Blackgate
The Blackgate Penitentiary , or Blackgate for short, is a fictional penal institution that is used in publications by DC Comics and in other media products (films, TV series, computer games, etc.) based on these comics. The place is also a registered media brand under which various comic publications, such as the one-shots Blackgate (1997) and Blackgate - Isle of Men (1998), but also other products, such as the console game Batman: Arkham Origins Blackgate (2013), are published have been.
Blackgate is the penal institution of the fictional city of Gotham City , located in the DC universe , in which most of the adventures of the superhero character Batman and many adventures of various other fictional characters owned by the DC publisher take place. Blackgate has appeared in numerous comic book stories for the publisher DC and in a number of other media as the place where the Gotham City criminals are kept after their capture. In particular, many of Batman's opponents are imprisoned here after their defeat against the crime fighter. The prison is thus the facility in which those criminals of Gotham City who are sane are suspended, hence the counterpart to the Arkham Asylum as the place where the Gotham City authorities keep the city's insane delinquents after their capture.
Location
Blackgate Prison was first introduced in the history of "The Hungry Grass" in the May 1991 book Detective Comics # 629 as the prison of the fictional city of Gotham City. The author of this story (and thus the inventor of the Blackgate concept) was the Briton Peter Milligan , while the visual design of the booklet was taken over by the draftsman Jim Aparo , who thus created the institution's first design. In the following years, Aparos design of the fictional facility was further refined by draftsmen such as Tim Sale , Graham Nolan , Joe Staton and Scott McDaniel , enriched with details and modified in parts by showing further parts of the institution in later stories (and, accordingly, optically beforehand designed) and the overall appearance of the fictional place z. T. modified.
In earlier Batman stories, various prisons in the city had occasionally been briefly shown since the 1940s, but they always had no name or were generically referred to as "Gotham Penitentiary" or the like and which, as fictional locations, were only given no more precise contouring were used as plot device . For example, uncharacterized (interchangeable) cliché prisons were unceremoniously inserted into Batman stories by authors when they needed a prison for the story they wanted to tell, for example as a place from which a Batman opponent at the beginning of a story should break out to get the story going or as a place where a captured villain was imprisoned at the end of a story.
With Blackgate, the fictional city of Gotham City was given a penal institution for the first time, which bore its own name and which had a fixed appearance, which was largely retained consistently in later stories, and which was located in a specific, fixed location in the geography of the city of Gotham found.
Blackgate Island, a small rocky island in the waters in the south-east of Gotham City in the city's bay to the Atlantic coast (Gotham Bay), was chosen as the location of the prison. From the mainland - or the main island of Gotham City, which is based on the main island of New York City, Manhattan - the island is in most versions about a mile away.
In individual Batman stories, a large number of the inmates of the Arkham Asylum are temporarily interned in the wings of Blackgate when the asylum cannot be used due to damage, in order to be sent back to Arkham after the facility has been repaired. Most Arkham inmates are interned in Blackgate after the destruction of Arkham at the beginning of the Knightfall saga in 1993, after their recapture in the course of the almost two-year storyline, up to the 1995 issue of Shadow of the Bat # 38 a new Arkham Asylum is opened (for example, the Arkham inmates Amygdala, Cornelius Stirk, Firefly, Mad Hatter, Poison Ivy, Riddler, Salter the Suicide Freak, Scarecrow, Two-Face and Mr. Zsasz are in Blackgate during this time) . During the one year of No Man's Land storyline from 1999, while the Gotham City separated from the rest of the United States and to a no man's land explains prevails in the hereafter anarchy, Batman returns control over Black Gate to the paranoid former prison guard Lyle Bolton: In the course of the storyline, which spans several dozen issues, Batman conquers one district of Gotham after another from his adversaries, who have divided the city like warlords among themselves and "rule" with the help of wild gangs, capturing each of them Adversaries to Bolton for custody in Blackgate, until at the end of the one-year storyline the authorities take back control of the institution and thus the prisoners. During this time, numerous Batman villains, otherwise imprisoned in Arkham, are again kept in Blackgate (such as Black Mask, the Mad Hatter, Scarecrow, the Ventriloquist and Mr. Zsasz)
In 1997, the special edition Blackgate , written by Chuck Dixon and drawn by Joe Station, was the first publication on the market that dealt with the fictional location in more detail. The booklet, which tells a story about an attempted mass escape from the institution, traced the fictional story of Blackgate in detail for the first time and provided in-depth insights into everyday life and processes in the institution. In particular, Dixon transposed many details of the real history of the Alcatraz prison in San Francisco into the fictional world of Batman comics by cutting them on Blackgate: For example, the original construction of the prison building as a military festival for the storage of weapons and ammunition and the The building was rededicated as a prison in the face of the crime wave that hit the United States in the 1930s.
Another special issue Blackgate - Isle of Men followed in 1998, which describes how Blackgate was hit by a violent tidal wave on the occasion of a severe earthquake, which meant that the prisoners could briefly take control of the institution and fierce fighting between the inmates and burn out from the guards. The protagonist of this story is a death row murderer named Jared Manx, who is able to escape from death row due to the destruction of the institution by the floods of water immediately before he can be brought to execution: The story describes how Manx through the circumstances to Becomes a hero by becoming the protector of his lawyer and the nun who was supposed to give him spiritual support before going to the execution in the turmoil of the prisoner revolt. He defends the two women from attacks by other inmates and gradually paves their way out of the depths of the institution and through the chaos of the fighting to the outside world. After Manx has as good as saved his lawyer and the nun and they are about to leave the building, he is finally struck dead by falling masonry in an act of mystical justice just at the time for which his execution was scheduled.
Adaptations
In the animated series Batman. 1990s The Animated Series features a penitentiary closely related to the comics' Blackgate Prison called Stongeate Prison , also on an island in the waters off the city's coast.
In the movie The Dark Knight Rises , Blackgate appears as the setting.
In the computer and console game Arkham Origins , the Blackgate prison is a plot through which the player has to fight his way through both at the beginning of the game and at the end of the story part of the game: At the beginning of the game, a mysterious prison revolt shakes the prison, which causes the crime fighter Batman to break into the asylum in order to pacify the trouble spot and rescue the prisoners. At the end of the game, the main villains of the game, Bane and Joker, lure Batman back into the asylum, where he now has to find his way through the prison blocks and eliminate his opponents' henchmen and escaped prisoners in order to reach the final bosses and give them the job lay.
The console game Arkham Origins. Blackgate (2013) even takes place entirely in Blackgate and describes how Batman has to recapture one by one after the establishment has been taken over by three different warring factions of prisoners.
Inmates
In the Batman comics, a. the following figures shown as inmates of Blackgate:
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Employee
- Dr. Simpson Flanders : Simpson Flanders is Blackgate's institutional psychologist in various stories from the 1990s and 2000s. Flanders believes that most of Blakgate's inmates are victims of a misconstructed and inhumane society and unfortunate living conditions, and that he - imbued with a belief in the good in everyone - helps them to rehabilitate and return to society. Flanders' naivete is exploited on various occasions by inmates of Blackgate by manipulating him into unwittingly helping them with their escape plans. For example, the pyromaniac Garfield Lynns (Firefly) has Flanders divide himself into a cleaning crew, with Lynns using the chemical-rich cleaning products that are accessible to him to build an incendiary bomb and to flee in the fire it triggered ( Detective Comics # 689). The terrorist known as Bane, in turn, uses a teddy bear given to him by Flanders to hide a blade in it and smuggle it into the prison yard, where he can then murder a fellow inmate. As a punishment, Bane is then, as he planned, sent to an isolation cell for several months as a punishment, in which he then cures his body, which has been ruined by drug addiction, and restores his destroyed physique, in order to finally flee from Blackgate.
- Victor Zehrhard : Victor Zerhard officiated in numerous Batman stories of the 1990s as director ("Warden") of Blackgate. He is a tall and strong man with a lush mustache and a bald head who, as a tough law-and-order man, leads a strict regime in “his” institution. It is first introduced in the comic book Showcase 94 # 3. After the Cataclysm storyline from 1998, he no longer appears.
literature
- Robert Greenberger: The Essential Batman Encyclopedia , 2008