Batman: Arkham Asylum

Rating:
Summary: One of the essential Batman mythos.
Review: If I were told that I could only give someone one single graphic novel to convince them that at least some of the Batman comics are art, Arkham Asylum would be the one.

Told masterfully by Grant Morrison, illustrated beautifully by Dave McKean, Arkham Asylum stands as a frank and brutal look at the difference between sanity and insanity. Are Batman and the Joker really that different? Is Batman drawing more criminals to Gotham with his actions? Does one have to destroy to heal?

Arkham Asylum asks a lot of tough questions and provides very little in the way of comforting answers. It's also by far one of the most graphicly violent of the Batman stories.

And yet, out of this violence and chaos comes an elegant and graceful story, full of gallows humor and biting commentary.

Arkham Asylum represents one of the most important comic tradepaperbacks of the decade. It cannot be highly enough recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Lyrical Angst
Review: It is a hard truth that while comics have outgrown the pubescent superhero genre, it is the superhero comics that sell. This is a deconstruction of that loony vigilante, the batman. Dealing with superheros in an adult context, this book takes it about as far as it will go. Abuse, sexual anguish and psychiatric dissolution frame this well-worn character. The writing is creepy and the art is absolutely beautiful. A masterpiece from two masters of the craft. It's just a pity that it is batman. Both Morrison and McKean do superb work out of genre.

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Summary: Arkham Asylum by Grant Morrison ( Author )
Review: It is preety cool because it shows Arkham thought different Eyes

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Summary: Pedestrian story, muddy artwork
Review: It was never clear to me what Arkham Asylum was intended to accomplish. The plot has been done many times before, after all: Batman is forced to fight his most dangerous villains in large numbers. Writer Grant Morrison changes this slightly by putting Batman inside Arkham Asylum and (in theory) at their mercy, although the difference is slight. There's some superficial exploration of the dementias which afflict the various villains, but this is done only briefly for any individual villain, and these explorations have been done in more depth elsewhere. Ultimately, the story is not much more than a running fight with pseudo-psychological overtones.

Artist Dave McKean was - with Bill Sienkiewicz - one of the pioneers of fully-painted American comic books. But, also like Sienkiewicz, his layouts were had little sense of dynamism, and his actual technique was muddy and confusing, trying to express something which ended up compleely hidden by the layers of color. While this added a certain claustrophobic uneasiness to Morrison's script, it doesn't really work as storytelling. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see now that McKean's style is rather primordial, and that it's been improved on tremendously by artists such as Alex Ross, who finally broke through to make painted artwork mainstream in American comics in the 90s.

Arkham Asylum is, therefore, perhaps a historical curiosity, but it's not really to be read and enjoyed. Morrison, in particular, has done far better work.

Rating:
Summary: What does it really explore?
Review: Maybe its an expectation thing, but I didn't really care for this. We all know Batman's crazy, even batman himself. But this didn't approach it in any enlightening way. Rather than a study, we get this schmaltz overlay of the original Arkham's slide towards insanity with Bruce Wayne's. Forced! I don't know, maybe Batman is just played itself out.

There were three moments of brilliance by Morrisson: 1st when he suggests that the Joker may be the only one in the assylum who isn't insane (and this is a story of Jungian/Campbell granduer dying to be told but that can only be written by someone like Gaiman). The 2nd instance is when he hints that Bruce is still a child and that this mythical re-birth of batman wasn't the true rebirth that all humans require to become fully actualized and will always supress this needed transformation, leaving him an emotional adolescent for life. And 3rd, Joker's suggestion of the homoerotic undertones of the Batman/Robin partnership. But all of these thematic gems are kicked backed under the rug so that Grant can rehash the two-face saga of black & white vs shades of gray. Refreshing!

And yes while the artwork is interesting, intense and sometimes downright breathtaking, it can also get in the way of the story, maiking it difficult to sort out. Sometimes the depth of color made me to wonder what exactly had been drawn.

Overall its just poor. You want to compare it to the 17 weekly titles about Batman that DC put out? Then yeah, it's definitely a gem. But in a comparison with good literature (graphic or not), this can be insufferable.

Rating:
Summary: This book represents a new form of comic
Review: Maybe the mos important books about Batman are Arkham Assylum and the Dark Knight saga. In this book all the insane habitants of the city take control of the assylum. Each one of them explodes a side of Batman, Clayface, Croc, Two Faces, Dr. Milo, and the Joker, who leads the party. The inks and artwork are really great.

Rating:
Summary: dark, twisted, frightening...wonderful!
Review: oh wow...those were my first thoughts when i opened up and finished batman: arkham asylum. this is the batman comic that i have been waiting for. i have always seen batman as a dark and disturbed individual, and this comic really grabs onto that idea and runs with it. it is twisted look into the famous (an insane asylum in the world of batman) and messed up arkham asylum.

while one may think this is going to be an action filled romp, it isn't. it is more of an intimate look into the incredibly insane house of horrors. it takes many of the popular characters and villans and throws them in without reserve. the villans take control of arkham and invite batman in...or else! batman accepts and finds himself going insane down the dark and meandering hallways of the asylum.

while i loved the story, the thing that makes this comic a true gem, and a five-star in my opinion, is the artwork. i have been a fan of dave mckean for a long time. his work on the sandman covers, mr. punch, coraline, the day i swapped my dad for two goldfish, etc. had blown my mind. his art is very modern with different mediums thrown in for fun. he is very dark in his illustrations, really giving the reader a feel for the twisted nature of the story.

if you are into dark tales, or even just into batman, then this is quite possibly the best read you will find! enjoy, but read with caution, as it is dark, twisted, and truly frightening!!!

Rating:
Summary: dark, twisted, frightening...wonderful!
Review: oh wow...those were my first thoughts when i opened up and finished batman: arkham asylum. this is the batman comic that i have been waiting for. i have always seen batman as a dark and disturbed individual, and this comic really grabs onto that idea and runs with it. it is twisted look into the famous (an insane asylum in the world of batman) and messed up arkham asylum.

while one may think this is going to be an action filled romp, it isn't. it is more of an intimate look into the incredibly insane house of horrors. it takes many of the popular characters and villans and throws them in without reserve. the villans take control of arkham and invite batman in...or else! batman accepts and finds himself going insane down the dark and meandering hallways of the asylum.

while i loved the story, the thing that makes this comic a true gem, and a five-star in my opinion, is the artwork. i have been a fan of dave mckean for a long time. his work on the sandman covers, mr. punch, coraline, the day i swapped my dad for two goldfish, etc. had blown my mind. his art is very modern with different mediums thrown in for fun. he is very dark in his illustrations, really giving the reader a feel for the twisted nature of the story.

if you are into dark tales, or even just into batman, then this is quite possibly the best read you will find! enjoy, but read with caution, as it is dark, twisted, and truly frightening!!!

Rating:
Summary: Could have been much better
Review: On paper, you'd think that Arkham Asylum had all the ingredients to be a brilliant read: a talented cast (writer par-excellence Morrison and the peerless and trailblazing Dave McKean) with a fascinating premise: what if Batman was assaulted by others'- and his own-insanity? Is Batman a mentally stable person to begin with; is his persona created and defined by his own inner psychological turmoil? While previous graphic novels have previously raised these questions when confronting the Batman mystique (the penultimate example being Miller's seminal The Dark Knight Returns), none ever placed them at the heart of the narrative.

I particularly enjoyed the first half of the book that traced the growth of both Amadeus Arkham and his Asylum. The latter seems to be the alter-ego of the former, the embodiment of his buried fears, much as Batman is the embodiment of Bruce Wayne's (and our?) innermost insecurities. Morrison is at his best here when he plays with the heavy symbolism of the themes involved; when he takes his time as a storyteller and enriches the world he's creating. It's only when things progress to the second half that he loses me. Without giving too much away, the narrative descends to a typical good guy vs. bad guy dualism where Batman has to battle the big, bad Joker. We're not provided any enlightening insights into any of the characters. The uninspiring resolution of this battle also ends rather awkwardly. By this point, I felt rather disappointed and empty.

It's all really quite a shame, too, because McKean seems at the top of his game. His visual renderings of Arkham Asylum and Joker are particularly noteworthy, brilliantly capturing the menace and pathos of both. Had it not been for his efforts, I would have liked the book even less than I actually did.

The fact that this is one of the most popular graphic novels ever created demonstrates that there are quite a few things that Arkham Asylum did right. For me, however, there are far too many things that went wrong.

Rating:
Summary: Over-hyped!
Review: Terrible, terrible, terrible! Grant Morrison is of the school of thought that the more you shock your audience, the better. That could be a sound strategy were it not for the fact that somewhere in there, you need a good story, which this isn't. Yes, Arkham Asylum is full of stark-raving lunatics who hate not only Batman, but just about everyone else. But the madness in this story doesn't feel like it's there for the purpose of advancing the plot or explaining things to the reader. In Morrison's hands it just feels gratuitious. And the art is bad... I can understand going a little outside the norm to get the point across. But call me crazy, I actually like to SEE what is going on. Imagine a movie set being lit by a 40-watt bulb, and you'll get a good idea of what you're in store for when you pick up this item...