4 Insane Joker Stories Much Better Than a Prequel

Is this some kind of joke?

Everyone involved in the upcoming "Joker" prequel seems sure they've stumbled onto a brilliant idea--but the rest of us are quite stumped. When Martin Scorsese decides he wants to make a Batman picture you try not to look the gift horse in the mouth, but just what the hell is this?

What creative spark got Scorsese's eye? What inspiration drove director Todd Philips and writer Scott Silver? What drew the famously picky Joaquin Phoenix, who has joked with us before and will no doubt joke with us again?

#Gates of Hell

As your faithful Condiment King correspondent, I'm obligated to supply you with an update on his delicious trail of crime. The Prince of Pickles was spotted at the Baltimore Comic-Con on Sept. 29--cavorting with comics creators, perusing some substantially but not excessively over-priced vintage comics, and generally having a blast despite some very sore ankles.

In fact, I had such a generally pleasant and enjoyable time that I almost forgot that the comics industry is supposedly at the center of a firestorm right now--the fearsome #comicsgate. I follow enough people in the comics field on Twitter to know that they've all been affected by this "gate," either being forced to deal with it head-on or take steps to actively avoid the onslaught. I'm sure it came up at some of the panels I missed. But on the convention floor--where the real comic-conning happens--you'd never imagine it existed. No angry protests or counter-protests, just goofy cosplaying.

It's the weird nature of the Internet today that controversies can somehow be gale-force and non-existent at the same time.

What is #comicsgate? I actually have no idea. It involves a lot of vitriol and apparent sexism and transphobia, provoking comics creator to condemn it as a kind of manifesto. It's yet another culture war with vaguely familiar fault lines--Social Justice Warriors on one side, Men's Rights Activists on the other--but the particulars are as confusing as they are uninteresting. It started with a milkshake selfie (I kid you not), interpreted in some corners as a Girl Power declaration within Marvel Comics. It's been percolating for a year since then, ping-ponging off of various sociocultural pressure points, and it has something else to do with authors feeling excluded from the industry. But it's not really about any of that, the same way #GamerGate was never really about whether some software designer boinked a game critic for favorable reviews. In broad terms it's about some impulse to contract as the industry tries to broaden and diversify its readership. The particulars are basically impossible to follow and barely seems worth trying. Why would I care about all of this stupid bullshit when I could just read great Batman comics?

But as hard as it is to understand, it's also getting increasingly hard to ignore. (And don't misunderstand me--despite its transparent ridiculousness, #comicsgate has appeared to cause people real harm.)

#Comicsgate is yet another bitter, histrionic battle in an endless culture war, that to outsiders feels like it's being fought in some alternate dimension which occasionally rips a portal into ours.

Did the New Yorker Break Journalism's Golden Rule?

Christine Blasey Ford Wanted To Stay Private. News Coverage Forced Her Out. Reporters Need To Wrestle With This.

There's a third rail in American journalism. Every cop and court reporter knows it.

It's the identities of sexual assault victims. You just don't go near them. You don't report them, you don't report details on them, you don't question this rule and if you're not sure you don't do it anyways. Journalism has few iron-clad rules when it comes to the reporting of true facts--almost everything is negotiable to news judgment at some point--but this rule is one of the least flexible, and the least ambiguous. In just this one case, reporters aren't allowed to do their job no matter how much they might want to.

This relates to three things which Christine Blasey Ford, a Palo Alto professor and until last week a private citizen, has claimed. The first is that Brett Kavanaugh, a nominee for the Supreme Court, attempted to sexually assault her at a party when both were in high school in the early 1980s. The second is that, while she had notified her Congresswoman about the incident, she didn't wish to come forward publicly. The third is that she felt compelled to do so, in a Sept. 16 interview with the Washington Post, because of the news coverage swirling around her story over that week.

As a 15-year journalist who cut his teeth covering cops and courts for a local Ohio paper, those three claims made me sick to my stomach once I saw them clearly. It's not that I have particularly strong feelings about the rule, or that it's obvious to me it was broken. But years of conditioning had impressed onto me that in a confusing case like this, the wishes of the victim are paramount. I couldn't quite tell if reporters had given them proper deference here.

And I also knew that Ford's life was about to become absolute hell. (And it has.)

The Taste of Death

Batman's Stupidest Foe Isn't Just Tragic--He's Lethal

Murderous mayo? Deadly Dijon? Some fatality on your French Fries?

Just what is the Sultan of Sauce's weapon of choice? Because we learned something new in Batman #54, released earlier this month--the Condiment King is a serial killer.

"King robbed seven grocery stores this week. Killed three employees," Batman tells his longtime trusted ally Richard Grayson.

This quick line penned by another King--Tom King, Batman's current writer--reveals quite a bit about the Prince of Pickles, another interesting new layer for a character who already has plenty.

And it threw me--the self-appointed historian of the Condiment King's reign of terror--back for a moment. Our lovable King, who only wanted to channel his love of additives to a useful purpose, is a blood-thirsty killer?

Batwoman in Red

The CW network announced on Tuesday that Ruby Rose, fresh from shark-hunting in this summer's "The Meg," will star as Batwoman in a cross-over event featuring its established superheroes, which may eventually develop into a solo Batwoman series.

It's been quite a few years for Batwoman. In the summer 2016 DC Rebirth event, which "rebooted" the DC comics universe, she regained her solo title, which had been canceled the previous May. She also had a major role in DC Comics namesake series, Detective Comics--where the Batman first appeared in 1939--leading the "Batmen," a dysfunctional group of superheroes he gathered to save Gotham for various outside forces.

What I'm wondering, though, is this--just how will the Batwoman TV show handle Batman? The Arrow-verse, the collection of superhero shows which began with 2012's "Green Arrow," has only sprinkled indirect references to the Caped Crusader. Technically, it has so far only confirmed the existence of Bruce Wayne, not his alter-ego. The producers have emphasized that Batman won't be coming to their universe, but left the rest of the details vague. (It's pretty clear that DC and Warner Brothers have forbid the Dark Knight from going on live TV, for fear of diluting their most valuable intellectual property--how else to explain "Gotham" and the upcoming "Pennyworth?")

Picard's Back--Keep Him Out of the Chair

Patrick Stewart up-ended the science fiction world this weekend, confirming a long-rumored return to the role of Jean-Luc Picard and the Star Trek franchise.

Trek, all but left for dead in the mid-aughts, is now likely secure for yet another 50 years.

Picard's return raises a question, though--is it believable that a 78-year-old could command the deck of a starship, hurtling through uncharted space at speeds several times what Albert Einstein thought was possible?

My answer: absolutely.

But he shouldn't.

Is this Man a Fascist?

A Decade Later, We're Still Wrestling With The Dark Knight's Murky, Challenging Politics

Ten years ago, I knew I had just seen a great movie--the superhero film I never knew I had been waiting for, the first time in a century's worth of pop fiction it seemed like these masked fools had something urgent to say.

I'm not sure I quite comprehended, though, that I was watching a movie I'd be talking about for a decade.

"The Dark Knight," the second and best of Chris Nolan's Batman trilogy, opened nationwide on July 18th, 2008. It went on to gross more than a billion dollars, becoming the 4th-highest domestic grossing movie at the time and a critical darling--so highly praised that, when it was snubbed for a Best Picture nomination at the Oscars that year, they changed the rules. 

It transformed Hollywood, spawning a generation of high-end superhero epics and setting a template for superhero mythology as battles of ideas and worldviews you can still see in recent hits like "Black Panther" and "Wonder Woman." The movie also left legacies less beneficial--ever-escalating superhero events and "universe" saturation, as well as a self-serious tone which has sunk other franchises. (The effect I hoped for most--that it would inspire studios to stop replying so much on computer-generated effects to create action and suspense--never really materialized.)

As a political allegory, though--which it undeniably is--"The Dark Knight" leaves a less clear legacy. 

Lost in the Stars

What's the longest a movie has made you angry?

We've all got movies we hate--"A Life Less Ordinary," "Lucy," "Justice League." But I'm talking about the kind of anger that makes you stew, that invades your thoughts during peaceful moments.

The best I can come up with is "Sphere," Barry Levinson's turgid and senseless adaptation of the Michael Crichton sci-fi thriller I read and endlessly re-read as a 12-year-old. Months after eagerly seeing it in the theater, it still had me fuming.

But that's nothing compared to the rage a large number of gentlemen are still nurturing online towards "The Last Jedi," the eight official Star Wars installment which was released a full seven months ago. The frothing wrath about every related to the movie--the treatment of Luke, the female military command, the hostile takeover of the franchise by the dreaded SJWs--has become such a constant presence on every social media platform, star Kelly Marie Tran had to leave Instagram due to the vitriol.

Questions I Have About "Jurassic World"

In Defense of the Jurassic Park Franchise's Most Reviled Entry

Jurassic Park III contains two talking dinosaurs.

The first is a velociraptor which Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill) dreams is in a plane with him, as it approaches Isla Sorna, an island filled with very real and (as far as we know) mute raptors.

The second is Barney, of Barney & Friends, who appears on a TV screen and briefly distracts Ellie Sattler's (Laura Dern) 2-year-old son while he receives a desperate call for help from Grant, now stranded on Sorna.

For most viewers, one talking dinosaur was enough--two was unbearable. The Raptor On a Plane scene is mostly remembered as the self-parodying nadir of the once-mighty franchise which began with a movie that seemed like the Citizen Kane of summer blockbusters.

Well--everyone's wrong.

The Confounding Conundrum of the Condiment King!

Batman's silliest villain has a surprisingly interesting story.

Of all the throwaway side characters in "The Lego Batman Movie," he was A One to remember.

The Condiment King makes a blink-and-you'll-miss-it appearance--complete with ketchup and mustard guns that make a loud "splurt" sound--in "The Lego Batman Movie," as one of the Joker's minions.

It's a funny moment on its own, and it's even funnier for the Batman fans who know that this pest-o is an actual villain from the DC canon. At the time, I remember thinking it was a rare joke-on-a-joke that worked.

But the Condiment King is no mere joke-on-a-joke. The "Sultan of Sauce" is more like jokes cubed on jokes cubed, an intricate and seemingly infinite Russian nesting doll of knowing, self-referential winks, each layer gently elbowing those before and after it.

And when the jokes are all put together, the story of the "Prince of Pickles" forms an arc with an unexpected (and likely unintentional) air of tragedy--which is maybe the greatest joke of them all.

It turns out the Condiment King explains quite a bit about Gotham.

Universal Deconstruction

"Justice League," released last year, still doesn't seem to have the proper respect from either critics or audiences. I think this is because there is a fundamental misunderstanding of how it builds the DC Extended Universe mythology.

Therefore, I've decided to put together this Justice League/DCEU FAQ, which I hope is helpful.

So what's the deal with the Flash? How did he get his powers?

He was struck by lightning, and this gave him the ability to create a "layer of dimensional reality that seems to manipulate space-time." At least, that's the "abridged version." (These are real lines from the movie.)

Um, OK. And the suit?