The Sportsman I & Princess Poison

Young Preston Cutler was hailed as the “All-American Athlete” for mastering seemingly every sport he tried and embodying old-fashioned patriotic values—a perfect symbol for Nixon’s America. The 1972 Munich Olympics were to be his crowning achievement, as the nation eagerly anticipated Cutler leading the U.S. Olympic basketball team to a gold medal victory over the Soviet Union.
However, seeing terrorists murder the Israeli athletes he’d befriended shattered his simple, heartfelt life’s paradigm of fair play and good sportsmanship. Days later, when the officials’ repeated rules violations allowed the Soviets to defeat the Americans for the basketball gold, Cutler was left completely embittered against an irredeemably unjust world. Now convinced killers and cheaters ultimately win at everything—including his beloved sports—he vowed to become a champion at crime.
Years before, another brutal wrong claimed the life of Josephine Sherman’s mother, mere weeks after giving birth to her. Amidst his grief and devastation, her scientist father resolved no one would ever lay a hand on his precious baby girl. He began obsessively experimenting on his daughter’s biochemistry, altering it until she became literally poisonous. Her father believed he’d saved her, but once the vainly beautiful and power-hungry Josephine realized her abilities allowed her to do as she pleases, it was her victims that needed saving.
Preston Cutler debuted as the criminal Sportsman in 1973, and built his reputation adroitly battling Freedom City's superheroes in the waning years of The Freedom League. Eighteen-year-old Josephine, craving new riches and besotted costumed pawns, first donned her Princess Poison guise in 1978. She met the Sportsman soon after when he helped her escape the pursuit of Arrow and a scarily intoxicated Bowman. He was an embittered gadget villain, and she was a narcissistic toxin reservoir. Opposites. The attraction was instant, genuine, and all consuming. Their tale became a love story, a romantic partnership born of crime.
As the 1980s dawned, the savvy Sportsman realized early the supervillain game was changing, and Freedom City would become no place for crooks who hurl giant bowling balls. When the Moore Act was adopted in 1984, Cutler and Sherman were already on their way to accumulating enough loot for an early and safe retirement. They’d have gotten away with it, too, had it not been for that meddling kid: in 1990, Josephine found herself unexpectedly pregnant with a son. Retirement had to wait, and crime became about paying for football camp, braces, and college for Michael.
By the turn of the millennium, Preston and Josephine finally had money enough to get married, settle down amongst Emerald City's supervillain community, and raise Michael to follow in their lawless footsteps. The Cutlers made Michael’s life entirely about fulfilling their unrealized super-criminal dreams; so much so, the surprise arrival of his sister Melissa was nothing more than a nine-month distraction to them.
Now, the Cutlers’ transition to semi-retirement and vicarious living is complete. Deemed ready after decades of harsh training and mutating chemical treatments that left him emotionally unstable, the now-superhuman Michael recently embarked on a series of robberies as the new Sportsman. The mundane Melissa is now Ms. Scorpion, star pupil at the Emerald City Shadow Academy, but remains such a disappointment to them.

Physical Description

Special abilities

The original Sportsman possessed nearly superhuman physical abilities and athletic skills, such as mastery of archery and several martial arts (though time has eroded his prowess somewhat). In addition, he carried gimmick weaponry inspired by various sports equipment, allowing him to crush foes with giant bowling balls, throw baseball grenades, and get around on literal jet skis.

Princess Poison’s skin naturally produces contact toxins which she can formulate at will to induce a variety of effects in those exposed: overriding lust, severe inflam­mation, instant slumber, or painful death. She is immune to poisons of any kind.
The Cutlers are experienced criminal planners. They never attempt a job without devising several escape routes, and retreating if they encounter a larger hero team.

Mental characteristics

Intellectual Characteristics

Disdainful of all others (save his wife and son) and com­pletely self-confident, Preston carries himself with the arrogance of a champion, even with his general disil­lusionment (and now, advancing years). For Preston, stealing (and later, maintaining) the wealth that pro­vides comfort and safety for his family is his prime moti­vation. Josephine, the cherished championship trophy of his life, and Michael, avenger of all his life’s failures, are everything to him—however sociopathically he ex­presses love.
As her strange childhood inculcated, Josephine believes she’s too rare and special for rules apply to her. Her overrid­ing self-importance allows her to steal and even kill without remorse, lest the world be cruelly deprived of her presence. Still a ravishing beauty in her fifties, Josephine is long ac­customed to being desired and has a lifetime of practice at manipulating the smitten. Despite all this, she remains pro­tectively devoted to Michael (mimicking her own father’s parenting) and obsessively in love with Preston (the beauti­ful man strong enough not to need her, but who still does). He is the rare person in life who could abandon her, which makes her cling to him furiously.

Social

Contacts & Relations

The Cutlers mostly distanced themselves from the darker, more violent criminals of ‘80s Freedom City, though they did earn enough favors doing jobs for the Labyrinth to barter for the experimental performance-enhancing drugs used to make Michael superhuman. Michael, the modern-day Sportsman, and his sister Melissa (alias Ms. Scorpion) would do nearly anything for their parents.
During their time in Freedom City, the Sportsman and Princess Poison battled various members of FORCE Ops, and developed a long, enduring rivalry with the Eyes of Night (see Iron Age for more on these groups).