Remembering Tommy

Last character(s) from Kick-Ass 2, and also last member of Justice Forever coming from the comics: the dynamic duo known as Remembering Tommy. They’re a couple of husband and wife who lost a child, Tommy, and became superheroes to avenge him and to do something good in his name. In the movie, they’re a middle-age couple with a t-shirt resembling Tommy’s “Missing” poster, plus a blue paper mask. The woman fights with a brick in her purse, while her husband takes Colonel Stars and Stripes‘s bat for himself once the original owner gets killed. In the comics, they’re quite different characters, at least graphically, and they’re much more menacing. Let’s see together.

Probably, Remembering Tommy’s origin story is the only one who’s real without a shadow of a doubt inside Justice Forever, apart from the leaders’ one. The man who would have become the first part of the duo once went out with his son, Tommy, to buy something at the store. He asked the child to watch after the dog while he was inside, and he repeatedly warned Tommy never to lose sight of the animal, since it was “a valuable thing”, as he said. Irony wanted that, when the man came out of the shop some minutes after, the dog was still there, while the child had disappeared. Some time passed, and when it became clear that Tommy didn’t go somewhere else nearby, nor he went away on his will, man and wife reported the kid’s kidnapping. Both the man and the woman tried their best to find their son, followed the police in its investigation, contacted newspapers to have any news about Tommy, but everything proved to be useless. Tommy was lost, and nobody seemed to care anything about it apart from his own parents. When Kick-Ass first appeared, the man and the woman had the idea to keep searching for their son directly on the streets, hunting for pedophiles and children’s kidnappers with a vigilante’s method. They created the shared masked identity of Remembering Tommy, and started patrolling the streets. They kept saying they were still looking for their son, but, somewhere deep inside them, they knew they could do nothing but avenge him.

When Colonel Stars and his brother Lieutenant Stripes met the two gladiator-like heroes, they thought they would have been a perfect choice for their newborn team, and they recruited both of them in Justice Forever. Determined, well prepared and moved by a solid motivation, Remembering Tommy proved to be a valuable asset to the team, even if they exceeded in brutality sometimes (not something the Colonel ever blamed them for). When Kick-Ass was introduced to the team by Doctor Gravity, the couple told Tommy’s story without a glimpse of hope, making clear that the illusion phase was more than over. They didn’t participate to Kick-Ass’ first mission with the group, since in their civilian life they still had to attend to their store, a fruit shop that took some time from their heroic mission. Anyway, Remembering Tommy participated to many other missions with the team, until Colonel Stars was killed in cold blood by The Mother Fucker and his supervillains’ team, The Toxic Mega Cunts. The violence escalation brought the police to a zero tolerance policy, and many masked people, either good or bad ones, were arrested. The couple stayed in the shadows for a while, until Kick-Ass called for what remained of Justice Forever to aid him in the final battle against The Toxic Mega Cunts. Now with the intention of avenging the Colonel as well, Remembering Tommy participated to the fight in Time Square, where they defeated the villains’ army along with Justice Forever. At the end of the battle, however, they were both arrested by the police, who took to jail any man or woman wearing a mask.

The man and the woman composing Remembering Tommy are both desperate people, driven by anger and pain: their son’s loss drove them almost to madness, and they react to the grief beating criminals in the streets. Both of them proved to have quite some skill in fighting: the man handles a big sword, while the woman fights with a mace. Brutal and pitiless, Remembering Tommy punishes every delinquent for the same crime, Tommy’s abduction and possible murder, unloading on every enemy the rage for the incapability of protecting the one they loved the most.