Invest
Explanation
This comic satirizes supervillain monologues by injecting practical financial advice.
The top panel shows what appears to be a supervillain delivering a speech to an assembled group of costumed characters. Instead of outlining a plan for world domination, the villain advises: rather than using their resources to attempt a takeover of Australia, they should invest in index funds, withdraw 4% a year, and use the returns to take over small towns in New Zealand one at a time. The villain emphasizes that "the goal is long-term sustainability."
The bottom panel shows a bell curve (normal distribution) plotting "How good a supervillain movie is" against "Realism." The curve suggests that supervillain movies are best at moderate levels of realism -- too little realism makes them cartoonish and forgettable, but too much realism (like a villain who advocates for index fund investing and incremental territorial acquisition) becomes absurd in its own way.
The humor comes from the collision between the dramatic conventions of villainy -- grandiose plans, theatrical speeches, world domination -- and the mundane wisdom of personal finance. The comic suggests that a truly rational villain would just follow standard investment advice, which is funny precisely because it's correct but completely deflates the genre. The bell curve adds a meta-commentary on why movies avoid this kind of realism: it's technically smarter but dramatically boring.