Final Crisis: Ink!

The last aftermath mini featured Tattooed Man. While not a major player in Final Crisis, he was one of the leads in Submit one-shot and definitely was more significant to the plot than Human Flame or Super Young Team. Nemesis wasn't even in it at all. So how did it turn out?

Over the years there have been multiple Tattooed Men in DC comics. This one was created by Geoff Johns few years before Final Crisis in Green Lantern #9. He wasn't treated very seriously there and was more of an excuse to have Hal Jordan and Batman team-up and resolve some of their differences after Green Lantern: Rebirth. While he was killing criminals there wasn't much of an attempt to make him a good guy, so basically a cool looking villain of the week.

In Final Crisis Morrison tried to make him a bit more heroic, maybe an anti-hero. How did it work? I'm not certain, I don't think that pages with him were bad, but at the same time I don't feel like anything would be really missed if he was removed from the story. But he got some focus and in aftermath mini Wallace attempted to turn him into a potential lead character.

On paper it makes sense. Final Crisis was a big event, DC didn't (and still doesn't) have many black leads, his power set is very convenient for artist to draw cool looking pages. His backstory of being in a military is also something that many writers enjoy writing. His criminal past gives him some edge and differentiates from other heroes. What could go wrong?

Fiorentino draws all the issues and visually this is my favorite aftermath mini. Sadly this is where the good things end. While I wasn't really a fan of Run and Dance minis, I think an argument could be made that on technical level they are both well written. I just didn't like the direction or thought that certain things were a waste of time and pages. 

Here situation is a bit different. While there are certain interesting elements in this story (many of them due to work done by Johns and Morrison), it does feel like the script needed few revisions to really make sense. From our lead character fighting African tribe (or was it supposed to be Indians?) in European country to whole gang plot making little sense and many other small problems. It just doesn't click.

Unlike other aftermath characters Tattooed Man became a regular in another book after his mini wrapped up. Deathstroke created a version of Titans for himself and invited him as a member and he continued being a regular in that book till Flashpoint washed everything away. I'm not really a fan of Titans franchise or Deathstroke (asides of Priest's run) and Wallace certainly didn't recommend himself with this mini to me so I never tried his Titans run. Maybe it is better than this mini, but I have no desire to see it for myself.

Either way Tattooed Men, like many other failed characters, was pushed to the side after Flashpoint. He had only couple of brief cameo appearances since then and, if I'm not mistaken, died in Heroes in Crisis. 

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