Spooky Batman! - Arkham Asylum: Living Hell

Batman is the most terrifying superhero. Terror is one of his primary weapons, “striking fear into the heart of superstitious and cowardly criminals...black, terrible, creature of the night,” etc. You never know when Batman’s watching, what he sees or what he’s planning. Thus, Batman’s villains need to meet his scariness by doing super-scary things like cutting off their own faces, releasing neurotoxins into public water, or being a giant crocodile monster. Batman and horror go together as well as Batman and crime. As All Hallows Eve approaches, I wanted to take a look at the scariest Batman stories I could find to see what makes the Bat so frightening. 

I recently flipped through my back-issues from the early 2000s (bought when I was 12) and found Arkham Asylum: Living Hell. I tried to remember the story, but could only recall, 1) new people to jail are called “Fishes” and 2) a madhouse is the scariest fucking place on earth. While Grant Morrison and Dave McKean’s original Arkham Asylum is a more obvious choice for a scary Batman yarn, this book is already quite popular (one of the best selling graphic novels of all time, in fact). Yet Arkham Asylum: Living Hell, the 2003 mini-series by Dan Slott and Eric Powell is at best a cult classic, yet does something totally different with the horrifying gothic hospital. If McKean/Morrison’s book proves that Arkham is the scariest place on earth, Slott/Powell's book shows the human side of the asylum--the lives of the “normal” people it takes to make a mental hospital run. It’s sort of like how Ed Brubaker/Greg Rucka’s Gotham Central showed the human side of the GCPD. But ultimately, Arkham Asylum is destined to fail: the crazies always get out of their cages and no one is sane, especially the people who get paid to administer “sanity”

I think if Living Hell came out in 2009 it would have sold better. The story’s main protagonist is the Great White Shark, Warren White, a Wall Street fat cat who embezzles money from people’s college funds and retirement plans. He is called, by everyone including the Joker, “the worst person I’ve ever met”. The book makes a passing mention of Halliburton, the Great White Shark is pretty much exactly Kenneth Lay. At first, the character is completely out of his element in Arkham, almost getting murdered by practically everyone. But once he learns how to play the system, and his nose gets ripped off (making him look a lot more like a Great White Shark), he becomes a top dog within the hospital. The point here is not subtle: industrial capitalists are fucking insane. They have no empathy, they care only about themselves, and they are ruthless sociopaths. 

Pretty cool right? The series also seeks to humanize the people necessary for running America’s worst mental hospital. Dr. Jeremiah Arkham, the warden of the madhouse, is always doing his best to keep the crazies under control. Of course, the entire Batman storyline wouldn’t work unless Arkham constantly fails. Every night Jeremiah goes into Arkham to try and stop a riot, or a hostage situation, or a chemical bomb--and most nights, the only reason he succeeds is because Batman helps him. You can’t force people to be sane if they don’t want to be. Just ask Dr. Anne Carver, an Arkham psychiatrist who valiantly tries to rehabilitate her patients, but always takes the blame when a crazy person falls back into their cycle of craziness. Finally, the story’s ostensible hero is Aaron Cash, an Arkham Guard, who took his job because a) he needs money and b) he likes beating the shit out of people. This is the type of person a mental asylum attracts for its non-certified laborers: desperate people. Below, you can see Cash trying to fight Killer Croc with a night stick. 

The book also takes an interesting look at who exactly qualifies as mentally unstable. While you do have to kill someone to get into Arkham, you don’t need to be as flamboyant as the Joker. The four villains the story devotes the most focus toward are all typical identity categories that are pushed to the margins of American society. First up is Jane Doe, the most absolutely horrifying villain nobody ever uses. Jane is a completely blank slate, a human without any identity or ego. Basically, she’d be what would happen if you abandoned a baby alone in a room and only provided it with food and water. Her origin is not revealed, but her “super-power” is: Jane impersonates other people in society by making creepy skin suits and pretending to be the person’s identity. Jane tries to do this with Great White Shark, and succeeds in doing this with Anne Carver, the psychiatrist. Jane might represent the children in America who are given no love or guidance whatsoever. The type of person who couldn’t help but become a desperate psychopath. So obviously, she wears your skin and steals your life.

We also meet Doodlebug, an outsider artist who sees the world in a horrifying hallucination of color (this drives him insane and makes him only want to paint with blood). Junkyard Dog is a crazy homeless person; he spouts weird, demonic rhetoric and eats garbage. Strangest of all is Humpty Dumpty, who is literally just Humpty Dumpty. He’s a round, fat eggman who only talks in rhyme and is obsessed with putting things back together again. He’s not very scary, but he is pretty fun. He was probably invented just so the DCU had another character who talks in rhyme (there's way more than you'd expect). Dumpty recently made an appearnece in Beware the Batman and is voiced by Breaking Bad’s, Matt Jones, or Badger! 

The book starts with a very creepy lobotomy. This is how our Christian ancestors treated mental illness. See, look!

And it ends with the rising of Etrigan the Demon. Wait, what? As a 12 year old, I didn’t understand why Etrigan appears at the end of the book, but now I think it might be to hyperbolize the idea that “demons” cause insanity. Slott comments on the idea that insanity used to be thought of as caused by demons, which as we now know, was very lazy excuse-making from our past Christian ancestors. Insane people need is love and compassion (hard to give), proper child-raising (which is impossible to give) or maybe even just death. But they definitely don’t need religion, as that really messes with their already messed up heads. The true demon lurking in the background of our collective unconscious is the concept of insanity itself--the idea that some of us are sane, while others are not sane and instead should be feared. Of course, you and I (sane readers) are just like everyone else: right on the verge of sanity! Once tragedy strikes, or a head injury occurs, you find the necronomicon, or even just a tiny neuron snaps, then you're not sane anymore. It doesn’t take much to make a person go crazy. That’s the scariest thing of all.

Ultimately, Arkham is a useful metaphor for the futility of mental asylums. Sometimes people joke that the asylum should just lock Joker’s cell tighter. But this misses the point: there will always be more Jokers if there’s a place to put the Jokers. Usually, the American government uses insane asylums to find a place for the people they otherwise don’t want to deal with (the homeless, children from bad homes, people that nobody else understands), so they’ll never accomplish the stated ideal of making people healthy. Asylums are underfunded, the people working there are over-worked, and most of the patients are incapable of understanding the point of “rehabilitation” in the first place. The “best” thing an asylum does is stand atop a stormy hill as a symbolic caution to the sane: reminding us, never do anything crazy. Once you go over the ledge and stop being a productive member of society, you will be abandoned. Once you are abandoned, there is no turning back. And that, friends, is very scary.

Tomorrow, I look at an under-rated Grant Morrison Batman horror classic!