Fairly simple really, choose your token interfering busybody and share with us your completely reliable, utterly unfoilable masterplan to dispose of them.
I figure with the sorts of evil geniuses knocking about on this board we should at least be able to do better than the Joker.
Feel free to point out the tiny flaws in each others plans.
You are limited to the resources typically available to your chosen quarries foes.
Bonus marks if you can figure out a way to dispose of Superman without resorting to kryptonite.
No points at all for anyone using any variety of death-ray whatsoever.
.50 sniper rifle from a mile or two away. Three rounds to the head; if there aren’t superbrains drizzled liberally all over the pavement, at least their PR stock will have dropped somewhat.
Pick a good, concealed vantage point. Get some expendable henchmen to lure him to your position (use gang members or whoever else is stupid enough to do such a thing). When the Punisher shows up aim for his head, fire, AND DON’T MISS!
“Just shoot them” sounds like a simple enough plan, but think of your favorite super hero, and then think of how many times they’ve been shot at, or even shot. Aside from a bullet point blank in the skull, guns really don’t do much good. What you have to do is the good old fashioned “find out their personal identity, then take advantage of that by threatening their loved ones.” Even without knowing their personal identity, it’s always easy to find at least one or two people they really care about to use against them. Just capture that one person, have the hero put themselves in a chryogenic tube, then launch them into the sun/drop them into a volcano/tie a heavy wieght to their tube and drop them into the deepest part of the ocean and let the preasure and water do the rest.
As for Superman, assuming you can get ahold of one of those wonderful interstellar space ships, I would get him out of the way like this: Hire a bunch of actors and train them for about two years on how to act “Kryptonian”. Then transplant them to a far off galaxy in a solar system with a red sun, create a threat, and have Superman jsut happen across their diestress signal. He’ll expend a good amount of energy to get there, and once there, he’ll use up the rest of his superhero battery. Once he’s as weak as everyone else, have the actors blast him into oblivion, or for shits and giggles, unleash Doomsday on him.
Or just pay Lobo to kick the crap out of him again. Just make sure you don’t run out of booze
Team one prepares the super-secret hideout in the Appalachian mountains. This should be the anal-retentive types in your group, the ones that pay attention to every little detail. Robot minions would be very effective here
Team two attacks a nursing home in Anaheim with baseball bats. These guys are going to get caught and end up in a mental institution for the criminally insane; best to staff this team with those goons who have annoyed you recently and who you haven’t yet executed in front of the other goons as a warning.
Team three – this is the most important team – goes to a hospital in the mountains; while team two is attacking in Anaheim, team 3 kidnaps all the babies from the hospital.
Take all the babies back to your super-secret hideout. Each baby goes in a separate room with a separate goon. The walls are reinforced steel around a thin layer of lead. Each baby gets fitted with a computer-controlled grenade, set to go off if it ever stops receiving the encrypting, constantly-changing code it’s designed to receive by radio transmission. If any wall in the complex is breached, or if the door is opened once all of team 1 and team 3 are inside, the radio signal stops.
Now you just let superman know that he can sacrifice himself, or he can sacrifice the babies. Remind him that there are plenty of other superheroes out there who can fill in for him once he’s gone. Videotape the mothers of the babies and send copies to Superman. Give him thirty seconds to show up at a prearranged meeting spot with a means of killing himself (this way, he provides the kryptonite, not you); for every five seconds late he is, another baby gets it.
Advantages of plan:
Superman is all about the self-sacrifice.
Thirty seconds gives him plenty of time to get to your meeting spot, but not enough time to prepare some sort of counter-ambush.
He may be able to break through fast enough to save some of the babies, but not all of them, and he couldn’t possibly let some of them die.
Cons:
If he’s smart, he’ll just fly around the world backwards really fast, reverse time, and then catch you and lock you up in the insane asylum before you assemble the three teams of goons.
Or he’ll just fly to the pre-arranged spot and tear off your head. Sorry, but if we can act without any regard to the "rules’ of comic-bookdom then we must assume that the heros can also act that way. That is, Superman would be a little more pragmatic then he is made to appear in the comic books. To foil your nasty plan he would contact Batman and ask him to work on the kids-with-bombs issue. Then, he would fly to you, pick you up and torture you about 1 mile above the planet. This ought to do the trick.
Are we talking “in comic” or “in real life”? In comic, I think you’d have to sap their popularity by involving them in lots of heroic but boring rescues, then set up a self sacrifice of some sort. IRL you go with the aforementioned “fail of bullets” theory. Two competant marksmen on nearly opposite sides with automatic weapons should do the trick. Of course, there’s a chance of failure (this chance always comes up in the comics), but no amount of fannying about really makes this any better. To be surer, do something similar lots of times, only in fiction do million-to-1 shots keep coming up.
Not sure about superman… maybe if his powers stabilise I can work something out
The problem with sniping from a distance is that the first bullet will always miss (narrative causality) enabling the hero to seek cover, I think most super heroes would have to be affixed to something and then riddled with bullets.
Left Hand of Dorkness Good plan, however -
How happy are the goons on baby sitting duty going to be about being blown up, dissent from within could scupper your plans.
Getting back to your hideout, wiring up babys, interviewing parents, etc could take enough time for supes to figure out what was going on and crash your little party pre dilemma.
You either have to have some way of stopping the bomb if Superman plays along (which he could use) or risk having him realise that you are going to blow them up anyway.
30 seconds might not be enough time for him to obtain some kryptonite or other means of suicide, you run the risk of ending up at the 2 minute mark fresh out of babies with a really PO’ed kryptonian breathing down your neck.
Have you accounted for the fact that he might try faking his own death. Do you know how to take supermans pulse?
How does the encrypted radio broadcast get into the lead lined rooms?
Using my interdimensional-travel machine, I would journey to the Parody version of that hero’s universe, where the narrative causality would be on my side instead of against me. I would be the dorky nobody who obliviously gets the hero killed by accident
In JLA/Planetary: Terra Oculta, the evil Elijah Snow sends Superman to his doom by casting him off into the void of space. Don’t forget - Superman cannot survive in a vacuum anymore.
Well, it depends on the super hero. For physically and mystically weaker heros, like Batman, I would have my loyal cannon fod^H err I mean cultists, kidnap some small children, and tell Batman he has 15 minutes to make it to a remote warehouse or the kids die. This keeps him from preparing. Of course, I have my cultist slaughter the kids right after they get to the warehouse, as long as Batman doesn’t know the kids are dead they will work just as well as hostages, and then they won’t get in the way.
When Batman shows up, I will just command all of the cultist, Deep Ones, and Star Spawn I have in the area to rush him, guns ablazing. Of course that might not work, so I have some of my more crazy^H^H^H loyal cultist have a VERY large bomb(if possible, nuclear) built into the warehouse, and they will detonate it in the middle of the fight, while Batman is too busy going hand to hand with the deep ones to notice the bomb. That should take care of Batman.
For a really powerful super hero, like Super Man, I would just have to wait till The Stars Are Right, and deal with him myself. I figure I could shatter his mind telepathically, then eat him with some kryptonite salt just to make sure.
This won’t kill him, but it will get him out of your way permanently. All you need to do is convince him to run fast enough and long enough. Physics will do the rest.
Step 1:
Make sure Flash hasn’t seen the movie “The Core.” If he hasn’t, tell him the Earth’s core has stopped spinning. These types of critical ecological failures occur all the time in comics, and superheroes correct them on a regular basis. Hire some scientist-type (or a government, if you can afford it), to present Flash with the solution. Tell him the problem can only be corrected by him running a zillion laps around the equator as fast as he can. That should do the trick.
Step 2:
There is no Step 2. As Flash begins to run and approaches the speed of light, time should slow down for him. What seems like a short time for him is a lifetime for you. You are free to carry out your evil schemes free from his interference. By the time he finishes, you’ll either be dead or be enjoying the fruits of your evil labor on a tropical island somewhere.
