Review: Dr. Anarchy's Rules for World Domination

Or How I Became God-Emperor of Rhode Island

In 2017’s The LEGO Batman Movie, Joker’s motivation stemmed from his resentment toward Batman after finding out that the Caped Crusader didn’t consider him to be his arch-nemesis. Joker then went on a massive crime bender to conquer the world, defeat all the heroes, and become the undisputed king of evil and so forth.

DR. ANARCHY’S RULES FOR WORLD DOMINATION, also released in 2017, follows this same idea, at least generally. In my YouTube video about this book, I compared it to a few other titles with supervillains as the main character. We’ll get into that.

For now, this was an entertaining book, but I want to be fair about its flaws.

The Story

Dr. Anarchy—real name Michael Jackson, and yes, we get jokes about that—is an engineer with an IQ over 200 and a burning desire to conquer the world/defeat the League of Superheroes/etc. He’s on the FBI’s Most Wanted list and he’s trying to work his way up to #1, but between stiff competition and his own blind spots, it’s hard to gain headway.

He hits a personal wall when he meets the book’s stand-in for Batman and declares himself to be the Dark Detective’s nemesis, only for Not-Batman to dismiss him as a one-off villain who isn’t worthy of his full attention. Like LEGO Batman and LEGO Joker, this is the emotional driver of the book for Anarchy.

What follows is a series of evolving challenges that escalate in scope and intensity as Dr. Anarchy gets closer to his goal. Ultimately he achieves it, and we’re treated to a glimpse of what he does with (limited) absolute power.

The Characters

The two with the most screen time were Dr. Anarchy and his assistant, Raven, who is an Asian-American woman that he found washed up on the beach one morning, paralyzed after an accident. He rebuilt her as a cyborg ninja, and now she pays off her debt by helping him with his quest.

Their dynamic was the most enjoyable part of the book for me. Here and there the dialogue felt a little cheesy and forced, but you can tell Chereta loved these characters and put effort into them, and they oppose each other well. Raven doesn’t have his riches or intellect, and Anarchy doesn’t have her tactical skills. They start to care for each other as events play out, and when they get together it felt believable. I liked that.

There’s also a revolving door of fellow low-level villains, organizations of heroes and bad guys, and alumni of other groups Anarchy has belonged to, and they make good contributions here and there. Mainly it’s Anarchy and Raven who carry the narrative in their first-person accounts, and they have good voices.

The World

A few years ago on this site I reviewed CONFESSIONS OF A D-LIST SUPERVILLAIN by Jim Bernheimer; DR. ANARCHY… is built from the same framework as that one. It’s basically our world but heroes and villains exist openly, but they’re not responding to our geopolitical problems all that much. They care about turning the whole world into cockroaches or other equally preposterous comic-book plots. There are aliens and magic and everything else that makes the world wide-open with potential. It’s fun and familiar.

Politics

When Dr. Anarchy achieves God-Emperor status over all of Rhode Island, he goes on a diatribe about how perfect his state is under his control, and he quite directly looks at the reader to say that his laws would piss off both conservatives and liberals.

This passage didn’t work for me because it broke away from Dr. Anarchy’s voice and I felt like Nelson Chereta was instead reaching through the page to get me to hear his own politics. “Legalize drugs! Regulate sex work! Mwahahahaha!” It induced some heavy eye-rolling in an otherwise fun book.

Content Warning

F-bombs and other language happen somewhat regularly. Abundant sexual references pop up with the intensity of a Netflix jump-scene. Dr. Anarchy callously executes people with a disintegration gun for petty shortcomings, etc.

On top of that, Nelson Chereta is clearly a New England Patriots fan. Indecent.

Who is it for?

If you liked the aforementioned D-List Supervillain books, or the Full Metal Superhero series by Jeff Haskell, or SOON I WILL BE INVINCIBLE by Austin Grossman, these are for you. Fan’s of Amazon’s Invincible cartoon will also like it.

And I guess anyone who’s still watching The Boys will appreciate the setting and characters, though they might be confused by the lack of outright nihilism.

Why buy it

I covered that in my video review. Short version: it’s fun, even if it’s walking along well-trod ground. I got about a third of the way through it before I started feeling like I’d read it before (only because I’d read Bernheimer, Haskell, and Grossman) but by the end I felt like Chereta had made his own distinct addition to the subgenre.