Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth
Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth is an acclaimed 1989 Batman story by Grant Morrison, with art by Dave McKean and lettering by Gaspar Saladino. It interweaves Batman’s attempt to put down a riot at Arkham Asylum with the backstory of its founder Amadeus Arkham, with both protagonists forced to confront their inner demons and tenuous grip on reality.
Batman
[edit]- Afraid? Batman's not afraid of anything. It's me. I'm afraid. I'm afraid that the Joker may be right about me. Sometimes I... question the rationality of my actions. And I'm afraid that when I walk through those asylum gates... when I walk into Arkham and the doors close behind me... it'll be just like coming home.
- Sometimes it’s only madness that makes us what we are.
Amadeus Arkham
[edit]- My movements through the house have become as formalized as ballet and I feel that I have become an essential part in some incomprehensible biological process. The house is an organism, hungry for madness. It is the maze that dreams.
- I pity the poor shades confined to the Euclidean prison that is rationality.
- Following my father's death, I think it’s true that the house became my whole world. During the long period of mother's illness, the house often seemed so vast, so confidently REAL, that by comparison, I felt little more than a ghost haunting its corridors. Scarcely aware that anything could exist beyond those melancholy walls.
- I see my wife first. My dear Constance. Her body in pieces. Harriet lies nearby, indescribably violated. Almost idly, I wonder where her head is. And then I look at the doll’s house. And the doll’s house looks at me.
- Finished. It’s finished. I’m Arkham. I’m home. Where I belong.
- Twinkle twinkle little bat! How I wonder what you’re at!
- Sometimes… sometimes I think the Asylum is a head. We’re inside a huge head that dreams us all into being. Perhaps it’s your head, Batman. Arkham is a looking glass. And we are you.
Dialogue
[edit]- [Joker holds up a Rorschach inkblot]
- Joker: WELL I SEE TWO ANGELS SCREWING IN THE STRATOSPHERE, A CONSTELLATION OF BLACK HOLES, A BIOLOGICAL PROCESS BEYOND THE COMPREHENSION OF MAN, A JEWISH VENTRILOQUIST ACT LOCKED IN THE TRUNK OF A RED CHEVROLET… WHAT ABOUT YOU, BATMAN?
- [Full page panel of a bat]
- Batman: Nothing. I don’t see anything.
- Joker: NOT EVEN A CUTE LITTLE LONG-LEGGED BOY IN SWIMMING TRUNKS?
About
[edit]- Len Wein ... had written a few short and evocative paragraphs on the history of Arkham Asylum and it was here I learned of poor Amadeus Arkham, the hospital's founder, whose wife and daughter had been murdered by Martin "Mad Dog" Hawkins. In Wein's précis, Arkham's madness was described as a result of the Stock Market crash of 1929. It occurred to me that having one's wife and daughter slaughtered by a man named "Mad Dog" might have been sufficient cause for a nervous breakdown, so I decided to explore and expand on the life of this throwaway character.
- The intention was to create something that was more like a piece of music or an experimental film than a typical adventure comic book. I wanted to approach Batman from the point of view of the dreamlike, emotional and irrational hemisphere, as a response to the very literal, "realistic" "left brain" treatment of superheroes which was in vogue at the time, in the wake of The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen and others.
- The portrayal of Batman presented here is not definitive and is not necessarily how I would write the character otherwise. The repressed, armored, uncertain and sexually frozen man in Arkham Asylum was intended as a critique of the '80s interpretation of Batman as violent, driven, and borderline psychopathic. My own later portrayal of Batman in the JLA comic was one which emphasized the character's sanity and dignity.
- The construction of the story was influenced by the architecture of a house — the past and the tale of Amadeus Arkham forms the basement levels. Secret passages connect ideas and segments of the book. There are upper stories of unfolding symbol and metaphor. We were also referencing sacred geometry, and the plan of the Arkham House was based on the Glastonbury Abbey and Chartres Cathedral. The journey through the book is like moving through the floors of the house itself. The house and the head become one.
- The story's themes were inspired by Lewis Carroll, quantum physics, Jung, and Crowley; its visual style by surrealism, Eastern European creepiness, Cocteau, Artaud, Švankmajer, the Brothers Quay, etc.
- The original first draft of the script included Robin. Robin appeared in a few scenes at the beginning then remained at Police Headquarters for the bulk of the book, where he spent his time studying plans and histories of the house, in order to find a way in to help his mentor. Dave McKean, however, felt that he had already compromised his artistic integrity sufficiently by drawing Batman and refused point blank over for the Boy Wonder — so after one brave but ridiculous attempt to put him in a trench coat, I wisely removed him from the script.
- Grant Morrison, in the annotated 15th anniversary edition
- I imagined it being done by someone like Brian Bolland, and my vision was of it being ultra-real to the point of being painful. [. . .] But then when Dave McKean did it it became something quite different, because he wanted to make it more abstract. And I think that in a lot of ways, the ways we both approached it clashed in the middle. [. . .] I think it would have been easier for people to deal with if it had been a lot more concrete.
- Morrison, Grant Morrison: Combining the Worlds of Contemporary Comics book, p. 68.
- We piled all this stuff on top of it, and dressed it up in its best clothes, and sent it out. Then I sat down afterwards and realized, "Why? Why bother? It's such an absurd thing to do." It's like suddenly realizing the fact that you're desperately trying to work around the subject matter — trying to make the book despite the subject, rather than because of it. At the end of the day, if you really love to do Batman comics, then that's probably the best thing to do. Not liking them, and then trying to make something out of them is just a waste of time.
Also, by the end of it I'd really begun to think that this whole thing about four-color comics with very, very overpainted, lavish illustrations in every panel just didn't work. It hampers the storytelling. It does everything wrong. It's very difficult to have any enthusiasm about it after that.
- Dave McKean[1]
See also
[edit]- Batman: Arkham Asylum, which draws inspiration from the graphic novel
- Philip Larkin, source of the subtitle
