Salt City Sinner

posted on 10/8/2019 by the Salt City Sinner I’ve been a fan of Batman and the rogue’s gallery of villains that regularly menace Gotham City for more than thirty years. Comic books, cartoons, the 1966 live-action version with Adam West, the current live-action show ( Gotham ), ten live action movies (if you count Bats’ cameo in 2016’s Suicide Squad ): I’ve consumed them all voraciously, even the ones that were directed by Joel Schumacher. While there are plenty of Batman fans out there older and/or more well-versed than me, that’s still quite some time to be devoted to a franchise. My relationship with Batman has been going even longer than I’ve been reading Stephen King, which is saying something. I’ve had a lot of time to think about this over the years, and have come to a few conclusions. First among these is that Bruce Wayne is a deeply troubling – and deeply troubled – character. To paraphrase Michael Caine’s Alfred Pennyworth in The Dark Knight, he’s one of the r...

posted on 6/10/2015 by the Salt City Sinner Musky salutations, nerds and nerdettes! We are a mere 15 weeks away from the triumphant return of Salt Lake Comic Con, or, as I like to call it , the North American Comic Con With The Fewest Virgins™. Throughout Utah and the surrounding region, fans are getting ready; assembling their costumes, slimming down to fit into said costumes, planning time off of work from from the IT help desk, and so forth. If, like me, you are already starting to get excited about the goings-on and if you are wondering how you will pass the idle days between now and September 24 – 26, here are five suggestions on what to read, comics-wise, between now and then. SALT CITY STRANGERS “Hang on a second,” I can hear you say, and not just because I've bugged your house. “Did you steal the title of your dumb-ass bloggue from this marvelous local comic book? What the hell is wrong with you, asshole?!” Whoa, buddy! Watch your language! And while you...

posted on 9/9/2013 by the Salt City Sinner Salt Lake City's first Comic Con, held from September 5 - 7,  was a record-crushing success. SLCCC sold 50,000 tickets, had around 80,000 visitors, had to turn thousands away at the doors (including some wristband-holders, due to excessive amounts of people and pesky fire codes). Celebrity meatvatars included Adam West, William Shatner and Stan Lee. You could play “blast a storm trooper” or get your picture taken with probably no fewer than three hundred Batmen roaming the floor, ranging from the pudgy and depressing to the marvelous and movie-quality. Like all cons, this one was an orgy of both creativity and consumerism – a colorful peacock parade of costumes jammed shoulder-to-shoulder between long rows of booths selling art prints, posters, clothing, video games, action figures, and, of course, comic books. SLCCC will be back, I have absolutely no doubt, and that is a boon for Salt Lake's geek / weirdo economy (arg...

posted 5/23/2012 by the Salt City Sinner Gods darn it, I tried to ignore this story. I tried to ignore it on April 18 when Grant Morrison popped off about Batman in an in-depth feature on superheroes for Playboy . Quoth Grant: [Batman]s very plutonian in the sense that he's wealthy and in the sense that he's sexually deviant. Gayness is built into Batman. I'm not using gay in the pejorative sense, but Batman is very, very gay. There's just no denying it. Obviously as a fictional character he's intended to be heterosexual, but the basis of the whole concept is utterly gay...All these women fancy him and they wear fetish clothes and jump around rooftops to get to him. He doesn't care - he's more interested in hanging out with the old guy and the kid. First of all, consider the source of this statement from two angles. Angle one: Morrison is the most talented comic book writer of the last thirty years, and I'm including Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman (wr...

posted 5/14/2012 by the Salt City Sinner As I so often say to myself these days, "I can't say it better than Grant:" Image by the preternaturally talented Alex Ross Grant Morrison's Supergods , which anybody who has ever read a comic book even once should read and slowly savor, gets *really* interesting in chapter 21. In the chapter, titled Hollywood Sniffs Blood . Morrison marks the ascendance of comic book culture in Hollywood with 2000's "X-Men." He acknowledges early efforts in the field like Tim Burton's Batman movies, but I agree with Morrison that the turn of the century marked a turn of fortune for comic book culture in Hollywood. Morrison makes the case that M. Night Shyamalan's Unbreakable was the true turning point in super hero cinema. I won't argue with the master -- Samuel L. Jackson (an outspoken comics fan among celebrities) would later build upon his performance as Mr. Glass by becoming the embodiment of Sp...

posted 5/3/2012 by the Salt City Sinner From Grant Morrison's masterful Supergods : At the heart of [Chris Nolan's] The Dark Knight was a reputation-assuring performance that seemed to burn and fizz off the screen; it was hard to recognize the face of handsome young Heath Ledger under the scars and smeared makeup of the Joker, but he owned the screen from the moment he first appeared and slammed a pencil through a man's head until his final dangling turn as the hanged man of the tarot, condemning Batman to an upside-down world of darkness and madness. [emphasis mine] When I first read this, the only reaction I can describe is a trite one: my mind was blown. Judge for yourself: Hung, you may note, by his ankle ...also hung by his ankle. And the standard Tarot reading of "reversal" is right there in the movie. These things are hidden in plain sight. Or, possibly, I'm insane.

Captain America! An opportunity for community members to help their kids! Life is pretty sweet, sometimes. Captain America, whether you prefer the original flavor or the spicy new update , is a pretty impressive guy. Please, if you have children and spare time, come and experience something legendary. Captain America is nothing to sneeze at: Look at him. Manly, stately, representative of all that is best regarding "Patriotism." And yet, what is this? If you have youngsters, pack them into the minivan and get your hindquarters to the South Towne Expo Center on Saturday the 25th so they can learn to be safe, but more importantly - so they know for sure that superheroes are real, and that Captain America is there to prove it.

i09 has published their list of "The 10 Greatest Mentally Ill Superheroes." The honors, of course, go to the A#1 dark superpsycho, and my personal hero, Batman: Okay, maybe Bruce Wayne hasn't always been depicted as a loon, but he certainly often has. Especially in the last couple of decades, when Bats was ground zero for the move to "deconstruct" superheroes. Alan Moore had Batman sharing a demented laugh with the Joker at the end of The Killing Joke. Alan Grant and other writers played on the idea that Batman was as disturbed as the baddies he hunted - and Grant even had that Skinnerian psychotherapist, Arkham, lock Bats up in Arkham Asylum with the rest of the crazies. More recently, Grant Morrison had Batman creating a fantasy "backup personality" for himself in case he ever got drugged and driven over the edge. A crazy plan for a crazy situation, or just the ultimate proof that Bats dances over the edge? Perhaps most tellingly, back in the late 1...

With my obligatory "health care, meh" post out of the way, time to geek out a bit. There's been a lot of scuttlebutt in the dorkus malorkus community about which actor will play Captain America in the upcoming movie adaptation. I, myself, think that DC has a better track record than Marvel when it comes to films (then again, I'm a DC partisan in general), but Marvel has improved their record lately with the impressively non-awful Iron Man and Spider Man franchises. Well, scratch that last, actually, as they canned Sam Raimi recently , along with the entire Spider Man cast, in the interests of a truly poorly though-out 3-D reboot. Now I get this news : Chris Evans will play Steve Rogers, also known as Captain America. Sources tell us the actor has not only accepted Marvel's offer, first detailed on Friday, but that the dealmaking moved so fast it's now all about dotting the i's and crossing the t's. Evans, if you recall, played Johnny Flame in the shitf...

Keith Knight's K Chronicles is an awesome comic published in many city weeklies throughout our great nation. Citing SLC bargoers as "the drunkest, rowdiest" crowds he would encounter on his tour with his band, the Marginal Prophets , he has seen fit to give our city its propers . Thanks, Keith - and don't worry, I doubt that July will mean the end of our drunken, rowdy bar culture. If anything, it should be the beginning of a glorious new chapter. Cheers!