Welcome back to Funding The Kryptonite, a blog that will take a look at comic book super villains and discuss them from a business perspective.
Today's blog post will be discussing the super villain team known as the Secret Six. Composed of relatively well known bad guys such as Deadshot and Bane teaming up with more B-list types such as Ragdoll, Catman, and Scandal, the Six struck out on their own as a hired muscle team for anyone with the dollars to pay. As it turns out, they need a bit more than that to be successful.
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Gooning For Dollars
The Six are hired for a relatively simple mission: Extract the super villain Tarantula from prison in Alcatraz and deliver her to Gotham City alive, collect payment. This is where the first problem crops up, being that their employer for this mission is entirely anonymous to them. A critical issue stems from this, being that not knowing who you are working for can be very dangerous.
Brand Association
The Six speculate on who their employer could be, and one particular guess of note is the Joker. As discussed in a previous post, he's not exactly what one might call a nice guy. Beyond his mercurial personality there's an additional problem with working for a guy like the Joker which is that other people might not want to work with you after.
Selecting the right partners or employers for business is a pretty important factor in charting your forward path. An easy example is anyone who goes to work in the tobacco industry. While they might simply want to work for a big firm, the associations in the public eye linked to that employer will impact the employee going forward. It might turn off other future employers, or cause social problems.
By not knowing who they are being hired by, the Six run a pretty big risk of being associated with undesirable parties. And given they're already super villains, that's digging yourself even lower.
Risking The Unknown
The Six have another major problem in that their ability to take the job, or turn it down, requires access to information they are not given. As presented, they face a simple jail break and delivery job. In reality, the person they are escaping with carries a "Get Out Of Hell Free" card. For any number of super villains who have murdered, extorted, and otherwise generally done a lot of bad things, the idea of being able to walk away from a blood soaked life without rotting in Hell forever is pretty appealing!
Information is crucial to risk management because it is what allows you to accurately assess the potential risks involved, their severity and likeliness, and make an informed decision on a course of action. Without that, the Six find themselves hunted by a minor army of angry B-list villains who are being offered a handsome reward for the heads of the Six and the card delivered to their own benefactors.
Closing Comments
The Six are a team of loveable rogues, and being composed of a motley of largely sociopathic already puts them at pretty good odds for horrible, and hilarious, self-implosion. Good business practices would minimize their exposure to the wide variety of other things that would kill them and leave them to getting that done on their own.
"I can't say for certain who it is, but the advance cash came smelling distinctly of herring." -Scandal (Secret Six #1)
Final Rating: Bad business!
P.S: This storyline can be found in the Secret Six: Unhinged trade paperback. I strongly suggest picking it up, it's hilariously witty.
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