book three

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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CW: Sexually explicit imagery

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Grant Morrison’s script for Arkham Asylum focused on the geometric image of the vesica piscis.

I find myself grasping for my roots, awkwardly. And I wonder what my grandparents would think of me, were they to meet me today. Ask their shades about me and I imagine they would pull ghost photographs from their wallets and handbags, show you a solemn child with huge hazel eyes. -Neil Gaiman, Mr. Punch

Euclid’s Elements begins with one, using it to construct an equilateral triangle. Indeed, one can use it to construct a myriad of basic shapes—the square, pentagon, and hexagon can also be constructed from it. 

Within the Pythagorean religion the number one, represented by the circle and called the monad, was considered sacred and holy. The vesica piscis thus represented the dyad, combining as it did two circles. The generative properties outlined by Euclid, then, become the product of copulation, a meaning further emphasized by the visual similarities between the vesica piscis and the vagina. This mystical association, obvious as it was, served as a largely cross-cultural bit of sacred geometry.

Separately, however, the vesica piscis became a Christian symbol. By extending the lines on one apex one gets a distinctly fish shape, which meshes with a wealth of Biblical imagery. More mystically, various numerological associations between the proportions of the vesica piscis and the Bible are attested, if dubiously. The shape is also closely related to the ogive, which is essentially a vesica piscis with flattened sides, and which serves as the geometric underpinning of the gothic archway. 

For their part, Morrison ties the symbol to the larger body of symbolism in Arkham Asylum, using the fish symbol to relate it to the Moon Tarot card according to Hermetic lore while also drawing a Christ-Osiris link (familiar in Crowley) to bring up descent to the underworld imagery. Indeed, there’s an entire line of fish symbolism in Arkham Asylum. Clown fish make regular appearances, gesturing both to the Joker and to a theme of sexual ambiguity that got downplayed when Warner Bros. corporate refused to allow the comic to depict the Joker dressed as Madonna on the grounds that it might lead people to assume that Jack Nicholson was a cross-dresser, a fairly astonishing case of reaching the right decision for the stupidest reasons possible. (Morrison later rued that “in the end it was Heath Ledger who immortalized the tranny Joker in 2008’s The Dark Knight, vindicating my foresight.”) And at another point they have Amadeus Arkham reflect on the French term for the victim of an April Fool’s prank, poisson d’Avril, while also connecting the vesica piscis to holography and the theories of David Bohm. 

The bulk of the discussion of the vesica piscis in Morrison’ script comes around a sequence roughly halfway through the book where Batman, shaken by flashbacks to his parents’ murder, snaps himself out of it by pushing a shard of broken mirror into his hand.…

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: Grant Morrison’s first major hit was Arkham Asylum, a Batman graphic novel whose dense symbolism included, among other things, the Tower card and the Great Dragon.

This particular lunatic claimed he was the Biblical Anti-Christ and promised to return to Gotham one day, on the eve of the battle of Armageddon. -Grant Morrison, Batman

This suits Crowley’s larger signification, but is tangental in the extreme, relying on Dīs Pater’s later conflation with the more traditionally bestial Orcus, who provided the roots for the French ogre and Italian orco, from which Tolkien’s orcs and the ensuing high fantasy trope emerged. More abstractly, however, the presence of a fire-breathing mouth implies a dragon, and Morrison’s association of the figure with primal chaos cements this tidily, suggesting again a flaw at the heart of things.

Morrison states that the dragon is opposed by reason, represented by the spear. Within the lore of DC Comics, then, this would imply Batman, the world’s greatest detective. Unsurprisingly, however, things are not that simple given Morrison’s conception of Batman. In the gallery at the end of the book that serves as a cast of characters, Batman is given a brief, anxious narration: “Criminals. Criminals are a terror. Hearts of the night. I must disguise my. Terror. Criminals are Cowardly.  Superstitious terrible omen. A cowardly lot. My disguise must strike terror. I must be black. Terrible. Criminals are. Criminals are a superstitious cowardly lot. I must be a creature. I must be a creature of the night. Mommy’s dead. Daddy’s dead. Brucie’s dead. I shall become a bat”. This invocation of “creature” makes it clear that Batman is not some dispassionate force of reason who can combat the Great Dragon within the Tower, but rather a force of the Dragon. The clear implication—which Morrison pays off—is that Batman is only ever confronting himself as he battles his way through the Asylum.

It is worth stressing that this is not all a bunch of mystic interpretation being imposed onto the text. Arkham Asylum makes active and extremely literal use of these symbols in accordance with their occult implications. The aforementioned passage in which Amadeus Arkham’s journals transition from talking about the Dark Tower to the Dragon plays out as narration overlaid with Batman encountering Killer Croc, a relatively recent addition to Batman’s rogue’s gallery created by Gerry Conway in 1983, with “And face the Dragon within” appearing in a half-page panel of Killer Croc. The Dragon easily gets the better of Batman, hurling him out a window. McKean draws this with clear resemblances to the Pamela Coleman Smith rendition of the card—a tall panel in which Batman crashes out of an upper spire of the Asylum, lightning crashing behind him. Batman falls, then catches himself, pulling himself up to find a statue of Saint Michael defeating Satan. 

This, of course, is the event described in Revelation when the “great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his head,” provoking a “war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, And prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven.…

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: Grant Morrison made their debut and early reputation in the US with a relaunch of DC’s Animal Man. But soon after came the comic that would establish them as a superstar.

Like Babel, meant to heaven reach
All towers men build a lesson teach
Lightning, descending from the sky
Reminds man there’s but one most high.
-Alan Moore, Promethea

Morrison pitched what would become Arkham Aslylum at the same February 1987 meeting where they successfully pitched Animal Man. The exact terms in which Morrison sold it are not entirely clear, but their earliest allusion to it in a January 1988 interview described it as, “you know the asylum from Batman stories? – yeah, well it’s April the first and the inmates take over the Asylum. They are holding hostages, and they demand that Batman be sent in because he belongs in a nut-house with the rest of them! So it’s a sort of psychological thriller, with Batman going through all sorts of mental and physical cruelties at the hands of his worst enemies. The story draws its inspiration from the medieval Feast of Fools and the World-Turned-Topsy-Turvy ceremonies when the rich would swap places with the beggars, criminals would become clergy and they’d all enjoy a day-long orgy of role-playing. So we look at all the familiar Batman paraphernalia from the viewpoint of these insane villains.”

The project faced a number of delays—Morrison claims it “took a year to research and was written in one fevered month in 1987, generally late at night and after long periods of no sleep.” Given the pitch date, a late 1987 composition seems most likely. By early 1988 Dave McKean, a fellow Brit who had pitched alongside Neil Gaiman at the same 1987 meeting, had been put on art duties. McKean, however, was doing a three-issue Black Orchid miniseries (with 48-page issues) and the first ten covers of Sandman at the same period, and so was slow in getting the 128 pages of Arkham Asylum finished. A final delay from Warner Brothers corporate to coordinate around the release of the 1989 Batman movie meant that the comic did not see light until October of 1989, by which point Morrison was well into both their Animal Man and Doom Patrol runs.

From DC’s perspective, Arkham Asylum was clearly a spiritual successor to Moore and Bolland’s The Killing Joke—a bespoke Batman story by ambitious British creators. But where Moore and Bolland were known properties teaming up on one of DC’s most popular characters, Morrison and McKean were unknowns being launched to prominence with a major Batman project launched so as to coincide with a movie. 

Given this, there is a certain perversity to the book, which sees Morrison at their most ruthlessly obscurantist, crafting a story that was absolutely drenched in occult symbolism and references both literary and philosophical. The story was that of a dark night of the soul for Batman—a transformative and cathartic experience in which he descended into a personal hell and emerged stronger for it.…

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