Arkham Asylum was circulated during production of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight movies, and has lent its name - and some of its concepts - to a videogame series you might just have heard of. The book’s legacy stretches through the three decades of Batman stories that have followed, even outside of the comics. It’s sold somewhere north of half a million copies, making it one of the best-selling original graphic novels of all time. That might not sound like the formula for a smash hit, but - buoyed by the blockbuster success of Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman movie - Arkham Asylum was an unprecedented success. That was matched with Morrison’s symbolism-heavy approach to storytelling, which drew in everything from biblical imagery to tarot cards, psychoanalysis to sacred geometry. His pages are works of collage, mixing realism with abstraction, pencils with paint, and traditional panels with photographed collections of physical objects. The art of Dave McKean was unlike anything that had been associated with Batman to that point. It’s as self-consciously literary and ‘grown up’ as you’d expect from a book that references the poet Philip Larkin in its title. Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth, to give the book its full title, was a graphic novel that took an experimental approach to familiar characters like the Joker, Two-Face, and the Caped Crusader himself. So what makes Arkham Asylum 2 different to all its peers? From Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth Dave McKean and Grant Morrison/DC Comics RETURNING TO THE ASYLUMįirst, a quick history lesson. Remarkably, though, the news actually left me excited to read the sequel, certainly more than any of DC’s other returns to the same 1980s well. Given the context, this announcement should be another example of the cyclical nature of corporate superhero comics - a snake increasingly hungry for its own tail. The thing is, the panel where Morrison cracked this joke was the very same one where he and DC did actually announce Arkham Asylum 2. And between Rebirth, The Button and the forthcoming Doomsday Clock, we’re currently in the midst of DC’s second attempt to revive Watchmen in five years. A third series of Dark Knight comics, subtitled “The Master Race”, wrapped in June. Sandman marked its 25th anniversary with Sandman Overture. After all, DC Comics has made a recent habit of returning to that era of the late-1980s, when a run of stone-cold classics - Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, Sandman and more - established it as the home of more mature, literary superhero stories. It’s not hard to see where this joke came from.
Speaking on a DC panel at last month’s Comic-Con, writer Grant Morrison looked back over his thirty years working with the publisher, and joked that a sequel to Arkham Asylum - the comic that helped make his name all the way back in 1989 - would be the sign that his career had well and truly jumped the shark.
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