Meru Marlowe is a True Crime writer with a single book under her belt, desperately looking for a subject for her next book. After seeing a special about the mystery of flight 815, where every person on the flight developed total amnesia except for one unknown passenger, Meru is inspired to follow up on the case. What she finds will draw her into a world of betrayal, paranoia, and corruption, all revolving around the mysterious organization known only as Mind Management.
In 2020, a board game was crowdfunded titled: MIND MGMT: The Psychic Espionage "Game" on Kickstarter in which one player plays as the recruiter while the others play as the rogue agents in a hidden movement game. The Kickstarter edition was sent to backers, and the retail version was sent to stores in 2021. A second Kickstarter was created due to popular demand, reprinting the Kickstarter edition of the game with physical versions of the secret mission cards.
Tropes in the original MIND MGMT series include:
- Animal Eye Spy: One of several psychic powers trained at Mind Management; agents were expected to guide animals through a maze or order them to do something suicidal. Ironically, the most successful practitioner of this power hated using it, as she was an Animal Lover and couldn't bear to see them get hurt.
- Book Ends: Issue 1 begins with two people grappling and trying to kill each other while falling off a building. In the climax of the series in issue 35, two people are grappling as they fall through a collapsing building, but they're not trying to kill each other.
- Brown Note: Mind Management has several different flavors of this, including the assassination letter (which has to be printed on special paper and handled only by blindfolded agents) and Versus Verses.
- Chekhov's Army: In most issues, the "Second Floor" section at the beginning gives a brief biography of an agent. Many of those agents then show up in later stories, and several of them become major characters by the finale. Notable examples include Barbe Noir and the Wish, who only appeared in one issue each before being part of the Eraser's special forces in the climax.
- Cognizant Limbs: One character, Chip, was the product of experiments by Mind Management; his left arm grew much larger and stronger, and seemed to have a mind of its own. During a psychic confrontation, it attempts to strangle Chip to death, and he's forced to cut it off with a pocketknife.
- Exact Words: When Meru confronts a group of the Eraser's agents, she intimidates them by showing the umbrella of protection, saying she "took it from the First Immortal," "minutes before I killed him." What she neglects to mention is that he willingly gave her the umbrella, and she didn't realize she was killing him thanks to her Anti-Magic field.
- Expy: P.K. Verve is a version of Philip K. Dick, right down to the name.
- Gaslighting: A particularly cruel example with the Eraser, whose husband used his powers to erase selected memories and keep her questioning what was and wasn't real.
- History Repeats: Meru tracks down Henry Lyme, the missing passenger of Flight 815, only to later discover that it's not the first time she's done so. In fact, it's at least the seventh.
- Improperly Paranoid: We eventually discover that this was the cause of the Zanzibar City massacre. Lyme was so paranoid about whether he was subconsciously manipulating his wife and daughter to love him that he drove the entire city to commit suicide in a frenzy of paranoia and hate.
- Invisible to Normals: This is Mind Management's main operating principle. They use subliminal messages that can only be perceived by people with psychic abilities, both as a means of communication and for recruitment. Their flux safe houses can only be truly seen by agents; everyone else sees them as an uninteresting business.
- Laser-Guided Amnesia: The power of The Eraser, who can do exactly what it sounds like. When Mind Management was shut down, she had the responsibility of erasing the memories of all agents.
- Master of Your Domain: One of the disciplines of Mind Management; agents would be tested to see if they could heal wounds by communicating with their own cells. Agents with an affinity for this power were known as "Immortals," since they couldn't die—even if they wanted to.
- Mundane Solution: More than once, characters who are prepared for some use of psychic abilities are instead taken out by something completely ordinary.
- In one issue, Duncan faces off against one of the Immortals, and starts describing his Touch of Death attack. The Immortal seems confident it won't work on her, but Duncan seems ready to test that theory. Instead, Duncan just gives her a throat chop and flees while she's recovering.
- Meru briefly faces down an entire station's worth of police officers who are prepared for her abilities. When she points to a box on a nearby table that's smoking, they dismiss it as an illusion, until they realize she can't create illusions. Then the box bursts into flames, distracting them long enough for Meru to get what she came for. We then see a montage of Meru building the package out of entirely mundane parts and having it delivered to the police station that day.
- Painting the Medium: Extensive throughout the series. When a character's memories have been erased, people in those memories may only appear as penciled figures, rather than fully inked and colored. Alt Text on the side of the page will spill over into the main story when a character begins quoting it. Fake advertisements in the comic are actually coded messages from Mind Management to their agents.
- Pastiche: A couple times in the series, part or all of an issue is done in a different style.
- Issue #18, about Ella Jean, the Animal Kid, is done in the style of Richard Scarry. This is partly a case of
So My Kids Can Watch: Ella Jean is heavily based on Kindt's own daughter Ella, and when he told her the story of the Animal Kid, she wanted to know whether she could read the issue. Thus, Kindt changed the tone of the issue to reflect Ella Jean's sheltered nature. - The issue giving the Eraser's background is drawn in a style reminiscent of a '50s sci-fi comic, to reflect the style of P.K. Verve, the Eraser's husband.
- Issue #18, about Ella Jean, the Animal Kid, is done in the style of Richard Scarry. This is partly a case of
- Psychic Powers: As implied by the title, this is the driving force of the book. Human beings will naturally develop various psychic abilities; Mind Management and their Soviet counterpart "Zero" recruit them to help keep the world safe. Notably, although a wide variety of psychic powers appear in the series, none of them affect physical matter, with the exception of the "Hulk" training. Powers can strictly only affect living minds, not physical objects; nobody is shown with Telekinesis or other Mind over Matter powers. Even the "Hulk" ability is framed more as perceiving the weaknesses in an object, not altering its physical structure.
- Psychoactive Powers: This is eventually revealed to be crucial to psychic powers: the person using them must believe that they work, or else they start to fail. Any doubt can be fatal.
- Putting the Band Back Together: The goal of both the heroes and the villains, in the end. When Mind Management was shut down, a lot of agents dropped out of sight, had their memories erased, or were simply forgotten about. The Eraser is trying to rebuild Mind Management by recruiting these former agents, while the good guys hope to stop her by recruiting everybody to their side.
- Rule of Two: A non-villainous example. In the end of the book, Meru's New Management limits itself strictly to two-person teams, on the belief that it's the optimal team size. Working alone is destructive to the self, but adding even a third person will inevitably lead to corruption and betrayal.
- Series Continuity Error: The Eraser's new base is established as being constructed in Hong Kong, but in later issues it's changed to Guangzhou, with no explanation given.
- Subliminal Advertising: In-universe with the "Ad Man" and others with his powers. Although this talent can be used simply to sell things, Mind Management uses it to send coded messages to its agents. Some of these advertisements even appear in the comic as full-page ads.
- Touch of Death: This is one of Duncan's powers; he can simply tap his finger to an opponent's head and they die instantly. However, he reveals that it has a significant condition: the victim has to believe that he can do it, or else it won't work. It's why he often takes the time to hype it up beforehand; the victim has to be aware that it's coming and dread its use.Duncan: My finger has nothing to do with it. It has everything to do with belief.
- Trigger Phrase: Several agents are woken up or put into action by the phrase "Mulligan Rock."
- Underwater Base: Mind Management's original base was an elaborate, multi-dome structure somewhere deep beneath the sea. Later, after they move into their new base of Shangri-La, Sir Francis makes it his home.
Tropes in MIND MGMT: Bootleg include:
- False Flag Operation: Mister Hide is actually working with The Eraser. She needed a threat big enough to convince Meru to let her restart Mind Management, with herself at its head.
- New Media Are Evil: The main threat this time around comes from the "Empty Tablets," a cult that believes thought itself is evil and must be stopped. In order to prevent people from thinking, they encourage cell phone use, social media, and sharing cat memes.
- Screw This, I'm Outta Here: When Denny goes to the new Mind Management headquarters, he's given a series of tests, starting with a bizarre set of questions, then being attacked by a martial arts master, and then being told to stick his head in a pillory and cut his own ears off to escape. This last one causes him to just leave through the open window and down the fire escape. However, curiosity compels him to re-enter, whereupon the receptionist tells him that the only real test that day was whether he would remember he'd been there at all.
