And we are you.” These are all timeless images, drawn together into one narrative – this is Batman’s subconscious trying to glue itself back together. Much like the Cheshire cat, he suggests to Batman, “We’re inside a huge head that dreams us all into being. The Mad Hatter, drawn from the works of Lewis Carroll, is represented – for the first time that I’m aware of – as a pedophile. I don’t think any other writer has ever been bothered to offer Maxie Zeus, Batman’s Greek-themed adversary, in anything resembling a complex light, but here Morrison draws the pathetic creature as “Lord of ECT”, lit up in shades of blue, worshipping at the “AC/DC altar”. There are the villains drawn from other sources, mythology or fable. Instead, Morrison selects his characters wisely, representing archetypes. With the exception of the Joker and Two-Face, who he meets in the lobby, there’s not really an a-list pool of villains. “You must be mad,” quoth the cat, “or else you wouldn’t have come here.” It’s interesting how Morrison populates the Asylum. This is Batman “down the rabbit hole”, so to speak. The book opens and closes with quotes from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, hinting at the dreamlike nature of the story. Will there be blood on his hands by the time Batman’s through? For my money, it’s Morrison’s best work on the character. It’s certainly dense and a bit difficult to read, but it’s ultimately more rewarding than most. It’s a lot more spiritual and mystic, featuring circles of salt to ward off evil spirits and lending the hint of a timeless cycle to Batman’s crusade (which would become the benchmark of Morrison’s take on the Dark Knight, but we’ll return to this later).
Morrison populates the story with the traditional trappings (it opens with the bat signal lighting the clouded sky outside of Gotham, it features Batman and his gallery of villains, it even features a flashback to the murder of Bruce’s parents), but this is an altogether different type of Batman story than most would be familiar with. Instead, Morrison suggests that there’s something fundamentally wrong with the house itself, hinting at stories about “secret passages, the ghost of mad Amadeus Arkham, the door that’s supposed to bleed” and bringing us back to the institution’s foundation. Some writers have made fun of the Asylum’s lax security, while Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns mockingly assigned it a ridiculously liberal agenda (even renaming it the “Arkham Home for the Emotionally Troubled”) as it gleefully declared its inmates (like Two-Face and the Jokers) victims of society and persecution. Of course, the fact that Batman’s selection of villains has endured pretty much unchanged over the past few decades gives an indication of how successful the institution is. It’s beautiful, it’s dark and it’s tough – but it’s also immensely rewarding. What I found was one of the most densely challenging, cleverly constructed and brilliantly gothic depictions of the Dark Knight I have ever encountered (indeed, it might even be “simply the most” rather than a safer “one of the most”). I’ll admit that I took my time getting around to reading it – partially due to the fact that DC refused to keep the hardcover in print – but I eventually buckled and got myself the softcover 15th Anniversary Edition. It is, one hand, highly critically praised and the best-selling graphic-novel of all time, yet Morrison scholars are quick to describe it as “much maligned”. I have to admit, I was somewhat surprised to hear recently that Grant Morrison’s Arkham Asylum is a somewhat “divisive” book. – Batman explains his unease at going into Arkham Asylum to Jim Gordon I’m afraid that when I walk through those asylum gates… When I walk into Arkham and the doors close behind me…
Sometimes… I question the rationality of my actions. I’m afraid that the Joker might be right about me.