The MatchmanHe had been years in the padded cage, the featureless walls singing back to him the undertone arias of his own impotence. He would hurl himself against the walls, fruitlessly. He had forgotten his name, his age, his place, his time - everything except his passion for revenge. He would have taken his own life long ago, if it had not been for the revenge. He lived only to see the execution of his plans for payback. He exulted in all things and phrases of equalization: getting even, balancing accounts, fifty-fifty. He would live long enough to see justice done. His brother had put him away here in this stinking hole of an asylum, and his brother would be the first to feel his wrath when he finally managed to escape.
It was all so unfair, this arrangement\! He on the inside and his brother on the outside. It was all he could do not to spit. As it was he shouted, he screamed, and he dashed himself around the confines of his padded cage until, inevitably, one of the ward staff would come in and give him something to make him go to sleep. Sometimes it was an injection. Other times it was a length of hard rubber hose. Still other times it was a choking, tearing spray to match the choking, tearing hatred within him. This comfortable routine went on for a long, long while.
Until one night, he had a dream in the depths of his black sleep. He dreamed that he had been lifted up, in his sleep, in the dream, and taken through a chaos of shifting images, flames and smoke and explosions, all the way to somewhere else. He could not see who was carrying him in the dream, nor could he see where the flames were coming from. He thought perhaps the asylum was on fire, and he smiled. He liked the dream - especially if it involved the destruction of his prison. It was a shame, he thought in the dream, that he couldn’t really destroy that place where he had been interred for so long in a sort of waking death. It was a shame, he thought, that tomorrow it would all be as it had been before, for so many years.
And then he woke up. He was standing, on his feet, in the middle of a large room gray with accumulated metal. Harsh fluorescents beat down upon him in his hospital robe in the middle of the bare expanse of floor. Before him, a large man with metal arms came floating down from a dais. He wore dark robes and had no face, just white spots, lights in the pattern of a face, like a jack-o-lantern, inside of a hood, and he came closer and closer and this was no longer a dream but a waking reality and the man with no face came closer and closer and he collapsed on the floor, shivering, and curled into a fetal position, for the first time noticing his utter lack of personal restraint devices.
The man with no face spoke: “Oh, for… look, you, get up. When I want you to grovel, I’ll tell you so.”
He thought it best not to move quite yet. He didn’t want to see what he was quite sure he’d see when he opened his eyes.
“Right. Ahem. Arise, Stan Suffix, and gaze upon the form of your new master, Doctor Dejection\!”
He lifted a wary, tear-stained face. “My n-new m-master? How did you know my name?”
“The same way that I knew that you were incarcerated in Rackham Asylum upstate,” Doctor Dejection said. “The same way that I know that you happen to be the brother of Scott Suffix. The same way I happen to know that Scott Suffix is indeed Matchman himself, my arch-enemy.”
“Scott is Matchman?”
“So I am pleased to have been informed by my spy network.”
“Oh, man, this blows\!” Stan said, sitting upright and burying his face in his hands. “Now I’ll never be able to get my revenge on him for having me committed all those years ago\! With super powers he’d just smack me down with the back of one hand and return me to the asylum in no time flat\! I can’t fight that\!”
Doctor Dejection smiled. “Ah, but my dear new minion, you could…if you had super powers of your own\!” From behind his back he whipped out a dark-blue set of super-hero tights, dark blue, and complete with cape. There was a symbol of a broken heart on the front of the outfit. “As of this moment, you are…Super Ficial\! Now, to the laboratory\! I have methods by which you may be made as powerful as your hated brother, and then, when all is in readiness, you can wreak your revenge upon him and I, coincidentally enough, will be tidily rid of a most annoying adversary.”
“Super Ficial\!? What kind of a name is that?”
“Shut up, nutjob. To the task at hand\!”
Scott Suffix was working calmly in one of the many laboratories uptown at the Columbia University Genetic Research Center when Super Ficial\! came barreling in through a window at him in a spray of broken glass. The impact threw Scott across the room, but luckily it didn’t prevent him from activating his own skill suite of super powers. Before he had even recognized his assailant, he realized that this was a job for Matchman himself\!
“Marvelous Matchpowers…activate\!”
The two costumed adversaries faced each other, both scowling, neither pleased to note that the other wore an exact copy - one might more accurately say, parody - of the other’s outfit. Matchman finally had a chance to clear his head and identify the villain.
“Stan?\!? Is that you? But…how did you escape? And when did you become a super villain?”
“Well, I…”
“Never mind that\! You’re going back to your cell at Rackham, and that’s all there is to it\!”
“No way\! I am Super Ficial\! now and your equal in power\! I do what I please when I please - unless, of course, my benefactor Doctor Dejection says otherwise\!”
“Doctor Dejection\! I should have known\! Brace yourself, Stan - this is going to sting a bit\!”
The two evenly-matched opponents battled until the laboratory was a small sea of broken glass. They then took the fight on the run across Manhattan, punching it out in the air above midtown. They finally came to earth again in the Sculpture Garden at the United Nations building on the Upper East Side. Both were tired, bruised, battered and panting heavily to catch their breath.
“Why did you ever want to become a super-villain?” asked Matchman.
“Why did you leave me to rot in that stinking asylum all those years ago?” asked Super Ficial\! in return, viciously. He leapt for his brother, intent on inflicting severe bodily damage.
Matchman reached behind him and grabbed the famous statue of the revolver with a knot in its barrel. He swung this over his head and slammed Super Ficial\! on top of the skull with it. It made a small ringing sound, like a telephone that only rings once before the caller, realizing that they have dialed the wrong number, has hung up.
While Super Ficial\! was dazed, Matchman undid the knot in the oversized metal revolver and re-tied the barrel around him, securely pinioning his arms. Then he picked him up to fly him back to the asylum. He hoped that they had a facility that could hold him, super powers and all.