The world of The Simpsons is such a delightfully complicated one and such a part of the world’s cultural landscape of the last twenty five years that its icons are globally recognisable. This Handbook of World Domination, as if the cover didn’t give it away, is a collection of material allegedly compiled by the series’ great baddie, Mr Charles Montgomery Burns, but written/drawn by the series’ creator Matt Groening. Its purpose is to give a view of the world useful for any tyrant, or indeed anyone with a need for global domination:
Does power corrupt? Absolutely!
Does the hunger and lust for absolute power course through your icy blue veins?
Do you feel the need to rule the world with an iron fist?
To subjugate the masses with a whimsical snap of your fingers?
To rise above the insolent and unworthy with your superior intelligence and unlimited supply of cold hard cash?
Have you ever wondered if there was a simple step-by-step guide for following your impulses and instincts toward world domination?
You’ve come to the right place. Here is the opportunity of a lifetime—the chance to turn your sociopathic needs into bloodthirsty greed! Now you can learn at the feet of the Master of Megalomania . . . Charles Montgomery Burns!
Don’t just stand there, you snivelling slugabed. Purchase this portable periodical post-haste and leave your conscience at the cash register!
This book’s a lot of fun.
Within its 64 pages there’s a lot of inserts, flip-out pages, motivational posters (‘Dream…but do it on your own time!), a comic book (‘Fruit Bat Man and his sidekick Nuthatch, the red breasted wonder boy!’), a family tree and a poster of the Burns’ family crest (and the motto‘Malicious Decrepitus Rex’), a diagram showing Mr Burns’ brain (with an area labelled ‘Selected Extracts from Mein Kampf’),
a bucket list of 30 things to do (“3. Get a tan. , 18. Exact my revenge on Maggie Simpson.”),
the first brochure from the CMB TV network (including the programme ‘Game of Drones’, “Morally ambiguous and dim-witted workers in a nuclear plant battle for the Porcelain Throne of the Seven Sectors. Each week, the sole female employee finds an opportunity to remove her top.”) and items such as Tyrant Togs, ‘inspirational cosplay for the aspiring authoritarian’. (This includes Napoleon, Kim Jong-il, Skeletor and Galactus.)
This is clearly very silly and not to be taken seriously at all. Fans of The Simpsons will love it, and there’s a lot here that has clearly taken time to produce. A good way to spent an hour or so, which left me with a big smile on my face after reading it. It is indeed, as one of the Burnsisms therein attests, “…the Cat’s Pajamas, the elephant’s eyebrows, the eel’s hips, the bee’s knees and gnat’s whistle!”*
C. Montgomery Burns’ Handbook of World Domination by Matt Groening
By Matt Groening
Published by Bantam Books, November 2014
ISBN: 978 0 593 07302 5
64 pages
Review by Mark Yon, October 2014
* That is something Excellent.
I don’t think this is genuine as it is displaying but if this is actually pretty useful considering how much of a genius way of saying how to control the world, people population, the government and the society in plain sight than where to begin and do not give me no celebrities propaganda and fandom paparazzi bullshit.