Arkham Asylum

Arkham Asylum is a media brand owned by the US-based Time Warner company , which includes comic books and graphic novels, as well as computer and console games. These tell stories about the fictional psychiatric institution "Elizabeth Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane". It is located in the city of Gotham City within the DC Universe . Most of the stories are closely related to the adventures of the superhero character Batman . The publications appeared in large numbers since the late 1980s in the DC Comics publishing house, which belongs to the Warner group .

The name Arkham goes back to the short story The Unnamable (1923) by HP Lovecraft .

The fictional location "Arkham Asylum"

Author Dennis O'Neil first introduced the Asylum in the Threat of the Two Headed Coin story in the October 1974 comic book Batman # 258. In this story, as in most of the publications since then in which it has played a role, the Arkham Asylum serves as a facility for mentally aberrant law breakers who are legally considered to be insane . Therefore, after their capture, those adversaries of the superhero and vigilante Batman who cannot be locked up in normal prisons are assigned here.

As a psychiatry, in which a large part of the best-known and most colorful Batman opponents, such as B. The Joker , the Riddler or Two-Face are housed whenever they are in the care of the authorities, the Arkham Asylum has become an integral part of the world in which the Batman stories are set . It has been a fixture in Batman mythology since the early 1980s at the latest. It was then that the author Len Wein began to focus more closely on the facility as an independent setting instead of just showing it as the place from which certain Batman villains were briefly shown in ephemeral fringe sequences at the beginning or end of a Batman story break out at the beginning of an adventure or where they are brought in at the end of a story after they have been captured. By using the Arkham Asylum in his stories as a highly recurring plot location, Wein established it as a locus recidivius within Batman's world. Since the 1980s, the Asylum has appeared less often in stories about other characters in the DC Comics program, for example in stories about characters like Superman (e.g. in the four-part series Superman: Arkham from 2000), Black Orchid or Sandman .

The Arkham Asylum brand

Since the publication of the graphic novel Arkham Asylum, Arkham Asylum has operated as an independent brand that serves as the title of publications . A Serious House on Serious Earth by Grant Morrison and Dave McKean in 1989. Since the 1990s, the Arkham concept has, to a limited extent, decoupled from its origins as part of the Batman comics and has become the focus of itself Has become stories in which Batman only appears marginally or not at all. For example , the story Waxman and the Clown , which appeared in issues # 80-82 of the Shadow of the Bat series in 1999 , only sheds light on the personal relationships of the inmates of the Arkham Asylum to one another and to the security and care staff, while Batman is in it - although they are under the Batman title appeared - not showing up at all. Arkham Asylum miniseries released in 2008 . Living Hell , a gloomy meditation on the abysses of psychological abnormalities, as they are concentrated in Arkham, in which Batman only appears briefly in a few flashbacks, finally dispensed with naming Batman in its name and instead made the Arkham Asylum the eponymous bearer of the Publication with which the Arkham concept emancipated itself to a certain extent as an independent brand alongside the Batman brand.

Design of the Arkham concept within the fictional world of the "DC Universe"

The background story of the Arkham Asylum, which has remained largely unchanged to this day, was written in 1989 by the author Grant Morrison in his graphic novel Arkham Asylum mentioned above . A Serious House developed on Serious Earth : Morrison's story, jumping back and forth between two different time levels, tells on the one hand how the stately country house of the Arkham family ( Arkham Mansion ) on the outskirts of the metropolis of Gotham City developed from the 1890s to the 1920s at the instigation of the brilliant - but exaggerated - psychologist Amadeus Arkham, the heir of the family fortune, developed from the ancestral home of the Arkhams into a psychiatry. On the second level, an inmate revolt is described in the present, i.e. the late 1980s, during which the inmates, including numerous recurring opponents of Batman, take control of the institution. In order to save the employees they have taken hostage, Batman has to penetrate the asylum and face numerous of his enemies. In addition to physical confrontations, there are also numerous mentally disturbing confrontations.

In the 1990s, the facility's recent past and “present history” were largely elaborated by writer Alan Grant . In the four-part The Last Arkham , which was first published in the 1992 series Shadow of the Bat # 1-4, Grant tells how Jeremiah Arkham, a nephew of the institution's founder Amadeus, takes over the reins of large parts of the old, gloomy " Haunted house ”and replaced by a sterile, modernist high-tech building. In this story, Batman is instructed in the asylum in order to get to the bottom of a mysterious series of breakouts from the perfected high-security system. He studies the treatment methods of Jeremiah Arkham as well as the conversions carried out by him. The reader is given deep insights into the inner workings of the institution.

At the beginning of the Knightfall storyline from 1993, the modern high-tech new building of the asylum is destroyed in the course of a mass outbreak staged by the South American terrorist Bane (Batman # 491). After most of the Arkham inmates are gradually captured again, one after the other, in the course of the Knightfall saga, they will be in Blackgate , Gotham's regular prison, until further notice - until new permanent accommodation is found in place of the destroyed asylum City: There a wing of the penitentiary will be cleared by regular prisoners and used as a place to house the mentally ill from Arkham until further notice. The conflicts between the Arkham inmates temporarily housed in Blackgate and the regular prisoners of Blackgate are portrayed in the two-part "Madmen across the Water", published in the 1994 series Showcase (author: Alan Grant ; illustrator: Tim Sale ).

In the two-parter The King of Comedy from 1995, it is finally described how the Arkham facility is moved to the “Old Mercey Mansion” country house. The reason for this is that the destroyed facility turns out to be beyond repair. The new Asylum is a gigantic towering, gloomy building that is located on the outskirts of Gotham City: Architecturally it is a mixture of the English country house style and the Gothic . Its convulsive, confusing, gloomy corridors, which meander through the building, make the Asylum a mixture of labyrinth and haunted house. The new Asylum is much more similar to the original Arkham Asylum than the modernist new building from the stories from 1992/1993.

The authors Grant Morrison and Alan Grant can be regarded as those authors who - together with artists such as McKean, Brian Stelfreeze and Norm Breyfogle - the (apart from slight variations) still valid visual appearance of the Arkham Asylum as a threatening and ominous "haunted house / Place of Terror ”in the style of Gothic architecture. In addition, they standardized the “inner workings” of the building, which had previously been treated as a non-recessed backdrop whose design and furnishings varied from story to story. The building was treated like a real object with fixed construction plans, through which the arrangement of the various rooms, their functional allocation and many other details are more precisely defined, which has given the sanatorium a certain consistency in its design since then.

Inmates

Returning inmates of Arkham Asylum in several publications :

Abbatoir, aka Arnold Etchison Alberto Falcone Amadeus Arkham Amygdala, aka Aaron Helzinger The Answer, aka Mike Patten Black Mask, aka Roman Sionis Calendar Man, aka Julian Day Cavalier, aka Mortimer Drake Calibax, aka Charles Clayface III, aka Preston Payne Cornelius Stirk Crazy Quilt, aka Paul Dekker Death Rattle, aka Erasmus Rayne Doctor Destiny

Doctor Phosphorus, aka James Satorius, Egghead, aka Simon Ecks flamingo Movie Freak, aka Burt Weston Firefly, aka Garfield Lynns Floronic Man, aka Jason Woodrue Great White Shark, aka Warren White Gray Abbott Harley Quinn Harpy, aka Iris Phelios Hugo Strange Humpty Dumpty, aka Humphrey Dumpler Jeremiah Arkham Jigsaw Man, aka Greg Rourke

joker Julie Cesar Key "Kid Gloves" McConell Killer Croc, aka Waylon Jones Killer Moth, aka Dury Walker Crypts Mad Dog, aka Martin Hawkins Mad Hatter, aka Jervis Tetch "Mad Dog" Markham Magpie, aka Margret Pye Maxie Zeus, aka Max Zlodsky Mime, aka Camilla Ortin Mr. Freeze, aka Victor Fries Mr. Zsasz, aka Victor Zsasz Phosphorus Rex Poison Ivy, aka Pamela Isley

Professor Milo Professor Pyg, aka Lazlo Valentin Riddler, aka Edward Nigma, aka Edward Nashton Samantha Santa Klaus Scarecrow, aka Jonathan Crane The Spook, aka Val Kaliban. Tweedle Dee, aka Deever Tweed Tweedle Dum, aka Dumfree Tweed Two Face, aka Harvey Dent Ventriloquist, aka Arnold Wesker Vox Wild, aka Max Wilde

Characters who appear in individual stories as inmates of Arkham Asylum:

Albert Blum Adam Strange Ambush bug Bane Batman Bob Overdog Bradbury ( Devil's Asylum , 1995) Tommy Carma Cheetah, aka Barbara Minerva Deadshot , Floyd Lawton Defenestrator Doodlebug, aka Deadalus Boch egghead

Everard Mallitt Jean Loring Junkyard Dog cobra Crypts, poisoners Lock-up Lunkhead Nightwing , as Pierrot Lunaire Pickaxe McCoy Pinhead Psycho pirate Professor Powder Ra's al Ghul , as "Terry Gene Kase"

Rob Frazier Rudy Heinkel Sarter the Suicide Freak Rupert Thorne Solly Bean, cannibal Superman Sweeney Tenzin Wyatt Toni LePoni Toyman, aka Winslow Shott Vernon Jameson Waxman Zatanna

Publications under the name "Arkham Asylum"

Graphic novels under the name "Arkham Asylum":

• Arkham Asylum. A Serious House on Serious Earth. 1989 (by Grant Morrison and Dave McKean )
• Batman: The Last Arkham. 1995 (by Alan Grant and Norm Breyfogle )
• Arkham Asylum. Madness. 2010 (by Sam Keith and Dave Stewart)

Comic publications under the name "Arkham Asylum":

• Devil's Asylum. 1995 (One-Shot by Alan Grant and Brian Stelfreeze )
• Arkham Asylum. Tales of Madness. 1998 (One-Shot by Alan Grant and Dave Taylor )
• Arkham Asylum. Living Hell. 2003 (six-part miniseries by Dan Slott and Ryan Sook )
• Arkham Reborn. 2010 (three-part miniseries by David Hine and Jeremy Haun )
• Arkham War. 2013 (One-Shot by Peter J. Tomasi and Scot Eaton )

Computer and console games under the name "Arkham Asylum":

• Batman: Arkham Asylum . 2009
  • Sequels: Batman: Arkham City , Batman: Arkham Origins and Batman: Arkham Knight

literature

• Scott Beatty: Batman. The world of the dark knight. Documentation of Batman's heroic career with all important details and characters , Stuttgart 2002.
• Ders .: The DC Comics Encyclopedia. The Definitive Guide to the Characters of the DC Universe , London 2008.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ The Unnamable By HP Lovecraft at hplovecraft.com, Author: HP Lovecraft, accessed July 2, 2015
2. ^ Batman # 505, 1994.
3. ↑ Arkham Asylum. A Serious House on Serious Earth # 1, 1989.
4. ↑ Batman. Shadow of the Bat # 3, 1992; Batman # 492, 1993; Batman # 550, 1998.
5. ↑ Arkham Asylum. A Serious House on Serious Earth , 1989; Batman. Shadow of the Bat # 3, 1992; Batman # 584, 1993.
6. ^ Azrael # 27, 1997.
7. ^ Batman # 592, 1993
8. ^ Azrael # 27, 1997.
9. ^ Batman # 582, 1992.
10. ↑ Arkham Asylum. Tales of Madness # 1998, Batman. Shadow of the Bat # 80-82, 1998.
11. ^ Devil's Asylum # 1, 1995.
12. Jump up ↑ Batman # 326, 1980.
13. ↑ Arkham Asylum. A Serious House on Serious Earth # 1, 1989.
14. Jump up ↑ Batman # 326, 1980.
15. ↑ Arkham Asylum. Living Hell # 5.
16. ↑ Batman. Shadow of the Bat # 1-4, 1992; Batman # 592-593, 1993; Batman. Devil's Asylum # 1, 1995; Batman Chronicles # 3, 1996.
17. ↑ Arkham Asylum. Tales of Madness # 1, 1998; Batman. Shadow of the Bat # 80-82, 1998.
18. Jump up ↑ Batman # 596, 598, 2001.
19. ↑ Batman. Shadow of the Bat # 3.
20. ↑ Arkham Asylum. Tales of Madness # 1, 1998; Batman. Shadow of the Bat # 80-82, 1998.
21. ↑ Batman. Shadow of the Bat # 80-82, 1998.
22. ^ Batman # 406, 1986.
23. ^ DC: New Frontier , 2004.
24. ^ Action Comics # 560, 1984.
25. Jump up ↑ Batman: Shadow of the Bat # 1-4, 1992.
26. ↑ Batman: Mitefall , 1995.
27. Jump up ↑ Batman # 403, 1987.
28. ^ Suicide Squad # 34, 1989
29. ^ Hitman # 18, 1997
30. ↑ Arkham Asylum. Living Hell # 1, 2003
31. Jump up ↑ Batman: Shadow of the Bat # 1-2, 1992.
32. ↑ Arkham Asylum. Living Hell # 1, 2003.
33. ↑ Devil's Aslum # 1., 1995
34. ↑ Arkham Asylum. Living Hell # 1, 2003.
35. Jump up ↑ Batman # 678.
36. ^ Hitman # 2, 1996.
37. ↑ Batman: Shadow of the Bat # 80-82, 1998.
38. ^ Crisis on Infinite Earths # 12, 1986.
39. ↑ Detetive Comics # 635, 1991.
40. Jump up ↑ Batman: Villains Secret Files # 1, 1998.
41. Jump up ↑ Batman: Villains Secret Files # 1, 1998.
42. ↑ Showcase 94 # 3, 1994.
43. ^ Shadow of the Bat # 80-82, 1998.
44. ^ Action Comics #, 1999.
45. Jump up ↑ Batman: Villains Secret Files # 1, 1998.
46. ^ The Demon # 9, 1991.
47. Jump up ↑ Batman: Villains Secret Files # 1, 1998.
48. Jump up ↑ Batman: Shadow of the Bat # 80-82.