the last seconds of his life insulting Sheriff Injustice.
- Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Gary manages to defeat an Archdemon he accidentally summoned. Played with as he's having the help of Merciful, who is an Archmage, and also equipped with multiple Primal Orbs.
- The Dragon: Sheriff Injustice serves as the most effective and dangerous foe that Gary has ever faced, despite Gary having fought actual gods. Gary is beaten repeatedly by Injustice throughout the book and only survives due to his friends.
- Dracula: Gary fights Dracula in this at the end. He is an in-universe Anticlimax Boss as it turns out his True Immortality is based on him being a ghost who possesses bodies then turns them into copies of his old one. Gary is literally a psychopomp who can send souls to Hell.
- The Dreaded: Gary is genuinely scared of both Sheriff Injustice and the Crone both.
- Expy:
- David the Nightflier is a shout out to Howard the Duck and Super-Pets like Krypto or Streaky.
- Splotch is a more direct reference to most being a Japanese American version of Spider-Man.
- The Red Condor and Rocketdeath are homages to the Vulture and Beetle, classic Spider-Man villains.
- Earn Your Happy Ending: Gary manages to fix the Big Ass Time Disaster and adjust reality so that time will march on. He also undoes his rule against resurrection to restore most of the dead heroes but not the villains.
- Fight Dracula: What Gary wants to go to Satan's Hollow to do. It gets complicated.
- Foreshadowing:
- Early on in the book David talks about how "technology was so much cooler back during the silver age". On a second read through it serves as a hint that he's really Merciful, Gary's counterpart from a reality based on the silver age of comics.
- [[spoiler: Leslie Trust and President Trust being HR Ds working on President Omega's agenda is a sign that he didn't die in The Science of Supervillainy and will show up again in The Fall Of Supervillainy.
- For Want Of A Nail: Despite history and pop culture mostly being the same, we discover several differences like the fact that Alan Moore is an actual wizard, Steve Dikto gave himself completely to Objectivism, Stan Lee is a famous classic science fiction author, and Jack Kirby was a superhero named Nazi Basher.
- The Hero Dies: Splotch is killed by police in what is implied to be a meaningless death that helps push Gary over the Despair Event Horizon.
- Hope Spot: Gary starts getting hero-training from the Super Duper Splotch Man and proves to be much better equipped to learn from a Hero with Bad Publicity and fellow quipster than the more stoic Society of Superheroes members. Then Splotch is killed.
- Ignored Expert: The Crone is the wisest and most cunning villain of all time (being Baba Yaga). She is thus the only person who sees Gary as incredibly dangerous and a threat to everyone else at the League of Archvillains.
- Insistent Terminology: The Super-Duper Splotch Man is how Merciless refers to him versus just Splotch like everyone else.
- Knight of Cerebus: Sheriff Injustice serves as this, being a villain who proceeds to beat Gary within an inch of his life repeatedly with almost none of Gary's usual tricks working against him. The fact he's a No Nonsense Villain who is politically opposed to everything Gary values (being an authoritarian racist) helps underscore what a danger that he is.
- Legacy Hero: Splotch is the son of an Expy of the Steve Dikto-era of Spider-Man and implied to be the father of a Miles Morales Expy.
- Man of Kryptonite: Sheriff Injustice only gets more powerful the more magic he's exposed to meaning that he's completely immune to all of Gary's traditional combat tactics.
- Meaningful Name: Stanley Oktid, the real name of Splotch, is a reference to Stan Lee and Steve Dikto.
- Prisoner's Dilemma: Stated to be why supervillain teams never succeed. If they're a bunch of selfish sociopaths then they're never going to be an effective team and only will be held together by self-interest as well as fear.
- Noodle Incident: Gary's previous attempts to take down Sheriff Injustice where he "got his ass kicked."
- No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: Gary suffers a couple of these at the hands of Sheriff Injustice. He also suffered one of these at the hands of him before.
- Not Quite the Right Thing:
- What banning resurrection magic has turned out to be.
- Making magic something everyone can do with the Primal Orbs is implied to be this.
- Legion of Doom: The League of Archvillains is stated to be this and The Illuminati equivalent. It's implied to be responsible for why the world has never managed to become a utopia despite all its heroes and demigods. Deconstructed as a much weaker group causes it to fall apart as they have no interest in risking themselves for each other's safety.
- Screw This, I'm Outta Here: The Crone predicts that Dracula bringing Gary among them will bring about their doom. She thus departs.
- Shout-Out:
- Gary has a car called the Blue Meanie.
- Most fictional superhero comics are about pirates, horror, and romance in a direct reference to Watchmen.
- Gary runs a blog where he reviews old episodes of Murder, She Wrote. He also thinks TekWar was underrated.
- The Superfriends are invoked by Case when they meet the League of Archvillains.
- Underestimating Badassery: Stated to be the sole reason Gary has survived as long as he has. The Crone even says that "clever peasants" like him are a heroic tradition and it always ends badly for the prideful. Dracula, of course, ignores her.
- Xanatos Gambit: The entire plot was one to get Gary to bring the Primal Orbs to Dracula's Castle.
- Weaksauce Weakness:
- Gary fighting a foe that gets stronger the more magic you use results in him getting his ass kicked repeatedly.
- Dracula turns out to have not considered that Gary's Psychopomp status makes him a horrifyingly dangerous opponent for a ghost who possesses corpses.
- Where the Hell Is Springfield?: Falconcrest City is firmly established as being where Detroit would be in the "real" world.
- The Worf Effect: Gary, surprisingly, is subject to this as he's repeatedly beaten by Sheriff Injustice.
- You Can't Go Home Again: Merciful found himself unable to adjust to his former home due to all the atrocities he committed trying to bring it back.
