By C. T. Phipps
MORTAL KOMBAT!
*techno music plays*
Oh, sorry, I was briefly lost in the Nineties. You’ll understand why I made that reference in a bit. When I completed the Science of Supervillainy, I briefly debated having Gary hang up his cloak for good. There’s always the problem of dragging out a series too long. You don’t want to overstay your welcome and it was a decent place to end the story. Gary had defeated Merciful, President Omega, and matured into a responsible adu…okay, I can’t finish that sentence without laughing. Gary didn’t mature in the slightest.
However, I didn’t want the series to become nothing more than a series of constantly repeated jokes and pop culture references. I already had some people saying the formula was becoming stale. I’ll even share a secret with you: I wrote a good sixty thousand words of Supervillainy Saga #5 before realizing I just wasn’t enjoying it. Thus, I scrapped the Kingdom of Supervillainy and decided to make the Tournament of Supervillainy instead. So what is this novel?
The Tournament of Supervillainy is an homage to all the dozens of fighting games I played during my teenage years ranging from Street Fighter II to Tekken to a few I don’t think anyone remembers (Virtua Fighter anyone?). Gone are the days of the arcade and the replacement of fighting online in multiplayer matches just isn’t the same. It’s also an homage to Enter the Dragon and other martial arts movies that inspired the fighting game genre.
Seriously, I must have spent thousands of dollars plugging quarters into arcade machines in order to try to win the various tournaments that countless villains had set up across the globe. I still have a poster of Chun Li on my wall even as I am torn between her and Sonya Blade. Ahem, sorry, I made it weird. I loved the colorful collection of characters who, somehow, had to save the world by smacking each other around. The similarity to comic books is obvious and, even better, you have a reason why hero fought hero.
It’s also a crossover story and fans of my other works will note Gary is going to be meeting the stars of Agent G, I was a Teenage Weredeer, Lucifer’s Star, and a few other books of mine. Why is this? Well, I’ve always loved works like Crisis on Infinite Earths and it would lose a bit of its oomph if I just had Gary meeting analogues for other superheroes. You don’t need to have read the other books to know what’s what, though. All you need to know is Gary is very good at making friends even in other universes.
This book will also finally get to have Gary take a serious moment to examine just what he plans to do with the rest of his career as a supervillain. It also will give us some insight into how the Society of Superheroes is coping with losing its equivalent to Batman and Superman. *pause* I mean, the Nightwalker and Ultragod have no similarity to either! Honest!
*shoos away DC Comics’ lawyers*
But is Gary going to continue? Yes, yes he is. Much like the comic book stories that inspired him and my idea for “What if Spiderman was a bad guy?”, Merciless is a character who exists within the confines of a single story from beginning to middle to end. However, that doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of stories left to tell about him. As long as there’s evil to be fought and money to be made from it, Merciless will stand right there in the middle.
Until I get bored or maybe Gary does. Honestly, I’m not sure who is in charge of our relationship.