Yahya Sulaiman
16th October 2009, 03:05
Anyone who holds to the snobby/ignorant stereotype that comic books aren't real art or literature, assuming that they already shouldn't hang their heads in shame, will have no right not to sit in the corner with the conical DUNCE hat on if they still hold to this elitist view after reading Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth, the most intelligent, artistic, powerful, deep, and emotionally/psychologically stirring work in the history of the comic book format (and therefore, unsurprisingly, the most bestselling graphic novel ever). It's short for a graphic novel--about a hundred pages, unless you have the WONDERFUL 15th Anniversary Edition with the full annotated script at the back that explains every bit of symbolism, allusion, parallel, insinuation, Jungian psychology, and artistic meaning throughout the whole work. With these annotations even the least interested-in-intellectualism person in the world will find little going over his or her head in such an abstract work.
The plot consists of two stories which interweave through echoes, hints, and symbols of the past and future appearing in each other. The past story is the full tale, only briefly alluded to in previous comics, of the history of the cursed Arkham Asylum (where the mad Batman enemies are kept when captured) and its founder Amadeus Arkham, who started off a sane and well-meaning man but who ended up treating a psychopath who murdered, raped, and mutilated Amadeus's own family. Naturally, Amadeus's treatment of his tormentor, and his resultant own growing need for his own treatment, did not turn out well. The present story told in alternating scenes involves Batman being forced to penetrate the halls of Arkham in a sort of gauntlet run after its supervillain inmates have taken it over and forced him inside with hostage threats. There's the Joker, the Scarecrow, Clayface, Tweedledee and Tweedledum, Black Mask, Two-Face, Maxie Zeus, the Mad Hatter, Killer Croc, and Dr. Destiny, whose ability to warp the line between reality and unreality (they obviously don't have the psi-dampeners on him now that the inmates have taken over) has turned the interior of the Asylum into a surreal, bizarre place like no other in the history of fiction, a dreamburst of a world where past and present, mind and matter, sanity and insanity overlap, and you never know what might happen.
The artwork isn't merely the best artwork in the history of comics: take certain panels, like one showing a landscape of Metropolis at twilight in a sort of abstract futurist design (tainted with a hint of Gotham's darkness due to being part of the story yet still clearly a brighter city), blow it up, frame it and hang it in a museum, and I promise you no one strolling by will find it out of place amongst the other masterpieces. No exaggeration. Not that Dave McKean is limited to an artsy look. His action is so well rendered and seemingly right-there-in-the-moment that Batman's fight with Killer Croc recalls the shadowy building fight climax of Blade Runner, only more laden with striking imagery and archetypal resonance.
My favorite part is when two Arkham psychologists who refused to leave their patients when the other hostages are released explain their psychological assessments and methods to Batman regarding Two-Face and the Joker. The Joker, they say, isn't so much as insane as someone with a unique disorder vaguely related to Tourette's. Whatever internal neurological mechanism everyone else has which allows us to cope with the constantly changing nature of our sensory input, he lacks. He copes by adapting by going with the flow and constantly changing himself. That's why he's pulling off simple crimes one day, trying to take over the world (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EQc5zpqEeo) the next day, and just being a harmless clown the next...And as for Two-Face, they try to "wean him off" his obsessive fixation with duality by getting him off a coin and onto a die so that he has six possible decisions to make each time he casts to decide instead of two. From there they go on to a standard deck, they plan to go from a Tarot deck on to the I Ching...and eventually he'll have the normal, complex set of functioning decision-making capabilities everyone else has. Problem is, they've screwed him up in the process and now he can't even decide how to determine whether to go to the bathroom and when we first see him he's in a puddle of his own urine.
The only serious flaw in the book is that some of the characters are underused. Black Mask, for example, is one of the best Batman villains, but he's hardly in this thing. Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee are in it even less. Professor Milo barely makes more than a cameo or two, which is especially unfortunate given that he was the sane doctor who was wrongly put in the asylum at around that time in the comics and would have worked excellently as a counterpoint to the genuinely insane inmates had his character actually been used. (One very minor unimportant continuity error has Amadeus Arkham singing the American national anthem as he dies when DC had previously stated he had been singing the Battle Hymn of the Republic. Attributable to Dr. Destiny again? :))
This graphic novel, whether you like comics or not, will blow. Your. Mind. I give it five out of five stars.
The plot consists of two stories which interweave through echoes, hints, and symbols of the past and future appearing in each other. The past story is the full tale, only briefly alluded to in previous comics, of the history of the cursed Arkham Asylum (where the mad Batman enemies are kept when captured) and its founder Amadeus Arkham, who started off a sane and well-meaning man but who ended up treating a psychopath who murdered, raped, and mutilated Amadeus's own family. Naturally, Amadeus's treatment of his tormentor, and his resultant own growing need for his own treatment, did not turn out well. The present story told in alternating scenes involves Batman being forced to penetrate the halls of Arkham in a sort of gauntlet run after its supervillain inmates have taken it over and forced him inside with hostage threats. There's the Joker, the Scarecrow, Clayface, Tweedledee and Tweedledum, Black Mask, Two-Face, Maxie Zeus, the Mad Hatter, Killer Croc, and Dr. Destiny, whose ability to warp the line between reality and unreality (they obviously don't have the psi-dampeners on him now that the inmates have taken over) has turned the interior of the Asylum into a surreal, bizarre place like no other in the history of fiction, a dreamburst of a world where past and present, mind and matter, sanity and insanity overlap, and you never know what might happen.
The artwork isn't merely the best artwork in the history of comics: take certain panels, like one showing a landscape of Metropolis at twilight in a sort of abstract futurist design (tainted with a hint of Gotham's darkness due to being part of the story yet still clearly a brighter city), blow it up, frame it and hang it in a museum, and I promise you no one strolling by will find it out of place amongst the other masterpieces. No exaggeration. Not that Dave McKean is limited to an artsy look. His action is so well rendered and seemingly right-there-in-the-moment that Batman's fight with Killer Croc recalls the shadowy building fight climax of Blade Runner, only more laden with striking imagery and archetypal resonance.
My favorite part is when two Arkham psychologists who refused to leave their patients when the other hostages are released explain their psychological assessments and methods to Batman regarding Two-Face and the Joker. The Joker, they say, isn't so much as insane as someone with a unique disorder vaguely related to Tourette's. Whatever internal neurological mechanism everyone else has which allows us to cope with the constantly changing nature of our sensory input, he lacks. He copes by adapting by going with the flow and constantly changing himself. That's why he's pulling off simple crimes one day, trying to take over the world (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EQc5zpqEeo) the next day, and just being a harmless clown the next...And as for Two-Face, they try to "wean him off" his obsessive fixation with duality by getting him off a coin and onto a die so that he has six possible decisions to make each time he casts to decide instead of two. From there they go on to a standard deck, they plan to go from a Tarot deck on to the I Ching...and eventually he'll have the normal, complex set of functioning decision-making capabilities everyone else has. Problem is, they've screwed him up in the process and now he can't even decide how to determine whether to go to the bathroom and when we first see him he's in a puddle of his own urine.
The only serious flaw in the book is that some of the characters are underused. Black Mask, for example, is one of the best Batman villains, but he's hardly in this thing. Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee are in it even less. Professor Milo barely makes more than a cameo or two, which is especially unfortunate given that he was the sane doctor who was wrongly put in the asylum at around that time in the comics and would have worked excellently as a counterpoint to the genuinely insane inmates had his character actually been used. (One very minor unimportant continuity error has Amadeus Arkham singing the American national anthem as he dies when DC had previously stated he had been singing the Battle Hymn of the Republic. Attributable to Dr. Destiny again? :))
This graphic novel, whether you like comics or not, will blow. Your. Mind. I give it five out of five stars.