Arkham Asylum: A Serious House On Serious Earth panels by Dave McKean. Some panels are completely filled with his face, forcing readers to look directly into the madness.

His horrific face is oftentimes given greater impact when used in conjunction with extreme close-ups. His eyes are bulging as if staring directly at you from the page. McKean gives him an elongated face, with a pointed chin, and mouth full of sharp, crooked, teeth. With this diagnosis in mind, McKean paints a horrifying Joker. Arkham Asylum allows Morrison to take different direction beyond the usual psychopath diagnosis and offers up a solution which accommodates every other diagnosis to also be valid. Many creators have tried to give reason to Joker’s behaviour, with many different solutions offered depending on the type of antagonist the Clown Prince of Crime needed to be. Some of these are quick encounters, but there are a few that Morrison takes the time to flesh out and explore.

Arkham Asylum: A Serious House On Serious Earth panels by Dave McKean.īatman wanders through the Asylum, meeting different rogues in his gallery and confronting their issues. Arkham Asylum is like another world, albeit deprived of sanity, and there are plenty of odd characters ready to meet him. Batman setting foot into Arkham Asylum is the equivalent to Alice falling down the rabbit hole. This is most obvious with the quotes from the novel bookending this graphic novel, but it goes much further than that. There’s much reluctance in his decision as he fears that entering Arkham will be detrimental to his own sanity.īatman’s narrative in many ways echos Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. In the present, Batman enters Arkham Asylum, the home of the criminally insane, after prisoners take hostages. With Arkham Asylum, the pair would take Batman and combine it with the fringe sensibilities of their prior work.Īrkham Asylum is a psychological horror with a dual narratives. Morrison would go on to start their run on Animal Man and Doom Patrol, while McKean would collaborate on projects with, at the time, a mostly unknown Neil Gaiman on Black Orchard and covers for Sandman. Arkham Asylum: A Serious House On Serious Earth cover by Dave McKean. Grant Morrison and Dave McKean were both part of what was dubbed the British Invasion and would go on to work on projects that would operate in the weird fringes of DC Comics’ catalogue. This was spearheaded by legendary editor Karen Berger, and it uncovered creators such as Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, Brian Bolland, and Dave Gibbons. In the 1980s, DC Comics were hiring writers and artists from the UK. But that’s that what writer Grant Morisson and artist Dave McKean did in the eerie 1989 Batman graphic novel Arkham Asylum: A Serious House On Serious Earth. While Batman has covered many genres over the years, psychological horror is not a genre that you would usually associate with him.

Batman arkham asylum dave mckean