Sal Maroni
43 years ago - Sal Maroni is born the heir to the Maroni Crime Family.
33 years ago - 10-year-old Sal's father shoots Carmine Falcone, starting a war between their families.
27 years ago - 16-year-old Sal goes to boarding school in Italy.
24 years ago - 19-year-old Sal's father is killed by Oswald Cobblepot. He returns from Italy to take over the family.
20 years ago - 23-year-old Sal ends the war between the families when he agress to the truce conditons proposed by Carmine Falcone.
14 years ago - 29-year-old Sal brings in Roman Sionis as an enforcer & allies with Oswald Cobblepot's organiation just as Carmine Falcone's DA is brought down by Batman, Harvey Dent, & Lieutenant Gordon, effectively restarting the war between the families.
11 years ago - 32-year-old Sal is brought in by Batman. Carmine Falcone contacts him, offering protection if he attacks Harvey Dent in the court room. The plan goes through (although Dent survives.) Sal attempts to escape prison, thinking Roman Sionis will help him, but is betrayed when Sionis pays Julian Gregory Day to kill him.
Early Batman comics heavily featured traditional organized crime figures, many of whom only appeared once. There are exceptions, of course... Boss Zucco was the gangster that killed Dick Grayson's parents, Joe Chill was the street thug the killed Bruce's. Otherwise, you saw a lot of very casual name drops over the years that didn't really amount to much.
Maroni was part of Two-Face's back story, and that made him only a moderately important character, but over the years his story has expanded and made him a very important character.
Maroni was part of Two-Face's back story, and that made him only a moderately important character, but over the years his story has expanded and made him a very important character.
Maroni's Comic History
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Maroni was originally only "Boss Maroni" when he appeared in 1942, the gangster that threw acid on Harvey Dent in the courtroom. For a very long time, while he would occasionally appear in comics, he was really only the answer to a trivia question. during those early stories he was a regular target of Two-Face, confined to a wheelchair in one assasination attemt or another until Two-Face succeeded in killing him.
He became a much more important character in 1996's Batman: The Long Halloween when Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale elevated him to one of the stories main characters. The limited series included a retelling of Two-Face's origin story, so of course Maroni was going to get a larger part, but it was also very much a crime drama that heavily featured the various Godfather-esque mafia families of Gotham, which meant that the Maroni was established as one of the most prominent crime families in Gotham lore. An interesting phenomenon has come from this; the early crime families of Gotham basically had their entire story told in flashback, so you don't see them in most of mainstream continuity outside of esoteric references... but live action depictions of Gotham in movies or TV almost always feature one version of these gangster characters or another, so Maroni, like Carmine Falcone or Rupert Thorne, are often seen in live action more often than they are in comics. |
Our Maroni StoryThe cool thing about Sal Maroni is that the only really NECESSARY part of his story is the moment he throws acid in Harvey Dent's face, so everything else you use him for is just fun. The Long Halloween made him the head of a whole crime family and the main rival to the Falcones, so we went with that, using single moments in the decades before Batman's appearance to tell his story. He's much younger than Carmine Falcone, so we tried to make that apparent in all their interactions, using his boldness and innovation to counter his rival's experience.
The overall intention with these classic gangster characters in Gotham is to set the stage for when the organized crime of Gotham is taken over by mout outlandish comic book villains. It actually goes a long way to making the existance of all these freakish baddies feel believable when you see them as the evolution of crime when these traditional criminals were overwhelmed by Batman. In this case, that specifically means the involvement of Black Mask. Roman Sionis was retroactively established as one of the biggest gangsters in Gotham, so we can actually use the downfall of Sal Maroni to depict Sionis's rise. |
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