Arkham Asylum

1989

$14.95 from DC Comics

Written by Grant Morrison

Illustrated by Dave McKean

Grant Morrison’s strange nightmare of Carrollesque madness *Arkham Asylum* came out some ten years ago now, but I never got around to reading it until very recently. It strikes me now, as I put the story in context, how very far the comics will always be from movies based on comics.

1989 was the year that Tim Burton’s visionary *Batman* came out. This was a big deal, if you recall. The popular culture at large had no idea how dark the Batman story could be; Burton’s stark take on the Bat-milieu was considered fresh and daring, although comics fans had been wallowing in the weird mania of Gotham City for years by then. There was a certain easiness to it all, in fact: Look! I’ve made a dark story! Look! Shadows! Oooh!

And that same year? *Arkham Asylum,* a graphic novel in which darkness is only the beginning.

I’ve said before that Batman is a Rorschach Blot of sorts for comics writers and that DC has been happy to oblige their every passing fancy. In *Arkham Asylum*, Batman is a man just barely on the edge of sanity, a tortured guardian who goes fearfully into the pits of gibbering creatures because it is his destiny.

The plot is not really important, but here goes. Arkham Asylum, the strange and twisted house in which every criminally insane villain is placed, has fallen to riot: for some reason the inmates are running the asylum. Commissioner Gordon gets a call: the inmates want Batman to come inside and talk to them. In Batman marches, where the he finds the Joker, gibbering and impossible to follow, who orders Batman to run and hide (or this here doctor gets it) and they’ll be after him soon. And so, into the bowels of Arkham goes the Bat.

As Batman wanders the corridors he meets up with more and more of Arkham’s insane, all the while feeling the edges of his own sanity unravel. The kind of insanity Morrison hearkens to here is one straight out of Lovecraft, insanity because one becomes aware of the infinite, indescribable horrors that lay just below the surface of reality. I can’t express the power of these passages properly. To write critically about Morrison’s manic poetry is, I realize, like writing about music, which itself is “like dancing about architecture.”

Batman’s journey through the Heart of Darkness is juxtaposed with two continuing images: that of Alice in Wonderland (“You must be mad, or you wouldn’t have come here,”) and the story of Arkham himself, who built his hospital to keep the insane locked away, and became an inmate himself. The story ends strangely as it began, allowing Batman to remain a hero and yet, somehow, to realize he relies on madness nearly as much as the Joker.

And I haven’t described Dave McKean’s art, which is like someone reached into the back of Lovecraft’s head and flung the black and tendrily treasures within at the page. It’s comic art extraordinaire.

What a tale. Ten years, still fresh. Madness only improves over time.