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Writer:
Grant Morrison Reviewed by Benjamin Russell Grant Morrison has been accused of being a genius. The reason why I say "accused" is because there are fans of his work that believe he is good enough that he need not be wasting his time with the superhero genre. But truth be told, Morrison warms to the concept of superheroes, their surrealism fuels him in some manner, creating within the ideas that make their way onto the surface of the twenty-four page pamphlet. On his webpage, Morrison is quoted as saying that he's always written "work-for-hire mainstream adventure material in tandem with the more ‘challenging’ or ‘personal’ projects." The former of which refers to superheroes. Animal Man was a superhero comic. The eponymous character wore spandex and a silly goggle face-mask. And in Morrison’s final issue of the comic, he meets "evil mastermind behind the scenes." He meets Morrison; Animal Man meets his maker -- something that is never supposed to happen, according to many old myths. There is a reason why Zeus avoids coming to Niobe in his full aspect, and why Jehovah communicates through whirlwinds and flaming foliage. When Vladimir Nabokov’s character Krug discovers that he is a fictional character in the novel Bend Sinister, Nabokov has to intervene for his creation by driving him mad so that he won’t have to deal with the full impact of the discovery. Krug pulls back the veil that allows him to see the gnostic mysteries of his universe, and is forced to go mad as a result. The same is true of characters in Morrison’s Arkham Asylum, a Batman graphic novel, fully-painted by Dave McKean. Morrison and McKean carefully exploit the full potential of the medium of comics. Comic books, with their dual media of text and visual art, are perhaps most adept at depicting parallel storylines. The captions can provide one tale, while the images can provide a second, and the juxtaposition that the reader is privy to is Art. This is far more difficult to do in other existing combinations of the textual and the visual -- film, for instance. Spilt screens or asynchronous soundtracks have proven largely unsuccessful in allowing meaning to emerge from the curious discordant overlap. Even books like Danielewski’s brilliant House of Leaves -- which mixes narratives, one taking place in the footnotes -- cannot be read with the same sense of simultaneity that comics provide. In DC Comics’ Arkham Asylum, Grant Morrison and Dave McKean provide the jaded and familiar pulp character of the Batman with a literary magnificence that has since been emulated and never equaled. This is done by placing the ordinary story -- Our Hero enters into the Lions’ Den to exchange himself for the lamb/victim, and yet Emerges Victorious -- against a tapestry of mystical symbolism, psychology, and commentary about the secret nature of the world. The outer face of the text provides a familiar piece of high concept: Batman must be crazy; anyone who dresses up in a cape and a mask and runs about trying to fight crime is certainly going to strike fear into the hearts of criminals -- and anyone else who he comes across. But not a fear of retribution and vengeance, but instead the creepy peripheral fear that one wants to scratch at when in the presence of someone who has the stink of crazy about him. But the true story is the same as that of Nabokov's Krug, of Buddy "Animal Man" Baker: character's learning the lesson that you need to see reality through filters, because you aren't meant to understand it all. What secret knowledge you can divine, you should do through metaphors and stories so that you are protected by symbolism. The primary running allusion is that of the journey of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Carroll’s tale is a oft-misinterpreted allegory. It has been appropriated by contemporary youth as a drug tale, and has been redrawn in tortured fashion by the world’s current crop of madness fetishists. But Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is not so much about madness as it is about Alice learning to deal with the double truths of the adult world. She learns moderation and control in the face of a series of monomaniacs who are distorted extensions of one aspect of personality. It’s not hard to see why in today’s psychomedical climate one would see it as a tale of lunatics, based both on the Cheshire Cats' assertion that everyone in Wonderland is mad, and the non-unrealistic diagnosis that many neurological diseases come about because of an unhealthy chemical imbalance that highlights one neural aspect over all others. But Alice’s journey is not a test of her sanity, in fact, she remains quite unfazed by the whole series of experiences, rather properly nonplussed by the entire proceedings. Her journey is one or revelation about how the adult world -- the one that she, as a pre-adolescent, is about to be indoctrinated into -- functions. Batman is already an adult, and knows how the world functions, but the story takes place on April Fool’s Day, when the Feast of Fools brings about a temporary reversal of roles and rules. But, as Dekker’s Shoemaker’s Holiday illustrates, the Feast Of Fools tradition is one that has to be sanctioned by an authority. The inmates cannot take over the asylum without the aid of he one ultimately in charge. The plot eventually reveals that this is Dr. Milo, whose mad perception of Batman can’t distinguish between his humanity and the symbol that he wears as his cloak. Milo is unable to separate the physical symbols from their representative meanings, which gives him a peculiar insight into Batman’s drive and neurosis, as he eerily knows Batman’s central motivations, and mocks them, calling him a "mama’s boy." Morrison is essentially equating Batman's costume with Amadeus Arkham's mad cross-dressing. The authority figure who sanctions the Feast of Fools is supposed to reinstitute control when the holiday has reached its tenure, but as Milo is mad himself, the holiday threatens to break it’s rules and run unchecked. Alice, by the end of her journey, learns to have confidence that she can survive in the world. But this cannot happen if someone like Milo has upset the natural balance. But because of the parallels between Arkham's mania and Batman's -- who, incidentally, is never referred to as Bruce Wayne, and who briefly talks about "Batman" in the third person -- and because of the latter's doubts about his sanity, Batman is thereby suspect as the agent to restore the natural order upon the world. The latter half of the story deals with his struggle to prove himself. In a deck of tarot cards, each suit also tells a story of a journey through world that swings precariously out of balance and has the balance restored at the end. Tarot symbolism is threaded all throughout Arkham Asylum, from the symbol of the Hanged Man as Batman enters the asylum (holding the position of Campbell’s "Belly of the Whale experience" in the story of the major arcana), to the bookends of the story depicting the Moon alongside epigrams from Lewis Carroll. As both Aleister Crowley and Carl Jung are mentioned in the text, it would be foolish to think that their respective texts on interpretations of the tarot and the effects of archetypal symbols upon the psyche do not somehow lend themselves to further interpretation of the novel. Also, a general exploration of ambi-sexuality is a dominant thematic thread, with echoes in the Joker’s dialogue, the initial association of Harvey Dent with the Lovers tarot card, and the casual psychosis of Amadeus Arkham dressing up in his mother’s bridal gown. Norman Bates even makes a brief guest appearance. But, the reversal of gender roles is only one of the requirements of a Feast of Fools celebration, it is to be expected that something as seemingly inviolate as gender becomes transmutable as well, and Morrison serves the reader well by including a reference to the clown fish, a biological precedent for gender-swapping, with additional connotations of the Fool. The weavings of symbolism are so intricate in Arkham Asylum that it is tempting to miss them altogether. Primarily because it would take more research than comic book reader is typically used to in order to fully understand the craft and purpose of the book, but also because it’s a Batman graphic novel. Ultimately, any deep meaning that Morrison is chasing in the text will be undermined by the demi-century of silliness that is the irrefutable baggage of the main character and his Rouge’s Gallery. The Joker, in his role of ambisexual predator, and given the fact that Morrison redefines his psychosis as mystical -- the Joker’s particular neurological disorder is effectively that he has no veils, and he sees the deity behind the protective guise of the burning bush -- takes on more meaning and force than he has in any other comic. The psychological victory of Harvey Dent at the end of the book, however, would make no sense without the context of the wider comic book. Morrison only provides the briefest of introductory character summaries, the clunkiest dialogue in the book, assuming that we can't help but be familiar with the archetypes of Batman’s world, and the story suffers as a result. If he could have created his own heroes, and if he had the time, space, and ability to flesh them out as he pleased, the novel would have been that much more manic, that much more full of internal context. Arkham Asylum may be the ultimate example of how even "mainstream adventure" can walk a twisted, literary road and be highly significant in the way that it deals with commercial properties, but because the characters have so many aspects engendered by corporate concerns, the work will always be wounded and limited. Arkham Asylum definitively proves that Morrison's enjoyment of the superhero is justified. But when Morrison and Animal Man have their famous conversation, Morrison complains that in a serial comic "nothing matters. It all just comes back, good as new." He later points out that "there's not enough space... in twenty-four pages." Unfortunately, what Arkham Asylum also proves that just because you have more pages, doesn't mean you can say what needs to be said. Batman is a flawed authority and should therefore be unable to completely revoke the Feast of Fools. But the mainstream adventure format requires a square-one beginning, with no real growth or change. Because, like Animal Man, it is "a world created by a committee," Arkham Asylum must also return to the characters to the bright, flat limbo of serial existence. Batman's victory is a hollow one that sounds dully against the elegant complexities of the work, and the ending feels rushed. Morrison may be satisfied with producing for the work-for-hire mainstream, but we should not be, not when it limits the success of a potentially great tale. Highly Recommended.
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Arkham
Asylum
