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Failed Super Heroes: Tarot Man
his power is to fly, of course, and sport huge pectoral muscles, cape, underpants on the outside etc etc but his real ability comes from his pack of magickal Tarot cards, left to him by a dying vengeful old grey-haired gypsy woman superhero who decided to pass the torch on. if some gangsters are threatening Tarotman he can, say, deal the ten of swords off the top of the deck, the card swirls around the gangsters and suddenly they all get ten swords in the back (or, you know, if there were ten gangsters it'd be one sword each, but i don't know how you'd divide it up if there were three gangsters. maybe if one of them was taller than the other you could say, ah, fuck it, the tall guy gets four swords, the other guys get three each) and so forth. if someone helps him out, he flips them the nine of Coins and they get rich. or the ten of Cups and they get a happy family and a house. or the three of cups if they're that way inclined, heh heh hehhh-h. he can punish bad guys by dealing The Tower (their house catches fire) or the five of Cups (he knocks over three out of every five drinks on their table). there are two problems with this. the exoteric problem: consider this situation. he's about to be flattened by a runaway steam-roller and he's flipping through the deck looking for the Chariot to make a getaway... can't find it.. how about the Hanged Man? no (the last time he used that card, he got out of his desperate situation only to spend the next two days hanging from the noose wrapped around his ankle, the other end of which was tied to a tree). in other words, if you're looking for one card out of seventy-eight that can save you... well, how fast can you shuffle? or are you going to trust in luck to bring the right card to the top of the deck? do you trust luck that much? this is getting a bit esoteric, so i'll stop here, 'cause this is supposed to be the exoteric bit. the esoteric problem is to do with self-determinacy. Tarotman could go around doing readings for bad guys and blowing them away, but after a while he'd get to noticing: if he threw the Justice card at the problem, it went away no matter how bad it seemed. for a while he had a similar deal going with the Death card; throw it at a bunch of bad guys and they're all dead. all too easy. Tarotman didn't even have to worry about being sued by the relatives of the victims, because he existed in a simplistic comic universe which itself existed solely for the purpose of entertaining teenaged males. there was no place for involved reasoning or emoting unless it was in the cause of self-aggrandisement. eventually Tarotman would stop using the other cards and just keep Justice at the top of the deck, laconically flipping it this way and that, usually catching them before they could make a move, even the ones who weren't committing crimes. Justice was for the innocent, too. you'd find that fifty dollar bill you lost, and that tab of acid that vanished into the depths of the freezer as well (and then you'd be charged with possession of a narcotic). old good deeds would be rewarded. the guy you lent your copy of Skinny Puppy's "Rabies" CD would remember that it was yours, and he'd bring it back. you would get a packet of breakfast cereal and there'd be a collectable toy inside that you didn't already have three of. the Justice card wasn't simply about bringing wrong-doers to right; it was about balance. and above balance it was about the power it had been given when the magickal tarot deck had been created. the power to enforce Justice. blindly, without mercy or passion or pity or expensive lawyers. if the situation required it, Justice could move the stars in the heavens, such was its power. this power had been distilled into the form of a tarot card in order to conceal Justice from the world for most of the time. whenever the card was dealt, there would be Justice, and that was enough of the time to keep most people happy. then he'd get to wondering why he needed the other seventy-seven cards if he never used 'em. then one day he'd leave the rest of the cards at home and he'd just go out with the one card, Justice, but he wouldn't realise that the power the cards held was tied into all of them, and Tarotman tries to stop a speeding getaway truck filled with criminals and large round bags with dollar signs painted on the side, the bags filled with gold coins. the Justice card only works when it's been drawn from amongst the other cards. the truck runs him over and kills him. i suppose we could have the one stray tarot card rejoin the rest of the pack and have his son discover them and become the next Tarotman if the need for a sequel becomes financially apparent. --- Mon, 29 Mar 1999 |
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