It's possibly the most pretentious graphic novel (i.e. expensive comic book) of all time. It has a reputation for deliberate inscrutability, hamfisted symbolism, or absolute vacancy, depending on who you listen to. So of course I bought it twice.
This Wednesday I picked up the softcover Fifteenth Anniversary Edition of Grant Morrison and Dave McKean's Arkham Asylum. My Watchmen is falling into tatters and my V for Vendetta is right behind it. Understanding Comics is fading fast around the spine and even Maus isn't looking so hot. My old copy of Arkham Asylum would look untouched if it weren't for the sun damage along the spine, a sign of how long I let it linger on an ill-placed bookshelf back at my parents' house.
But the anniversary edition (and a strange anniversary it is--15? I suppose they were hoping lightning would strike twice and they'd catch some fat Batman Begins sales) includes a full script with Morrison's annotations. I've been itching to revisit Arkham Asylum for a while now, driven by a suspicion that it isn't as bad as the conventional wisdom says. Not a great story, certainly, especially by Morrison's subsequent standards (it predates Doom Patrol and a good chunk of Animal Man), but not nearly as awful as collective memory and my own would have me believe. I've been wondering how much of its reputation is truly deserved and how much was just part of the Nostalgic Nineties' unpleasant reactionary stance against the truly groundbreaking comics of the late 1980s. With a look at Morrison's original script, this edition seemed the best chance to find out.
The new annotations are sparse but the script itself is already annotated, providing a thorough and often fascinating account of the comic's mythological underpinnings. The Christian and Tarot symbols were always apparent--how could they not be, when the comic opens with a handful of bloody nails, a plan of a cathedral, "THE PASSION PLAY AS IT IS PLAYED TO-DAY" and a giant chi?--but Morrison's asides reveal a surprising consistency and depth to allusions that come across, on the page, as superficial stabs at meaning. (This is after all a glossy prestige-format comic that casts our hyperviolent vigilante as that most hackneyed of literary symbols, the Christ figure. ) Morrison's notes don't necessarily reveal any new meanings but they do cast the old ones more sympathetically, teasing out connections between the psychoanalytic, religious, and shamanic images that make them all seem less arbitrary, less imposed and more discovered.
Meanwhile his more recent annotations restore deleted scenes, explain allusions, and toss out the occasional snide little gem like the following:
Robin appeared in a few scenes at the beginning [...] Dave McKean, however, felt that he had already compromised his artistic integrity sufficiently by drawing Batman and refused point blank to bend over for the Boy Wonder--so after one brave but ridiculous attempt to put him in a trench coat, I wisely removed him from the script.
I can't help but read a shifting of blame into that--he was too snooty to do a straight-up Batman story, not me. Other comments call to mind the 1995 Comics Journal interview (#176) in which Morrison said he had imagined Arkham Asylum would be illustrated "by someone like Brian Bolland" who could provide a super-real rendering of the horrific interiors. Instead, Morrison complained, he and Dave McKean generated clashing symbologies of art and script that repelled interpretation.
While Bolland's clean lines would seem dissonant in this project (as Will Brooker observes in his book Batman Unmasked), the script carries a couple of points in Morrison's favor. Many of his descriptions call for a representational clarity and, especially, a depth of field that McKean chooses not to bring to the page. Some are mere whimsies like the Mad Hatter's room:
Imagine now that you can hear Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit" begin to play here and continue throughout this scene. We're in a big room that's littered with all sorts of curious stuff. (A tip of the hat here to the Batman tradition of giant props.) [...] A liquid slide projector fills the room with psychedelic swirls and whorls of marbled colour. Sweet, cloying drifts of smoke fill the room. It looks most of all like a 1967 nightclub--a hallucinogenic paradise.
Actually, this calls to mind Bolland's complaint (read in some glossy comics fanzine many years ago--forgive me, I think it was Comics Scene) that Alan Moore didn't give him any fun Dick Sprang scenery to draw in A Killing Joke. Maybe he would have been ideal for Arkham Asylum.
Anyway, some of the excised descriptions are simply little pieces of color like the above, far more imaginative and entertaining than the blank swirls of paint that open and close every scene in McKean's final product. Others indicate important plot points: a bit of body language sets up Drs. Cavendish and Adams's sudden reappearance at the finale. It's a fair point that maybe Morrison shouldn't have expected his artist to include every item in his overstuffed descriptions (although a more conventionally representational artist probably would have, and McKean did have almost twice as many pages as Morrison thumbnailed out for him--the thumbnails, by the way, are also included in the package). It's an even fairer point that Morrison perhaps shouldn't have compressed so much of the story's dramatic logic into the background, leaving only the symbolic logic for readers to puzzle through in the action and dialogue. But the script illustrates in no uncertain terms that Morrison envisioned a much more realistically detailed, deep-focused artwork that would paint a much more harrowing picture of the asylum.
Really, McKean's greatest sin may be that the book just isn't all that terrifying. Except for one hazy "Feast of Fools" scene in which the cavorting inmates are covered over by gigantic icons, and the occasional background character decorated in clown make-up, the lunatics don't seem to be up to much of anything. Contrast that with Morrison and Jill Thompson's treatment of a similar scenario in "120 Days of Sodom," or even this Doom-like detail from Morrison's Arkham script: "There is a cryptic splash of blood across the reception desk, a discarded gun." McKean's utter abandonment of depth of field and physical verisimilitude annihilates such external environments, placing the action almost entirely in Batman's head. That's part of Morrison's scheme, but without the corresponding external world the internal turmoils just don't seem as threatening.
And Morrison wants us to know it. The anniversary volume seems dedicated to reclaiming his contributions, and his only. We get to read his original script, his subsequent annotations, his reflections on the comic's reception. ("I found out later that the script had been passed around a group of comics professionals who allegedly shit themselves laughing at my high-falutin' pop psych panel descriptions. Who's laughing now, @$$hole?" The modest lettering sadly not my invention.) We get to see his layouts, complete with trenchcoated Robin and transvestite Joker. (Not an image that we needed in the already gay-panicked atmosphere of the eighties; Frank Miller's lipstick-wearing mass murderer was quite enough. Warner Brothers may have mandated the change for insipid reasons but I can't say I regret the end result.) Morrison is all over this edition, while McKean is nowhere to be found. The result is another shifting of blame--more subtle than that old TCJ interview but to the same point.
That interview also showed a tendency to blame the readers that would resurface years later in Morrison's comments about Seaguy. On Arkham, he said, "I was still drunk with the idea that people were interested 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." That idea resurfaces in the annotations to the Fifteenth Anniversary Edition, too, only it's less accusatory and joined to a curious argument from quantity: "Much of this subtextual material was lost on the casual reader but that didn't seem to stop us from shifting mega-amounts of copies." He concedes that Tim Burton and Jack Nicholson weren't stopping them either.
When Morrison isn't reminding us that he didn't get the art or the readers he wanted, he's explaining his contributions with the wisdom, the prescience that can only come of hindsight:
The repressed, armoured, uncertain and sexually frozen man in ARKHAM ASYLUM was intended as a critique of the '80s interpretation of Batman as violent, driven, and borderline psychopathic.
[...]
Again, this appraisal of Batman's sexuality applies only to the "damaged" version of the character presented within these pages. I prefer to think of him now as Neal Adams drew him--the hairy-chested globetrotting love god of the '70s stories.
Right on! I don't know if the critique or the purging of Batman's "negative elements" were quite as preplanned as Morrison would have us believe, but there's no question that his subsequent takes on the character have been more enjoyable than any other writer's.
Whether it's reclaiming the most successful, most derided graphic novel in DC history or just Morrison's unsullied artistic vision, the Arkham Asylum Fifteenth Anniversary Edition doesn't quite pull it off. There are some scenes, like the intolerable four-page sequence in which Batman jams a shard of glass through his hand because the psychologist made him think of his mother, that no amount of handwringing can excuse. Not even with the revelation that it was originally followed by a scene in which Batman locks himself in his room and makes a Pink Floyd mixtape for Silver St. Cloud. No, I can only wish: instead the script lectures on about Christ symbols and the Vescica Piscis and the Mad Men of Gotham, quite fascinating stuff actually but nothing that ever wends its way into the plot, while the modern annotations pretend the scene is plausible as written ("This simple scene was intended to show Batman pricking his palm with glass to shock himself out of Joker-induced trauma...") and put everything on McKean.
The script establishes that McKean does destroy a lot of the story's already shaky narrative clarity, but let's not forget that he also contributes moments of great emotion and beauty: the pearls, the lace, and the child's drawing that float over the word-association scene, for example, found nowhere in Morrison's more literalistic blocking. Arkham Asylum has always been a beautifully designed book. (I should add that the colors in the new edition are more vivid than ever.) McKean's artwork is a part of its considerable success but, just as undeniably, a part of its often insufferable pretensions.
Even if the story had received its ideal artist--a demented Bolland or a McKean more interested in narrative and mise en scene--it's still driven too much by its overt gestures at symbolism. But Morrison's working notes show that he's well aware of how symbolism best works in comics, incarnated into humanoid forms that can then happily beat up on each other. The more concrete the incarnation, the less overt and, therefore, the more potent the symbol. (His comments on the Clayface scene are especially good in this regard.) The script and annotations offer a tantalizing glimpse at an Arkham Asylum that might have been, poorer in appearance but richer in meaning, or at least not so damned obvious about it. The Fifteenth Anniversary Edition is a revealing look at the graphic novel everybody is ashamed of, but I'm man enough to admit it:
Well, I always thought the gallery at the end was pretty cool, anyway.
Thank you.
I read AA once, when it came out. I splurged on the hardback, because, hell, this was DC in the late 1980s and I was still drunk on their Second Golden Age (the hangover was a bitch).
The parts I understood seemed either trivial or arbitrary; the parts I didn't understand seemed pretentious claptrap.
Ultimately, I felt like I had mostly wasted my money. I never seriously tried to access the work again.
I'm glad you reviewed the new version.
Posted by: Greg Morrow | October 07, 2005 at 11:00 AM
I remember liking it when it came out. But I was ....what .. 20 years old, aspiring to a life in the theatre. Both my coffee and turtlenecks were black, and my chain smokes unfiltered. At that point, art that confused me ... well, that must mean it's *good*, right? Pretension equaled quality.
I'd love to try it again now. But while my wallet protests, I can just pretend I read it, and that I was as insightful as you were.
Posted by: Mark Fossen | October 07, 2005 at 11:49 AM
Thanks, guys.
Posted by: Marc | October 07, 2005 at 01:15 PM
Ah, very nice work.
I guess simply having Morrison's script on hand is 'commentary' enough, but I still felt that Morrison's annotations were awfully sparse - I sort of wanted more.
It's really interesting how Morrison and McKean's impressions of the project's evolution differ. In his revent interview with The Onion AV Club ( http://avclub.com/content/node/41034/1/2 ), McKean basically takes the credit for pushing Morrison's script further into symbolism and literary allusion - indeed, he claims Morrison was "keen" to rewrite the script to his suggestions, as it was initially a more standard superhero work. Of course, McKean makes no bones about how he finds Batman and Robin to be utterly stupid in many respects.
Basically, I get the feeling that McKean would have rather illustrated something like The Mystery Play, though I frankly don't think that turned out any better for lack of superheroics (have you read it? it's really quite surprisingly similar in structure to Arkham, a flawed hero's journey through a strange land, with lots of overbaked biblical symbols and characters standing around and declaring things while smeary symbols circle around)...
Posted by: Jog | October 07, 2005 at 08:42 PM
Oh yes, I've read The Mystery Play and I liked your write-up on it a while back. The similarities to Arkham Asylum are so pronounced that I wonder if all parties involved weren't trying to recreate the formula for success--only without Batman or the mega-hit movie to boost its sales. It seems rather romantic if they thought the telegraphed symbology and murky art would do it alone.
I need to read that Ng Suat Tong review you mentioned, the one that identifies all the symbology; I wonder if it would redeem the piece the way Morrison's script partially does Arkham.
The McKean take is interesting; I wonder what he would make of Morrison all but blaming the thing on him. I confess, I started to read that interview but didn't make it through to the final page; I think the parallel Gaiman one wore me out. (That man is too precious too stomach.) The script does bear out his account, since it's obviously a post-McKean draft (Robin is already gone)--I could believe that Morrison really did dial up the symbology in collaboration with him.
Of course, while McKean displays a charming obliviousness to the book's troubled reception, his disdain for the very concept of Batman and Robin suggests he was absolutely the wrong person to tap for the art. Call it another point for Brian Bolland.
Posted by: Marc | October 07, 2005 at 09:31 PM
What would AA have been like if Dave Gibbons had drawn it? He's like Bolland, but possibly even more so--Bolland's figures are nearly mythic despite his (fairly stiff) photorealism, but Gibbons' figures are more earthly and make his artwork even more grounded in mundanity.
Would the contrast have improved the impact of the heightened level of symbolism in the project, or would it have robbed the symbolism of its stength?
I think either Gibbons or Bolland would certainly have made the work more palatable to lowbrows like me, and then, like Watchmen, the work would have also rewarded more careful examination. As it was, McKean's heightened visual symbolism provided a heightened barrier for entry just in the first place.
It would be a wildly interesting experiment to have different artists tackle the same script, wouldn't it? I'd pay for it.
Posted by: Greg Morrow | October 08, 2005 at 01:52 PM
Gibbons would have been terrific; Bolland just seems too poised, too pretty for a narrative this unsettling.
I think the contrast would have heightened the symbolism, actually; Morrison's notes play right into my hobby-horse about comics and symbolism but they make it clear that he regards the characters as already symbolic in all their garish four-color glory. Hell, his thumbnails put Clayface in his garish Len Wein/Marshall Rogers costume while his script talks about him as "an avatar of pestilence and infection." That contrast might have been too much; I don't object to McKean's decision to strip Clayface naked and cover him in lesions as it brings the embodied meaning further to the surface. But more often his art adds an intrusive filter of expressionism or abstraction; it's clear that he killed the Maxie Zeus scene by drowning it in a formless cobalt wash. As written in the script it's far creepier, but the creepiness is dependent on its blocking. A more grounded artwork would have better conveyed that horror.
You can almost see your experiment played out in the anniversary edition with Morrison's thumbnails. His Batman in particular looks like a Neal Adams influence, possibly an Irv Novick; I have no doubt that underneath his cape and cowl there beats the heart of a hairy-chested love god.
Posted by: Marc | October 08, 2005 at 06:04 PM
I think Morrison protests a little too much in saying his "Arkham" Batman was meant to somehow refute the dark psychopathic Batman of the 80s, especially when it in the end, all "Arkham Asylum" does is give us another dark, psychopathic Batman. That he's giving himself glass stigmatas instead of rolling around in a Bat-tank doesn't take away from the fact that this Batman is presented as being just as insane as his enemies, as belonging in the asylum, and being capable of murder. The whole "I was really railing against the 80s dark-and-crazy stuff, honest" reeks of the kind of desperate apologism-in-hindsight of a guy who tried to do the dark-and-crazy Batman thing and just did it very badly. Now he gets to claim the book is the exact opposite of what it appears to be, while also giving a good kick to the kind of 80s-style gtittiness that's gone out of vogue among fashionable writers.
I haven't read Morrison's original script - if I'm not buying "Watchmen" twice, I'm sure not buying "Arkham Asylum" twice - but I can't imagine how it would work better with a realistic artist. Nothing really happens in that book: Batman goes in, runs around being crazy, and runs out again, and in the meantime we have several set pieces which work or fail to work to varying degrees. It's a venue for reheating one of the most overcooked cliches in comics while not even bothering to attach it to a plot. At least McKean's style gives some visual flair to the thing to add some flesh to what's otherwise a rather shallow and skeletal story. The more realism you have, the more you're just left with Morrison's story, which frankly is kind of crap.
Posted by: Iron Lungfish | October 09, 2005 at 11:00 AM
"I think Morrison protests a little too much in saying his "Arkham" Batman was meant to somehow refute the dark psychopathic Batman of the 80s..."
I agree. It was playing up to the dark psychopathic caricature (and to the public's ideas of what a "mature" comic was supposed to look and read like) that moved all those copies. On the other hand, his script makes a somewhat better case that the experience in Arkham is meant to purge Batman of some of his own hang-ups. The script wants to have it both ways--and why not? It's only his subsequent comments that deny the book's indebtedness to the 1980s Miller-and-Moore model Batman.
"I haven't read Morrison's original script [...] but I can't imagine how it would work better with a realistic artist."
Perhaps you should take the word of those who have read the original script, then.
You would be amazed at how much of the scripted blocking, setting, and even key plot points get left out in McKean's artwork. McKean's photocollages add life to some fairly vapid scenes like the word association, and the overall production design is stunning, but he probably takes away more than he adds.
Posted by: Marc | October 09, 2005 at 12:00 PM
In hemi-demi-semi-defense of AA, I will say that when I was 17, I liked the part where the Joker, in response to some other inmates' demand that the Bat remove his mask so they can see his real face, replies, testily, "Don't be silly -- that *is* his real face," neatly circumventing one of the obvious confrontations and setting the Joker a cut or two above the tediousness of his fellow residents.
Posted by: Rasselas | October 09, 2005 at 02:04 PM
"Perhaps you should take the word of those who have read the original script, then."
I'll defer to your take on it, since you've actually read the script - it's just that the basic premise of "lunatics take over asylum and do nothing with it, Batman breaks in, runs around and runs away" is such a limp fish that it's hard for me to imagine what would have rehabilitated it. If the plot itself is unimportant, then the story is being carried by imagery and mood, and while a different artist can carry these pretty far, the basic elements of "Arkham" - Christ and Freud symbolism - are so hoary and cliched that I have trouble imagining how a better-suited artist could've made them really work.
Not there aren't lots of typically Morrisonian neat ideas scattered throughout the story. I particularly like the concept of "rehabilitating" Two-Face by giving him artificial means of making more and more choices - first with the die, and then with the tarot - but completely incapacitating his ability to make any choice in the process. It's just that the pieces don't add up to much in the end.
Posted by: Iron Lungfish | October 09, 2005 at 02:53 PM
Is there another creator out there that so relentlessly manages his reputation as does Morrison? It seems he's constantly fighting a rear-guard action against cracks in his reputation; which is a sort of sad spectacle, really, since the bulk of his work speaks well enough for him that a few failures are nothing to worry about.
Posted by: Dave Intermittent | October 10, 2005 at 02:51 PM
but dave mckean's art is beautiful!
certainly his interpretation of the script moves it away from grant morrison's conception of it, but mckean's visual aestheticism seems to me a reward in itself, despite its departure. so we got a mckean batman instead of a morrison batman, so what?
there seems to me a polarity: one pole is the experience of the comic book as primarily iconography and symbolism (which is to say a drawing of a man is meant to say "in the real world this world this would be a man" and grant morrison's more literary approach treats the comic this way, little paper dolls to be moved around in combination to form more complex visual sentences; the other pole is to approach the page aesthetically, which is to foreground the experience of the art--its visual/emotional impact--and not its grammatical function.
i love grant morrison's work as well, and certainly a closer collaboration that incorporated both sensibilities would be even better. (and probably add another hundred pages, but fantastic!)
but since we're apportioning blame, today i read a dialogue between mckean and barron storey today and it seems clear that morrison's approach was very hands-off (although we might take the comic script as a law itself this seems like a poor point of departure from the collaborative process with a collaborator as versatile and expansive as mckean).
etc.
--alex
Posted by: alex orzeck-byrnes | October 10, 2005 at 04:49 PM
"so we got a mckean batman instead of a morrison batman, so what?"
No--we get a series of pretty, frequently arresting but just as frequently incoherent McKean tableaux working at cross purposes to a Morrison script instead of a comic in which both story and art work in concert to achieve something neither could do independently.
I'm not sure there is a "McKean Batman," except in the most particular sense of figure drawing, so little interest does he display in the character.
Agreed that it's beautiful (at moments--some of the paint washes don't do much for me) but it isn't telling the story, any story, nearly as well as it could. Reading the working script (a script, I'll note again, clearly revised after McKean had joined the project and in response to some of his desires) has made it clear that McKean is better suited to collaborators like Gaiman, whose stories are no great shakes to begin with and who therefore benefit from all the visual digressions.
Posted by: Marc | October 11, 2005 at 12:23 AM
I'm surprised nobody's mentioned the artist who seems to me would've been most appropriate for this story -- Bill Sienkiewicz. He has all the artistic flourishes needed to create a rich, dark, unique vision akin to McKean's, but he also knows how to tell a straightforward story much better, and more in keeping with the writer's intent.
Posted by: tomthedog | October 11, 2005 at 01:11 PM
Sienkiewicz knows how to work to authorial intent? Tell that to Frank Miller or Neil Gaiman, both of whom had to totally rework scripts that they gave him (the Elektra one and the piece in Endless Nights) because he gave back art that bore no resemblance to their original scripts...
Posted by: Andrew Hickey | October 12, 2005 at 11:12 AM
i think that we're carrying the assumption that authorship in comics is the domain of the "writer". this seems like a mistake to me, inasmuch as the narrative is at least equally visual. professional visual artists (exceptional ones in the case of both sienkiewicz and mckean, both in terms of draftsmanship and the strength of their imagination) seems like not-terrible peeople to adjust the story to suit their capacities. the "writing" is done with words and pictures. in the case of the miller/sienkiewicz collaborations, i never recall hearing miller complain about the deviation from the script, it seems like they had a much happier organic chemistry than morrison/mckean, but correct me if i'm wrong.
Posted by: alex orzeck-byrnes | October 13, 2005 at 02:45 PM
i agree also that the clarity of mckean's storytelling in arkham is sometimes shaky, but i think clarity is not entirely his intent or content. i think he's intersted in creating atmosphere more than narrative transparency.
Posted by: alex orzeck-byrnes | October 13, 2005 at 02:48 PM
even though it may be a simple matter of differing tastes, i just want to suggest a different perspective regarding neil gaiman's strengths as an author (of comics): since the process in his case is inherently collaborative, is it a flaw to leave room for "visual digressions"? (on an unrelated note, i'm fairly sure that this "?" should go inside the endquote but i hate the way it looks.) i enjoy all of the work that he's done with mckean, although i haven't had much patience for his prose.
Posted by: alex orzeck-byrnes | October 13, 2005 at 02:54 PM
i'm also curious about why people think arkham asylum is pretentious. is it because of morrison's, uh, pretensions to literary complexity, his literary pretentions IN A BATMAN COMIC, or seeing painted art IN A BATMAN COMIC?
Posted by: alex orzeck-byrnes | October 13, 2005 at 02:56 PM
The point is that McKean's storytelling changes actually leave out subtle things that would make the plot hold together better. I don't think that anyone dislikes the changes he made to, for example, the word association scene.
My comments on Sienkiewicz come from the interviews in the current Following Cerebus (which has fascinating interviews with a number of comic creators this issue, conducted by Dave Sim). Gaiman and Miller are both interviewed, but it's Gaiman who said it about Sienkiewicz (not in a negative way - he found it an interesting challenge:
Gaiman - Bill Sienkiewicz - for whom I had written a story in as loose a way as I could, having spoken to people over the years who had worked with Bill and knowing that what I would get back would be nothing like what I had written anyway - Bill's art came in last of all, and it was wonderful and strange and really, really cool, and nothing at all like what I'd written --
Sim - Who had warned you about that? Was it Frank who had told you about that with Elektra: Assasin?
Gaiman - Frank had told me about that with Elektra: Assassin and I think Andy Helfer had told me about it. A few people had mentioned things about it, but mostly Frank. And in fact, I told Frank about getting Bill's art in and laying it all down on the floor of the bedroom - because there was enough space there to walk along it - and then moving pages around [snip] And when I told Frank the story his jaw dropped and he said "You changed the pages around I never thought of doing that."
Posted by: Andrew Hickey | October 13, 2005 at 05:01 PM