Literature / The Supervillainy Saga

It's good to be the bad guy.

The Supervillainy Saga is a humorous Urban Fantasy Capepunk superhero series written by C.T. Phipps, and published by Crossroad Press.

Gary Karkofsky is an ordinary guy with an ordinary life living in an extraordinary world. Supervillains, heroes, and monsters are a common part of the world he inhabits. Yet, after the death of his hometown's resident superhero, he gains the amazing gift of the late champion's magical cloak. Deciding he prefers to be rich rather than good, Gary embarks on a career as Merciless: The Supervillain Without Mercy.

But is he evil enough for the worst city in America?

The series follows Gary as he travels through a four-color world full of Expies of popular superheroes and the crazy situations he gets into as a result. The book often Lampshades the use of tropes and their implications even as it treats their plots seriously.

The series contains the following books:

• The Rules of Supervillainy
• The Games of Supervillainy
• The Secrets of Supervillainy
• The Science of Supervillainy
• The Tournament of Supervillainy
• The Future of Supervillainy
• The Horror Of Supervillainy
• Tales of Supervillainy: Cindy's Seven
• The Fall Of Supervillainy
• The Supervillainy Saga vol. 1 (Books 1-3)

---

The series contains the following tropes:

• Action Girl: Cindy, Ultragoddess, Black Witch, Ninjess, Guinevere, the Human Tank, the Red Schoolgirl, and many more. There are a lot of superheroines and supervillainesses in this world and all of them are badass.
  • Nightgirl a.k.a. Amanda Douglas joins the ranks of the heroines in Games.
• Affably Evil: Gary may be a ruthless supervillain, but he's quite nice about it, treating more like a fun hobby than anything.
• Affectionate Parody: Verges between this and Deconstruction of classic superheroes. Gary exists in a world where four-color heroes exist, 90s antiheroes, cosmic retcons, multiversal crises, Card-Carrying Villain and Cartoonish Supervillainy alongside genuine psychopaths. It takes a heavy toll on his sanity once he joins in the madness and there's plenty of times where the worst thing to happen to him is stock comic book plots like Back from the Dead or Status Quo Is God.
• All Myths Are True: Greek Mythology, Judaism, Neil Gaiman-esque ubergods, Lovecraftian abominations, and more all seem to be real.
• Alternate Timeline: Ultragod defeated Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin during World War II, bringing them both to trial for war crimes. Becomes For Want Of A Nail as both Nazism and the Red Scare continued without them.
  • Gary's father fought in something called the Second Vietnam War, whose opponent was apparently P.H.A.N.T.O.M.
  • Bill Clinton's term was actually claimed by someone called Android John. Doubles as a Ridiculously Human Robot and Robosexual since he married a human woman.
  • Barack Obama's Presidency was filled by President Omega who seems to be President Evil.
• Amazonian Beauty: A number of women in the series including Guinevere, Ultragoddess, and The Human Tank (who is Transgender).
• Ambiguously Bi:
  • Cindy. Humorous, since Gary's wife Mandy is openly bisexual and put off by Cindy's vague allusions. Becomes unambiguous when she takes up with Mandy and Gary.
  • Gary becomes this in The Games of Supervillainy due to his unwanted attraction to Angel Face. Gary seems to confirm it in The Horror of Supervillainy.
• Antihero: Gary zig-zags between this and Villain Protagonist for much of the book before finally choosing which he is. He's an anti-villain.
  • The Extreme and Shoot-Em-Up are antiheroes as well, though they kill numerous innocents and are much further down the scale than Gary.
  • Gabrielle and the Shadow Seven are a somewhat Lighter and Softer version of this, breaking international laws and being composed of The Atoner villains mixed with superheroes. They're basically The Outsiders.
• Antivillain: Namechecked. Gary says this is what he aspires to be after a long period of soul searching.
• Artifact of Doom: The Reaper's Cloak is this, though Gary and the Nightwalker are both able to use it for good.
  • The Book of Midnight in The Games of Supervillainy is a possessed spell-book which can destroy the world. It also acts like a dog. No, seriously.
• The Atoner: Most of the supervillains working in the Shadow Seven.
  • In Games, it is revealed the Nightwalker is one of these and a former supervillain.
• Ax-Crazy: Cindy is literally this once she gets a fire ax. Psychoslinger is a much darker version of this.
• Badass Normal: Mandy and Cindy are both these. Mandy becomes a Badass Abnormal in Games but this proves to be a bad thing.
• Beware the Silly Ones: Gary Karkofsky is an Idiot Hero or Guile Hero depending on his circumstances. However, he punches heavily above his weight class, often defeating gods or powerful archvillains.
• Big Bad: Tend to alternate between books.
  • In The Rules of Supervillainy Tom Terror is the closest thing they have, being a villain who doesn't have any of the quirks the others do.
  • In The Games of Supervillainy the Nightmaster is the head of the Brotherhood of Infamy and trying to summon Zul-Barbas who will destroy the world and remake it.
  • The Secrets of Supervillainy has this as a Big Bad Duumvirate with President Omega and Merciful.
  • The Science of Supervillainy continued with Merciful as the Big Bad that has turned Falconcrest City into a Police State.
  • The Tournament of Supervillainy has Entropicus, a Physical God that is threatening to destroy the entire multiverse.
  • The Future of Supervillainy has Mad Scientist Tom Terror trying to take over the Hollow Earth.
  • Tales of Supervillainy: Cindy's Seven has the Dragon King, who is a literal dragon and crime lord.
• Big Good: The Society of Superheroes fills this role in the setting. Which sucks for Gary when he draws their ire.
  • The Nightwalker used to be this before Falconcrest City. He's a Posthumous Character in The Rules of Supervillainy Except not.
  • Mandy and Gabrielle both become this for Falconcrest City during the month Gary is missing between Rules and Games.
• Black-and-Gray Morality: Gary is a supervillain-in-name-only who fights evil superheroes and even more evil villains. Averted with the arrival of Ultragod, Ultragoddess, and the Society of Superheroes who are every bit as good as they are believed to be.
  • Gray-and-Gray Morality: Gary's conflict with the Society of Superheroes is this as he's clearly in the wrong but they're a little too repressive for their own good.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Gary rapidly develops into one of these amongst supervillains. He's shockingly dangerous.
  • Sunlight turns out to have been one of these as well, proving himself to be quite competent in Games despite his Lawful Stupid and Wrong Genre Savvy tendencies.
• Cape Punk: The books Deconstructs the '90s Anti-Hero and The Dark Age of Comic Books by having Gary disgusted by heroes who kill and overly psychopathic villains. It also serves as a Decon-Recon Switch because Gary, himself, is a well-written '90s Anti-Hero. The book, notably, treats Lighter and Softer superheroes significantly more sympathetically than most examples of the Capepunk genre.
• The Cape:
  • Ultragod is this sort of hero to the world. Gabrielle is viewed as one but she's more a Pragmatic Hero.
  • Guinevere and the Prismatic Commando also follow this mold, with the former having some Knight Templar qualities.
• Card-Carrying Villain: Gary proudly proclaims himself to be a supervillain. Other villains find this quite weird.
• City of Adventure: Falconcrest City is certainly full of this, even if it's also a Wretched Hive.
• Comic Books Are Real: Gary Karkofsky talks about how "historical comics" exist. These are adaptations of the adventures of the Society of Superheroes and have more or less replaced fictional superheroes in their reality. Given reality is every bit as crazy as in comic books, it's implied the comics actually have to tone the stories down.
  • Gets worse (better?) as the series goes on. All of his books take place in the same The Multiverse and occasionally have crossovers with each other. However, all of the characters are fictional in the realities they visit so Jane Doe is a popular urban fantasy series in Gary's world even when she drops by and vice versa.
• Comic-Book Time: Handled in-universe. Gary deals with something called "time compression" where the seven years he spent in prison end up becoming six months despite his daughter remaining the same age. Its apparently a flaw in the universe and a deliberate homage to this trope according to Word of God. Later, it is revealed to also be the work of the Top God Destruction.
• Cool Versus Awesome: Gary battles against a Silver Age Of Comic Books set of villains, a Nineties Antihero Team, an Expy for Superman as well as the Justice League, a xenomorph, a Biblical Nephilim kaiju, and an Expy for Lex Luthor. This is notably, all in the first book. It's more more or less a celebration of the bizarre and incredibly convoluted continuity of comic books as well as how they can throw everything and the kitchen sink into a storyline.
• Conversational Troping: One of the hallmarks of the series is Gary causally chatting about superheroes and pop-culture while living in a superhero world. Learning which tropes are and aren't true is where the first book's title comes from.
• The Cowl:
  • The Nightwalker was one of these.
  • Gary is actually one as well, though he'd never admit it.
  • Amanda Douglas becomes the second Nightwalker.
  • Mandy becomes Nighthuntress after becoming a vampire.
• Dark Action Girl:
  • Cindy fills this role in most of the supervillain teams she's on. Also qualifies as a Not So Harmless villain when she reveals she's closer to The Lancer of the group.
  • Mandy becomes this by the third book.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Gary is revealed to be suffering from one of these. His brother was murdered in front of him by Shoot-Em-Up despite the former having reformed. Gary then tracked down the villain and killed him—at the age of fourteen.
  • Cindy has one of these too, which is only alluded to. At one point, having been forced to serve as a prostitute in high school.
• Dating Catwoman: Both Mandy and Ultragoddess consider their relationships with Gary to be this way.
• Deadpan Snarker: Gary is this in spades. Almost every word out of his mouth is unaudulterated pure sardonicism.
  • Qualifies as a full-on Snark Knight once you realize Gary's opinion of himself isn't much higher than his opinion of anyone else. Mandy, Ultragod, Diabloman, and Ultragoddess are about the only people he seems to respect.
• Death Is Cheap: Parodied, Deconstructed, and Lampshaded. Gary kills a supervillain in the first chapter only to find them resurrected as a zombie halfway through. This is the lead in to the Zombie Apocalypse. He also has to deal with multiple clones of the same group of '90s Anti-Hero antagonists. However, Gary finds it nearly impossible to bring back his dead wife.. Later, this is the subject of The Tournament of Supervillainy where it's revealed a Psychopathic Manchild god is responsible for most comic book resurrections.
• Decon-Recon Switch: The series is about a somewhat offbeat fellow, Gary Karkofsky, who finds a magic cloak and decides to become a supervillain. The book Deconstructs the '90s Anti-Hero and The Dark Age of Comic Books by having Gary disgusted by heroes who kill and overly psychopathic villains. It also serves as a Decon-Recon Switch because Gary, himself, is a well-written '90s Anti-Hero. The book, notably, treats Lighter and Softer superheroes significantly more sympathetically than most examples of the Capepunk genre.
• Department of Redundancy Department: Merciless: The Supervillain Without Mercy! The cloak gets a lot of mileage out of making fun of Gary for this.
• Distaff Counterpart: Ultragoddess for Ultragod. Justified given she's his daughter with the same powers. It also annoys her to no end as she was raised to be this rather than allowed to assume her own identity.
• The Dragon:
  • Diabloman settles into a combination of this role and The Mentor.
  • Eventually, Cindy gets to the point of being Co-Dragons with Diabloman.
• invokedDude, Not Funny!: Gary's reaction to Iron Cross' "ironic" use of Nazi paraphernalia as part of his battlesuit.
• Dude, Where's My Respect?: An ongoing joke/theme is the fact no one takes Gary seriously despite the fact he has a body count in three figures as well as having taken down some of the world's most terrifying villains. He's just so non-threatening that even those who actually believe he's dangerous assume he's using Obfuscating Stupidity.
  • Averted with Tom Terror and Baba Yaga, both who actually are aware how dangerous Gary is. President Omega also believes Gary is the most dangerous foe due to the fact he's aware how history turns out. Subverted by Merciless, of all people, who looks down on Gary extra hard because they're the same person.
• End of an Age: The series has the Age of Superheroes coming to an end. The Age of Superheroes began in the 1930s with the rise of Ultragod (Superman), the Nightwalker (Batman), and Guinevere (Wonder Woman). Now, two out of the three are dead and the public has grown sick of superpowered beings duking it out. Gary Karkofsky a.k.a Merciless is trying to preserve the Superhero Age for as long as he can but unwittingly hastens it by killing off several archvillains.
• Everybody Has Lots of Sex: Nothing is ever shown off camera but virtually all of the characters have active sex lives despite the main protagonist being Happily Married. He's sadly widowed and his wife turned into a soulless vampire by the second book. This results in him hooking up with two exes over the course of his mourning/attempts to resurrect her.
• Expy: Has its own page now.
• Fantastic Racism: A Downplayed Trope example as Supers, robots, and aliens are all said to be discriminated against but one of them was popular enough to be elected President of the United States. Becomes less of a Downplayed Trope as the series progresses, starting at about The Secrets of Supervillainy. President Omega discriminates against Supers as a way to get elected and then plans their outright genocide. Merciful also takes up the mantle of President Omega and becomes a Villain with Good Publicity by taking a zero tolerance policy against them. The future ruler of the world, Emperor Merciless explains that on his world, the human race eventually turned against Supers and there was a massive race war. As a father of Supers, he proceeded to go Papa Wolf and destroyed both sides' extremists.
• Faux Affably Evil:
  • Tom Terror appears to be a Wicked Cultured mentor-like figure to Gary. He's not.
  • President Omega is a hilarious pop-cultured badass able to match quip-for-quip with Gary. He's also a former Nazi and guilty of murder on a planetary scale.
  • Other Gary is this way after it's discovered that he never brought back Mandy at all.
• Feeling Oppressed by Their Existence: This is the level of hatred that Supers tend to receive from certain segments of the public. The public hates Supers less for the danger they represent and more for the fact that they make them feel inferior simply by existing. Gary notably gets particularly defensive about this due to the fact his sister and daughters are Supers. Gary, amusingly, is not due to being a wizard (i.e. tools and learned magic) rather than possessing inborn powers.
• For Want Of A Nail: Tom Terror Lampshades this by stating that despite the existence of superheroes and countless amazing events, their version of Earth's pop culture is almost identical to the ones without superhero. Which is a Handwave as to all of Gary's pop culture references are the same ones as in our world.
• Freudian Excuse: Played with. The death of Gary's brother and the traumatic consequences including killing his brother's murderer at age fourteen, certainly contributed to Gary becoming a supervillain. However, it's also clear Gary always admired supervillainy and had extremist political views as well.
• The Gloves Come Off: This happens a good deal with Gary Karkofsky a.k.a Merciless: The Supervillain without Mercy in The Supervillainy Saga. Basically, the majority of the time he's a Ascended Fanboy that jokes around with 80s and 90s pop culture references. Then sometimes someone does something that really ticks him off and he starts dropping bodies.
• Government Agency of Fiction:
  • The Foundation for World Harmony is frequently namechecked and appears to be the government agency which deals with all manner of weirdness in the world.
  • The Department of Supernatural is a much nastier one that is bigoted against Supers. The Variant Intelligence Collective Enforcement (VICE) is an internment group for them.
• Happily Married:
  • A first in superhero literature as both Gary and Mandy seem to be quite content in their relationship. Tragically interrupted by her turn into a vampire.
  • Diabloman and his wife appear to be this as well.
  • Ultragod and his wife Polly Perkins. Her passing is what results in him deciding to stay dead.
• Hates Rich People: Gary Karkofsky AKA Merciless: The Supervillain without Mercy TM use class rhetoric with a lot of his justifications. Becomes a Hypocrisy Nod when he successfully steals a massive fortune and tries to figure out what to do with it.
• Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act: In one tie-in short story, "Merciless vs. Hitler", Gary mentions that he went back in time to kill Hitler multiple times at various points in history. This just sprouted alternate timelines in which Nazism still arose without Hitler and in one the Nazis won the war without having to deal with his inept leadership, only for their Facist But Inefficient government to fall apart in a few decades anyway. Ironically, this results in Gary being recruited by the Time Police for another mission: to kill Hitler in a universe where the Nazis did win and (due to a magical object) kept winning until they became rulers of their universe, unlike in every other timeline.
• Hypocrisy Nod: Gary Karkofsky AKA Merciless: The Supervillain without MercyTM is an anarchist supervillain who hates the rich and wants to liberate the masses. He's also someone who is obscenely wealthy due to his various heists by the end of the third book, buys his way out of jail with his wealth, and has frequently mentioned his desire to conquer the world. Several volumes have Gary noting he's aware of the irony and just sort of brushes it off.
• Intelligence Equals Isolation: It's implied Gary suffered this as a child, reading much-more advanced books than is normal for his age while hanging around his supervillain brother instead of kids his age.
• Invincible Villain: Calling him a villain would be questionable but so is The Author's intention on writing Gary off as an underdog, except that he has been having everything given to him with little to no effort of his own. Then there's the fact that the heroes of the series written completely incompetent so Gary would be propped up as the city's only hope in taking down a main villain.
  • Subverted in The Horror Of Supervillainy is continually beaten within an inch of his life by a enemy who is able to subvert his magic.
• Jack of All Trades: Gary has a number of minor (by comparison to the setting) abilities. Minor fire, ice, levitation (not flight), durability (not invulnerability), and insubstantibility powers. He can also see ghosts. Gary turns these all into a massive advantage.
  • Subverted when he makes a pact with Death and becomes a master of fire and ice throwing.
• Jewish and Nerdy: Gary is a definite example of this. Cindy is definitely Jewish and UN-Nerdy.
• Kaiju: Enough of a problem the Nightwalker had a special gun for dealing with them.
  • Gary has to deal with two at the end of Rules.
• Just Like Robin Hood: Gary Karkofsky a.k.a Merciles: The Supervillain without MercyTM starts off as a simply disgruntled thief but by The Secrets of Supervillainy has started donating vast amounts of what he steals to charity in order to rebuild his city. This is because he has so much of it and also because it has the effect of making the locals grateful to him in a way that renders his life significantly easier.
  • Cindy, despite being significantly greedier than Gary also runs a free hospital because she hated what the medical industry did to patients (being a licensed Doctor).
  • At one point, Gary and company use a flying pirate ship to engage in massive stock fraud against an Asshole Victim to give back money meant to rebuild Falconcrest City that had been embezzled by its contractors.
• Killed Off for Real: Mandy, Sunlight, Cloak, Ultragod, and Mandy again.
• Knight Templar: The Extreme are a collection of these. As is Shoot-Em-Up and other in-universe antiheroes.
  • It turns out the Brotherhood of Infamy is a group of these as well too.
• Lovecraft Lite: The Supervillainy-verse has the Great Beasts and their Brotherhood of Infamy cult minions. Gary proceeds to interrupt the summoning of the former and ends up cutting it in half with his scythe. The cult even has its own version of the Necronomicon called the Book of Midnight.
• Love Dodecahedron: Gary is married to Mandy but used to be engaged to Ultragoddess while being a childhood friends as well as infrequent partners with henchwoman Cindy. Mandy used to be lovers with the Black Witch who is teammates with Ultragoddess. That's just how the story starts and it gets more complicated from there.
• The Mentor: Diabloman plays this role to Gary. As does Cloak to a certain extent.
• Misaimed Fandom: In-universe. Gary suffers this for his brother, who was a retired supervillain before his untimely death at the hands of a "hero", and who would, from what little we see of him, absolutely not want Gary to follow in his footsteps.
• Mission Control: Mandy takes on this role with Gary, providing him valuable intelligence through the power of the internet.
• The Missus and the Ex: Merciless finds himself working with his wife, two of his exes and his wife's ex. Awkward! Specifically, Gary is married to Mandy but his ex-girlfriend Cindy is his chief henchwoman. It causes only minor friction until Mandy is killed and resurrected as a vampire, where Gary and Cindy get back together out of grief. They even have a child together. Then Mandy gets her soul back. Oops. That's not even getting into how Ultragoddess and the Black Witch fit into things.
• Most Common Superpower: Superheroines (and superheroes to a lesser extent) make ample use of illusion magic to make themselves appear as incredibly beautiful physical paragons. This includes an extensive bust for (nearly) every woman. Gary asks about it and Cindy basically says they do it because they can and it's lucrative as a marketing opportunity.
• Mr. Vice Guy: the protagonists are all associated with various vices. Gary is associated with Pride (usually the worst sin), Cindy with Lust as well as Greed, and Diabloman was once synonymous with Wraith. They're all Antihero protagonists (or Antivillain depending on your point of view) tat ultimately do the right thing.
• Ms. Fanservice:
  • Cindy Wakowski a.k.a. Red Riding Hood deliberately cultivates this role as a henchperson.
  • Guinevere is the most beautiful woman in the world as one of her powers. Normally, she looks like Priyanka Chopra and that's not a bad argument by itself.
  • Gabrielle Anders is an Amazonian Beauty with a large bust and is of mixed Latina and African American descent. She also wears an outfit inspired by Supergirl.
  • Mandy is described as "Selene from Underworld if she was Eurasian." She dresses the part too.
  • Selena Darkchylde is a woman Gary cannot help but engage in Beige Prose regarding despite the fact she's one of the few women in the series not attracted to him.
• The Multiverse: Gary's adventures exists in one of these and other universes sometimes come up as plot points or a Noodle Incident. It becomes a focus of the setting with The Tournament of Supervillainy when we discover that all of C.T. Phipps' books are set in the same multiverse and can interact with one another.
• Nebulous Evil Organization: P.H.A.N.T.O.M is mentioned on numerous occasions. Doubles as a shout-out to SPECTRE.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Not Gary but Shoot-Em-Up. An Anti-hero in the Nineties who wanted to kill supervillains to make sure they stopped menacing people, targeted a bunch of reformed and mostly-harmless ones in front of their families. The effect of this is, after killing Gary's brother Keith (a B-list supervillain named Stingray), he sets Gary on his path to supervillaindom. Which results in Gary shooting him in a hotel later that year, despite the former being only fourteen years old.
• Nineties Antihero: The book shreds these mercilessly (no pun intended). Shoot-Em-Up is the first and he inspired Gary to become a supervillain by murdering his brother after he reformed. The Extreme, an entire team of them, are even worse.
  • Gary is deeply troubled when he starts to realize, after killing numerous villains and getting praise for it, he's morphed into one of these himself.
• Noodle Incident: A number of these are referenced by Gary, implying adventures or oddball events in-between stories.
  • Gary has killed Hitler 63 times in various universes.
  • Cindy has used Time Travel for sex tourism.
  • Gary at one point was a member of the The Black Eyed Peas. It's later joked he's far more famous for that than being a supervillain.
  • Wentworth Miller did a movie of Gary's adventures. It flopped.
• Nominal Hero: The Extreme and Shoot-Em-Up don't do anything good but kill supervillains. Reformed or harmless or not.
• Not-So-Harmless Villain: Most supervillains assume Gary is a Harmless Villain due to his laid-back demeanor, Card Carrying Villainy, and rambling. He really comes off more as a demented cosplayer than a supervillain. Then the bodies start dropping.
• Polyamory: Villain Protagonist Gary is monogamous with his wife, Mandy, during the start of the series but becomes involved with sidekick Cindy when his wife is a soulless vampire. Then Mandy gets her soul back and it becomes complicated. Also, Supergirl Expy Gabrielle and Gary have an on again, off again relationship dating back to college. Later, Gary admits that he tries to maintain all of his relationships because he's afraid of losing any of them from his life.
• Police Are Useless: Gary thinks so. Given there's 400 supervillains in the city and many have superpowers or super-tech, it's more like, "police are completely outmatched." we eventually discover in Games this is because the police are controlled by the Brotherhood of Infamy.]
• Pop-Cultured Badass: Cindy, Gary, and several other characters are very very nerdy as well as badass.
• Psycho for Hire: Psychoslinger is, apparently, this. He's a spree-killer, serial killer, and all round lunatic the other villains use.
  • Plenty of other supervillains follow this policy as many work for the Brotherhood of Infamy despite the fact they're murdering an entire city of innocents.''
• Refuge in Audacity: A large part of why Gary is so successful. People can't compartmentalize Gary more or less just walking up to people, announcing he's a supervillain, and then carrying out his plan without hurting anyone but fellow villains.
  • Cindy develops this habit as well.
• Religion of Evil: The Brotherhood of Infamy. Subverted by the fact, while their methods are deplorable, their desire to rid the world of superheroes and supervillains makes perfect sense given how crazy they've made the world.
• The Reveal: The series is very fond of these.
  • In Rules, Mandy was intended to have the Cloak, not Gary. Cloak was the Nightwalker's ghost all along.
  • In Games, that the Brotherhood of Infamy was founded by Arthur Warren a.k.a the Nightwalker before he became The Atoner. Its further controlled Falconcrest City the entire time and that's why it's a crime-ridden cesspool.'' Finally, Mandy Came Back Wrong and no longer has a human soul.
  • In Secrets that President Omega is actually a time-traveling Nazi supervillain. Gary has actually a predecessor doppelganger from a universe destroyed in a cosmic crisis.
  • In Science that Gary's doppelganger has taken over Falconcrest City and made it a clean and orderly police state.
  • In Tournament That the entire series has been secretly manipulated by the Primal known as Deconstruction who has been keeping Status Quo Is God. Also, that Mandy is actually Diabloman's sister Spellbinder.
• Seinfeldian Conversation: Always there in the books but hits a new high in The Secrets of Supervillainy where Gary stops an important conversation about how they're wanted by the government and the world's greatest superhero is dead to talk about why Cindy didn't love The Force Awakens.
• Servile Snarker: Cloak has this relationship to Gary, constantly pointing out the flaws in his very twisted logic.
• Shout-Out: The streets in Falconcrest City are named after famous comic book writers.
  • Ultragoddess is playing a clear homage to Injustice: Gods Among Us while wearing a Star Wars t-shirt.
  • The phone to the Chief of Police's office is an homage to the 60s Batman tv series.
  • Gary makes frequent references to the Alien movies when fleeing an extraterrestial predator.
  • Gary says his costume looks like a combination of a Sith Lord and Ring Wraith's outfit.
  • Sunlight is said to have done a lot of drugs with Hunter S. Thompson.
  • A blink and you'll miss it reference to Grant Morrison's X-men is Gary's fourteen year old self is described as dressing nearly identical to Quentin Quire.
• Spicy Latina: Averted with Ultragoddess who is both black as well as Latina but the most sensible woman in the cast aside from Mandy.
• Straight Gay: Bronze Medal has nothing camp about him whatsoever. This also applies to Mandy and the Black Witch.
• Superheroes Stay Single: Gary Karkofsky a.k.a Merciless starts Happily Married with his wife Mandy, only to have severe strain on his marriage occur due to his new life as a supervillain. He also has a lot of tension reignited with his ex-fiance, Ultragoddess, and old girlfriend turned henchwoman, Cindy. Similarly, Mandy's own exes play a role in the book as well as villains attracted to her. Mandy ends up killed, raised as a vampire, and then Gary has a child with Cindy due to a one-night stand while grieving. Gary gets back together with Mandy after her soul is restored but their relationship is never the same.
• Superman Substitute: Ultragod is the resident equivalent to Superman. His powers more closely resemble Green Lantern's even if he uses them to mostly replicate the standard Flying Brick power-set. He has a Supergirl equivalent in his daughter Ultragoddess, The Observatory as his Fortress of Solitude-esque base of operations, and a reporter wife named Polly Perkins. He's also African American, immortal, and a human astronomer empowered by aliens.
• Thou Shall Not Kill: Revealed to be a code of ethics most superheroes follow. It's Justified when Ultragod points out it avoids a lot of problems both legally, ethically, as well as practically. Furthermore, it can be bent if there's absolutely no other resort. Those superheroes who don't care about murder are called antiheroes in-universe.
• Those Wacky Nazis: Gary, being Jewish, doesn't find a superhero who incorporates their iconography the least bit funny. He's even less fond of Neo-Nazis it turns out, though Nazi Robots are something he's positively giddy to blow up.
• Trade Snark: Gary is ''Merciless: The Supervillain without Mercy™.
• Uncertain Doom: In "Merciless vs. Sidekick Girl", the eponymous supervillain wannabe (who had previously made a deal with an Eldritch Abomination), is pulled out of sight by otherworldly forces after being knocked out in a fight with the heroes. However, is is unclear whether she is being Dragged Off to Hell or her otherworldly patron is rescuing her from imprisonment for another battle.
• Unskilled, but Strong: Gary isn't a very powerful supervillain but he has a lot of very versatile abilities he makes intelligent use of. He also then becomes MUCH more powerful once he makes a pact with Death.
• Villain Cred: Gary is constantly trying to increase his and running into the fact no one takes him seriously. This despite the fact he has a body count three figures long of other supervillains and has killed a number of '90s Anti-Hero types. Amusingly, he's genuinely surprised when villains avert it and assume he's using Obfuscating Stupidity to appear less dangerous than he is. He isn't. He's just an enormous dork.
• Villain Decay: In-universe. Diabloman used to be one of the most feared villains in the world but health problems have reduced him to being a D-Lister's sidekick. Gary offers him a position as his Dragon and Diabloman never looks back.
  • Inverted for the Ice Cream Man and Typewriter who begin as Starter Villain types only to come back as superpowered zombies.
• Villain Protagonist: It's in the title. Gary is a supervillain and proudly so. He, eventually, becomes an antihero instead.
• Villain with Good Publicity: This starts happening with both the public and superheroes when they start to note Gary's "victims" are all evil.
• Voice with an Internet Connection: How Mandy stays in touch throughout the story.
• Women Are Wiser: Mandy has elements of this, especially in comparison to the complete lunacy of Gary and his crew. As does Ultragoddess. Subverted by the fact it's really just Gary and his crew who are insane. We just see more of them (plus Cindy is arguably more deranged than Gary).
• What the Hell, Hero?: In Rules, a bank teller when he robs the bank within minutes of saving the employees from being killed. And then does it again the next day.
• Where the Hell Is Springfield?:
  • Falconcest City is revealed to be on the other side of Lake Falconcrest which is on the border of Canada.
  • Atlas City is located in central Florida, near Cape Canaveral.
• World of Badass: Gary lives in a world where four hundred supervillains in one city is just really-really high.
• Worthy Opponent: Gary seems to have this sort of feeling for the Society of Superheroes. They seem more confused why a non-psychopath wants to be a supervillain.
• Zombie Apocalypse: What will happen if Gary doesn't use his powers often enough. He thinks it's a minor disadvantage. We get to see a full-blown example of it in the second novel.

---