As I type these words, it is opening day. A brand new season of Major League Baseball is upon us. Dontrelle Willis will take the mound for my beloved Florida Marlins in less than three hours, and I am so excited that I can hardly sit still.
Excuse me as I ramble on in a vain attempt to keep my mind off America’s other pastime; eventually, we will get around to Vs. System. Right now, I need to tell you about meeting Dontrelle.
Back in early January, I took Nina to a local fondue restaurant for her birthday. We stuffed ourselves for two whole hours and then waddled slowly toward the door. Standing at the hostess station was Dontrelle Willis and his wife. I grinned and grabbed his hand. We began laughing while I realized that I was shaking something worth four million dollars a year. A few minutes later, when we released our grip, the man actually started rubbing my belly and laughing some more. “So . . . how was it?” he asked. Nina told him what she liked best, and then we said our goodbyes and good lucks. It was a beautiful thing, and with another season about to get underway, that coincidental encounter will make our enjoyment of the game just a bit sweeter.
As I enter the final week of practice for the Vs. System City Championships of Miami, I realize that there is one character that I have included in all three of my deck choices, and his mythological background meets mine in similar synchronistic ways. He even has a connection to baseball. Tattooed Man, Living Ink hit a two-run homer off Superman in 1976. He really did.
The comic book is called DC Super Stars #10. If you know someone who is both a baseball fan and a Vs. System addict like me, I cannot recommend it highly enough, especially since Tattooed Man is such a dynamite shortstop. Like Jose Reyes of the New York Mets, who is widely recognized as the most exciting player in the Major Leagues and is the near-consensus first pick in all of fantasy baseball, our Living Ink has no true equal in the Silver Age metagame.
We discover in this thirty-year-old legend that Tattooed Man, Living Ink actually has a fielder’s glove drawn on one of his arms. He brings it to life and it is magical. This ability has also worked like a charm during my testing sessions for the City Championships. He can bring out the final nails in the Anti-Green Lantern coffin factory, and is very good at supplying the worst of 1-cost Army bad guys by alternately recruiting a couple Damn Nazis to fuel the most disgustingly evil Plague of Frogs you ever saw. And, my favorite of all, he gets insanely creative in his namesake War Paint deck to cover the table in the most intense of Vs. System colors.
In his DC Comics history, Tattooed Man has followed a very familiar pattern. He was created in the early 1960s, made a few cameo appearances during the seventies, and was featured loudly in the nineties. Now his myth is living once again on kitchen tables and City Championships thanks to Vs. System. His story is fascinating, and one of the smallest details is uncannily coincidental. It involves a 1965 Mustang convertible.
That is the car that my family moved to Miami in. We bought it brand-new in Ohio when I was three years old. My dad had it professionally restored after the salty air had rusted giant holes in the floorboards. It recently won “Best Mustang in Miami” at the Art Deco Weekend Car Show on South Beach and it is a future family heirloom. Believe it or not, Tattooed Man inherited the exact make and model in the myths. Let’s start at the beginning and work our way up to it.
Abel Tarrant was a simple sailor. As sailors do, he went to get a tattoo. He was sitting in the chair when a bizarre Tattooed Man appeared out of nowhere. The drawings on the man’s arms came to life and kept the others in the shop at bay while the magical mystery man pleaded with Abel to stay away from a life of crime. The colorful character insisted that he was a future version of the sailor himself and that he knew what kind of trouble they were headed for. Then the power-laden ink began exploding from his skin and he disappeared.
Unfortunately, this warning from his real future self did not achieve its intended effect, and Abel Tarrant followed his fate. He decayed from a dedicated sailor to a full-time thief. One night, he was robbing a laboratory to steal the next day’s payroll when the cops ambushed him. He was trapped. He killed the lights and accidentally broke a vial of strange chemicals in the dark. He fantasized about having a bomb to blow out a wall for a Swift Escape, then began drawing his wish in the glowing liquid on the floor with his finger. The imaginary bomb came to life as soon as he was done sketching it.
He returned to the lab the next day disguised as a reporter and soaked up all the chemicals he could with a sponge. Then he injected them into his skin so he could carry the magic with him at all times. His newfound powers made him one of the most gifted criminals in the world, and he stole entire collections of precious objects. He was extraordinarily successful since he targeted Coast City. Tattooed Man’s special ink has a strong yellow base color, so Hal Jordan and his Green Lantern shenanigans are completely powerless against it. Eventually, Goldface got jealous of Abel’s criminal prowess and rubbed him out in a vicious mob-style murder.
In another typical event for a comic character, the Tattooed Man was found to be alive much later in the myths. He had let the world believe he was dead and created a new identity in New York City. He opened a tattoo parlor called the Palace of Fine Art in order to make an honest living. Abel Tarrant actually used the drawings on his arms to make a happy artificial family life for himself. It was kind of sweet, but just a bit creepy.
Then the plot twisted. Guy Gardner, Egomaniac happened to walk into the shop one day. He wanted a tattoo of his own face to impress people with. He recognized the former villain and started a super showdown instead. They battled all the way down the East Coast to Florida. Guy Gardner gets distracted easily, and he eventually tired of the fight and went off in search of beach bunnies. The Tattooed Man washed up on shore and was later hired as a crab fisherman. He found the peaceful life he was looking for and is currently living happily ever after.
The most recent sighting of Tattooed Man in the comics brings us back to the beginning of this account and finally introduces the car into his story. Abel Tarrant took some time off from his crab fishing to attend the funeral of his former Injustice Gang friend David Clinton ◊ Chronos. Walker Gabriel approached him after the funeral and informed him that the original Chronos had left the Tattooed Man the title to his 1965 Mustang convertible in his will. Abel convinced Gabriel to let him use the Time Harness to travel back in time and warn himself about his own criminal intentions, but it did not work. Then everything played out the way I told you, including the baseball game.
The baseball game! I almost forgot. It is time for an opening day party, so let me leave you with a few more curveballs from 1976 before I go.
Thanks to Tattooed Man’s home run, the villains almost won. If not for Plastic Man’s impression of Endy Chavez in game seven of the 2006 NLCS (robbing the bad guys of a game-winning grand slam), the Living Ink and friends would have triumphed.
Only two of the characters included in the 1976 lineup have not been included on Vs. System cards. Ignoring the fact that Mark Fidrych is my favorite baseball player of all time and is the only rookie pitcher in American League history to start an All-Star game, and that he did it in that very same year, I have a challenge to present to you today. Take this box score and make a deck.
Send me your creations and reap the glory that only the game of baseball can bring to a human life. Combining it with comic book characters and trading card games has never been possible in quite the same way. Who knows? We might even get a viable strategy out of it. Either way, we will trot around the bases with a new sense of fun and excitement. It might even feel like opening day all over again.
Rian Fike is also known as stubarnes, and the hot dogs are ready for mustard. Send your baseball-inspired decklists to rianfike@hattch.com.