How to Succeed in Evil
March 6, 2010 11:25 AM   Subscribe

How to Succeed in Evil is the story of Edwin Windsor, Evil Efficiency Consultant. He's like Arthur Anderson for Supervillans. A novel by Patrick E. Mclean (the guy behind the Seanachai podcast). The novel (promo mp3) will be available March 16th, but the entire thing is already available free in audiobook form as itunes files (zipped) (err..should be eventually but dropbox was giving a 500 error when I tried it) or mp3/stream. There is also a promo comic (pdf) illustrated by Nicolaus Rummel.
posted by juv3nal (10 comments total) 9 users marked this as a favorite
 
Didn't Dr. Henry Killinger already write this book?
posted by Saxon Kane at 11:37 AM on March 6, 2010 [2 favorites]


With a little help from his Magic Murder Bag. Go Team Venture!
posted by JHarris at 12:20 PM on March 6, 2010


How about a real response? Sure....

I listened to the first episodes of the pod cast a couple of years back and found it pretty nice. It does have a Venture Bros. vibe to it, and yes, there is something of Dr. Henry Killinger in there, without the (literal) magic. (Edwin predates that character by a year or so.)

Looking back over the archives, it is interesting that the creator suffered a bit of a creative crisis right around the time I stopped listening to it. In fact, I had assumed he had just let it die and moved on to other things, so it's nice to see that he picked it back up and even remade the whole thing.

Reading the podcast comments, it seems that right around the time of the faultering, he attempted a radical revision of Edwin. The episode is "Edwin 2.0." It went over poorly with most of his audience. It seems like the inspiration for the reworked character was actually advice he had received from TV execs to whom he had shopped the story around to. Fortunately, it seems he then reversed the reboot and returned the character to something more like his original self.

Just another way that TV executives have tried to ruin the world.
posted by JHarris at 12:38 PM on March 6, 2010


The comic is fun. I'll give it a shot.
posted by doctor_negative at 12:56 PM on March 6, 2010


The novel sounds like fun. I'll have to give the audio version a whirl on my next long car trip.

And just because it's still funny after all these years: The Top 100 Things I'd Do
If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord.


(I'm partial to #34, myself. It's so true.)
posted by Strange Interlude at 1:50 PM on March 6, 2010


Peter's Evil Overlord List = Peter's Habits of Highly Effective Overlord People.
posted by SPrintF at 6:01 PM on March 6, 2010


In the same Supervillain theme, there's Brad Guigar's webcomic Evil Inc.
posted by oneswellfoop at 6:05 PM on March 6, 2010


there's an obvious flaw in Evil Overlord list #46: the correct answer is kill the advisor and then say "That." As it stands, it would violate #6.

It also occurs to me that many of these items have been effectively institutionalized by the KMT.

We now return to our original programming.
posted by warbaby at 7:53 PM on March 6, 2010


His bandwidth on the itunes downloads got borked and he sent me an email letting me know that y'all should use the mp3/stream link in the meantime.

(Put away the pitchforks. Not a self/friend link. He has my email because I commented on his blog/site thingy. I'm just a fan.)
posted by juv3nal at 8:44 PM on March 6, 2010


Arthur Andersen for supervillains?
posted by grobstein at 1:36 PM on March 8, 2010


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