Elizabeth Sandifer

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Released in the wake of the hit Tim Burton film, Grant Morrison scored a massive hit with Arkham Asylum.

Me? I’m the king of the Twentieth Century. I’m the bogeyman. The villain. -Alan Moore, V for Vendetta

But this was poison fruit. The truth was that Morrison’s success was not their own. Arkham Asylum sold because there was a Batman movie out. To the extent that its content was what drove sales it was the lush and immediately arresting design by Dave McKean that stood out—announcing itself thunderously the moment someone opened the book to a random page. Even the legendary Gaspar Saladino’s lettering—a vivid and expressionistic triumph of an oft-unheralded aspect of comics—would have made more of an immediate impression for most prospective customers than the fact that the book was by the author of Animal Man, a critically acclaimed midlist title. Morrison made the money, and of course their later projects would proclaim them the author of Arkham Asylum instead. But it was not Morrison’s work that ensured this success. Even Morrison admitted “I don’t think it would have sold so much if people had suspected what was in it.” Which gets at what is clearly the most painful aspect of it for them: the fact that for all its sales, it got an extraordinarily rocky reception. As they wryly but pointedly noted, out of sales that were by that point around 200,000, “199,000 people regretted it.” 

Indeed, as Morrison has tartly and repeatedly noted, the published Arkham Asylum differed in key ways from the comic they had intended. But it is worth considering the precise nature of what Morrison was attempting. Arkham Asylum was to have been a tightly interconnected set of symbols reflecting and reiterating each other so that meanings evolved through repetition. An entirely fair way to summarize this—one Morrison was surely smart enough to realize at the time—was Watchmen only for Batman. This is clear even to the level of small details—the mirror image opening and closing images, for instance, or the sequence in which the vigilante superhero is shown a Rorschach blot (he sees a bat, unsurprisingly) and subjected to other obvious psychological twists. Indeed, in a case of Morrison expropriating even Watchmen’s flaws, the incident that drives Batman to where he must engage in his mirror-fueled bloodletting is a word association test that goes to wincingly obvious places of the sort that he would eventually criticize Moore for doing with Rorschach. (“Mother.” “Pearl.” “Handle.” “Revolver.” “Gun.” “Father.” “Father.” Death.”)

The comic’s debt to Moore becomes even clearer when one looks at Morrison’s account of its reception. “At the time,” they note, “I was still drunk with the idea that people were invested in comics that were full of fantastic layers of symbolism. And obviously most people don’t even have the education to pick up on the most basic things. Which is not to say that I’m particularly educated; I didn’t go to university or anything, but I just happen to read a lot.…

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: Arkham Asylum was a hall of mirrors.

Why should I mind, Sam? Let them laugh. I am still their emperor. -Neil Gaiman, Sandman

When Batman pierces his hand to pull himself out of the trauma inflicted by the Joker he does so with a broken piece of mirror, while Arkham recounts his trauma in the funhouse hall of mirrors. And so the act of doubling is itself doubled. This approaches monstrosities far beyond those imagined by Borges, a point Arkham is aware of when he relates his nightmare “that the mirror people have escaped from the glass and come looking for me.” This, perhaps, is the dark and unspeakable inversion of Jung; that the Shadow might too need to confront the Self so that it can escape its bonds of repression.

Indeed, something very much like this happened. Arkham Asylum was not the book Morrison intended. Dave McKean did not draw the book Morrison wanted, not merely leaving out key elements of the symbolism but drawing a book whose starkly abstracted style was fundamentally incapable of communicating the sort of information Morrison wanted to communicate. The result is a bastard book, a monstrous thing that serves none of its creators’ purposes—a mirroring, as it were. But, of course, this is fitting for the book. Morrison’s point, after all, is that Batman finds himself reflected in the madmen within the asylum; that the implicate order of Batman means that truly understanding the Dark Knight requires understanding the madmen he fights. Surely a monstrous version of the book is, in some sense, its true form.

Indeed, in a very real sense Batman himself is a monstrous creation. The character was co-created by Bill Finger and Bob Kane. The latter, attempting to copy the success of Superman, drew a character to be called “The Bat-Man.” The original version featured a domino mask, literal bat-wings (although he was also swinging from a rope), and a costume design with large numbers of red highlights. Bill Finger, looking at the design, suggested the iconic cowl, the use of a cape, and removing the red elements of the costume, and also served as writer on the project, creating the name Bruce Wayne and Batman’s alter-ego, going on to write the debuts of Gotham City, the Batcave, the Batmobile, Robin, the Joker, Catwoman, the Riddler, the Penguin, Two-Face, Scarecrow, Mad Hatter, Clayface, and more. 

It was, however, Bob Kane who brought the character to DC, and so Bob Kane that negotiated the deal that would put his name on every issue as the sole creator, even as within a year he’d hired multiple art assistants and, subsequently, artists to ghost his style entirely. Finger, meanwhile, was pushed out of the picture, with Kane angrily denouncing his claims of having helped created Batman as fraudulent and declaring that if Kane wanted to be more than an anonymous ghost writer he would need to become a leader, not a follower. Kane parlayed his official status as the sole creator of Batman into a sort of sub-Stan Lee existence as a celebrity, including a sideline as an artist producing “fine art” for galleries, or more accurately hiring ghost artists to do it in his name.…

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: Morrison’s take on Batman was of a sexually repressed character unable to have a relationship, and they seeded Arkham Asylum with a number of images reflecting this. Oddly, however, they made little use of female characters.

You sit with your sisters, beneath all creation. She who spins the thread of life. You are the queen of seers, all-seeing. Of what is. Of what must be. Of what must be concealed. -Kieron Gillen, The Wicked + The Divine

Aside from Arkham’s relations there is only remotely substantive woman in the story is the psychologist Ruth Adams, whose main role is to be endangered in the climax. (Batman’s reaction to her peril is the impetus for Morrison’s above quoted digression.) Perhaps most surprisingly absent are any of the major female Batman villains; Morrison’s asylum contains neither Poison Ivy nor does Catwoman (admittedly by this point no longer really a villain). Instead Morrison is more interested in the image of the “Mother’s Son,” also described as the “Widow’s Son,” a reference to the Masonic allegory of Hiram Abiff.

This is in many ways a significant oversight in the comic as Morrison conceived it; a diagnosis of Batman’s psycho-sexual dysfunction that resolves with neither the presence of any women nor any serious engagement with queerness—an omission that’s even more obvious when one considers Morrison’s original insistance that the Joker should appear in drag as Madonna, part of a theme that Morrison describes as “shamanic transvestism” but that in practice meant that Morrison intended to put more of a focus on a crassly transphobic view of gender fluidity as transgressive and forbidden than on the idea that a story about sexual repression might benefit from having some women in it. In this regard, it is perhaps fortunate that Warner Bros.’ anxiety about Jack Nicholson and Dave McKean’s shadowy and abstracted representation of Batman conspired to more or less eliminate the entire theme from the published comic. Regardless, the failure perhaps does much to explain why Morrison’s claimed purification of the 80s Batman into the version from their JLA run requires skipping over eight years of Batman comics that only doubled down on the elements Morrison was trying to critique.

The one piece of clear feminine imagery that made it through into the comic as published is the structure of Amadeus Arkham’s family, which Morrison explains at the outset “form a Classical Triad—his mother, the Hag aspect, his wife, the fertile mother, and his daughter, the virgin.” This division, more popularly listed in the reverse order as maiden, mother, and crone, refers to a specific interpretation of the figure of the triple goddess common in post-industrial neopaganism. This is not strictly speaking the origin of the idea—the ancient Greek Hecate was represented as a triple goddess, as was the Celtic Morrígan, and numerous other triumverates existed such as the Norns in the Norse and both the Moirai and and Erinyes in the Greek. William Blake, meanwhile, reworked a painting of Hecate into The Night of Enitharmon’s Joy, depicting Enitharmon sheltering two other figures, their faces and identities hidden.…

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: Morrison hypothesized a psychologicl collapse for Batman that was implicitly tied to the nature of the asylum itself.

Adams’s drawings of the impossibly glamorous Talia locked in passionate clinches with a shirtless, hairy-chested Batman brought an electric surge of pure testosterone back to Bruce Wayne that seemed a direct and full-throated riposte to Dr. Wertham’s indictment.-Grant Morrison, Supergods

This is not, obviously, true for strictly causal reasons: it is not that Amadeus Arkham went mad because of a bat spirit and the murder of his family and became a serial killer and thus caused Frank Miller to have a massive commercial success with a darker and more violent version of Batman. Rather, it is a symbolic link—an implicit order that at once emerges from and causes the structure of Arkham Asylum.

This is a lot of weight to put upon a plot that Morrison expanded from a third of a page of text banged out by Len Wein for Who’s Who: The Definitive Directory of the DC Universe in 1985 in order to give the asylum a vague origin story and history where it had previously not had anything like that. Instead, as with many eventually core concepts in DC Comics, Arkham Asylum established itself as a slow accretion of incidental details. Its first appearance came in Batman #258, published in 1974, in a story written by Denny O’Neil. A fairly straightforward Two-Face story, Arkham serves as little more than the prison from which Two-Face is broken out of to start the plot. The Joker makes a brief cameo there as well, asking Two-Face to let him out and being refused because Two-Face’s coin comes up scarred side down. (In this regard, the scene serves as a quick refresher on a character who hadn’t appeared in three years.) On this first appearance Arkham is called Arkham Hospital, and is described as “a New England institution called a hospital—a polite name for an asylum which houses the criminally insane.”

The New England location—and the fact that Batman #258 was a Julius Schwartz-edited issue—points clearly to the origin of the phrase, namely the works of H.P. Lovecraft, who used the fictional town of Arkham, Massachusetts as a setting in several of hist stories, beginning with “The Picture in the House” in 1920. The asylum’s second appearance two issues later even specified its location in “Arkham, New England,” and Detective Comics #477 in 1978 saw Len Wein change its name to Arkham Sanitarium, as described in Lovecraft’s 1933 “The Thing on the Doorstep.” None of this was to say that 1970s Batman comics were part of the Cthulhu mythos—it was not as though Batman took a turn towards cosmic horror, or indeed even that the comics were taking a turn towards any sort of darker horror. This was just fannishness—an entertaining attempt to work in some horror fiction references.

Positioning Arkham in New England, however, posed a problem for its growing status as the home of all Batman villains not actively marauding across Gotham City given the simultaneous growing consensus that Gotham was located in New Jersey—that all of its supervillains would be sent to a single asylum two states away simply didn’t wash.…

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Britain a Prophecy, my own take on the sorts of comics I write about here, is currently less than $250 a month away from being feasible. If you like this project, you’ll also love what we’re doing over there, and I hope you’ll consider backing it. 

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Morrison’s explanation of theoretical physics was given to the Mad Hatter, one of several Alice in Wonderland riffs in Arkham Asylum.

He was my father’s oldest friend, the white hair ringed about his bald, pink crown. He seemed forever anxious; eager to be somewhere else. We called him ‘Bunny,’ though his actual name escapes me now. In hushed tones, so as not to wake my sister, he complained about the sun and asked if I would come inside to keep him company, awaiting my Papa’s return. It seemed ungracious to decline.” -Alan Moore, Lost Girls

Beyond that, Amadeus Arkham’s daughter is described as having a deep love of the Alice books (which Arkham blames for her nightmares), while the graphic novel is bookended by two quotes from Alice in Wonderland: “‘But I don’t want to go among mad people,’ Alice remarked. ‘Oh, you cant’ help that,’ said the cat: ‘We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.’ ‘How do you know I’m mad,’ said lice. ‘You must be,’ said the cat, ‘or you wouldn’t have come here.’” and “And is that not a mother’s gentle hand that withdraws your curtains, and a mother’s sweet voice that summons you to rise? To rise and forget, in the bright sunlight, the ugly dreams that frightened you when all was dark.” 

Alice in Wonderland references are, of course, a mainstay of a certain strand of self-awarely clever fiction—a shorthand for “this is a work of playful psychedelia” so easy as to frankly be lazy. Certainly within Arkham Asylum’s dizzying labyrinth of occultism, psychology, and quantum physics it stands out as a strikingly pedestrian choice. Nevertheless, Carroll served as at least a minor obsession for Morrison in the period, who also wrote a play about him for the theatrical troupe Oxygen House, who performed it at the 1989 Edinburgh Festival Fringe; Morrison references it in the annotations to the Arkham Asylum script for the Mad Hatter scene, noting,“some of the ideas on these pages are developed in greater depth and to greater effect” in the play

Carroll was the pen name of The Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a Victorian-era mathematician at Oxford whose career was split between mathematical texts such as An Elementary Treatise on Determinants, With Their Application to Simultaneous Linear Equations and Algebraic Equations, The Fifth Book of Euclid Treated Algebraically, and A Syllabus of Plane Algebraic Geometry and his far more famous pen name. His most enduring creations, the two Alice books, began as stories told on a boating trip in 1862 to entertain Alice Liddell, the ten-year-old daughter of Dean Henry Liddell and a close friend of Carroll’s. 

Behind this statement, however, lies a tremendous amount of controversy and theorization.…

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The Patreon for Britain a Prophecy is halfway to its goal, but there’s still a long way to go. So if you want to see me do a comic in which I turn the theory I’m working out here into practice, please consider contributing.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: The complex symbolism of Arkham Asylum was, in Morrison’s theory at least,

52 ‘brane universes vibrating in the same space, all at different frequencies, within the all-enclosing Bulk, otherwise known as Bleedpsace. Four Bleed Siphons have been drilled in from the Monitor Sphere to the Orrery, to permit harvest of the miracle Ultramenstruum fluid. –Grant Morrison, Multiversity Guidebook

Bohm was a theoretical physicist, albeit an oddball in that field whose career took the sort of pth that involved publishing books with titles like Science, Order, and Creativity and Changing Consciousness: Exploring the Hidden Source of the Social, Political and Environmental Crises Facing our World, and resulted in the Dalai Lama penning a one-page introduction to the posthumous collection The Essential David Bohm. (“Because he was the one I could question in detail about quantum mechanics, I consider him to have been one of my scientific ‘gurus.’”) His career began with an oddness that would characterize it; an early interest in radical politics ensured that he couldn’t get security clearance to work on the Manhattan Project, a situation that plunged into farce when his doctoral thesis proved useful to the bomb effort and was classified such that Bohm no longer legally had access to his own work and was unable to defend it, leading Robert Oppenheimer to have to personally intervene to ensure he got his PhD. In the 1950s, he became interested in the complex debates around how to reconcile the strange implications of quantum mechanics with the observable universe, where he came up with a radical and unorthodox solution.

The underlying problem Bohm was looking at concerned the behavior of electrons, specifically the fact that they simultaneously behaved as both waves and particles. The usual demonstration of how breathtakingly weird this is is called the double slit experiment, and involves firing a controlled burst of electrons at a plate with two parallel slits. If one observes how the electrons strikes a screen behind the plates, it forms an interference pattern suggesting that the electrons are behaving as a wave. But if one sets up a device to observe how the electrons are actually passing through the slits, they switch instead to forming two distinct bands on the screen, behaving like particles. This is, to put it mildly, extremely fucking weird, and the underlying mechanics of it have been a subject of fascination by both scientists and various flavors of magicians and occultists.

The prevailing theory within physics is known as the Copenhagen interpretation, and involved a sort of dualism in which the electron existed within a field of probabilities that collapsed to a single certainty upon observation. Bohm, however, found himself taken by a counterproposal offered and then discarded by Louis de Broglie called pilot wave theory.…

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Be sure to come back Wednesday for the launch of my biggest project since Neoreaction a Basilisk.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: A key part of the success of The Last War in Albion was Dave McKean, who broke out with Violent Cases, an autobiographical comic penned by Neil Gaiman. Well. Sort of autobiographical.

She fell down, a faint shadow wand’ring
In chaos and circling dark Urizen,
As the moon, anguish’d, circles the earth:
Hopeless! Abhorr’d! a death-shadow,
Unseen, unbodied, unknown,
The mother of Pestilence. -William Blake, The Book of Ahania

It’s a sort of folk memory version of what actually happened.” Gaiman compares the writing to the autobiographical comics of Eddie Campbell, particularly his Alec work, noting that “You couldn’t have had Violent Cases without Alec. What I learned from Eddie was the value of minute incidents in the building up of fraudulent biographical narrative. I wouldn’t say it was influenced by Eddie, but the only place in comics that Violent Cases plugs into from a story viewpoint is to Eddie. Which you don’t see because the visuals are Dave.” And this is extremely true. The narrative similarities to Campbell are existent, although Gaiman is clearly right to describe them as similarities rather than influences. But the comparison is not one anyone would make because the comic’s style is so obviously dominated by the utterly astonishing work that Dave McKean did for it.

As with Gaiman’s writing, there are clear precedents for McKean’s approach—his debt to Bill Sienkiewicz, in particular, is clear and something he freely admits to. But he also stresses a litany of other influences across multiple styles and media: surrealists like Max Ernst and Jan Švankmajer, comics artists as diverse as Winsor McCay, Bernie Wrightson, and Moebius, but also a bevy of other influences: Buster Keaton, Picasso, Degas, Bob Fosse, Stanley Kubrick, Jean Cocteau, Walter Sickert, Milton Glaser, and literally dozens more.  The result of these influences, when applied to Violent Cases, is an art style that drifts freely from vivid realism to something fare more ambiguous, symbolic, and unsteady. This serves as a perfect match for the story being told, setting the comic in something that is not quite truth or fiction, not quite reality or representation, a place defined primarily by the uncertainties of memory. Gaiman may be the figure debuting in Violent Cases who went on to the most prominent career in comics (in part because McKean always maintained a broader career, doing album covers, advertisements, films, and art pieces, with comics and comics covers a prominent but still minor part of the whole), but in terms of the book the most ostentatious and obvious talent was McKean, and it was no surprise that it was him DC identified as the figure who was marketable right out of the gate. While Gaiman provided thoughtful and intelligent comics, these required a degree of investment to appreciate. A page of McKean’s art, meanwhile, could be put in front of someone and they would immediately see that this was a serious and major talent.…

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