The Bambi of Arkham Asylum is watching the Alfred Hitchcock film Psycho on the hospital's TV set, introducing another connection between this story and popular cinema. Arkham Asylum likely wouldn't have fit into Bolland's schedule, but a Morrison/Bolland Arkham Asylum wouldn't have been too impossible to imagine circa 1988. The book was controversial upon release but also a sales behemoth, encouraging DC to pursue more adult-oriented stories featuring Batman. Bolland's meticulous, heavily-detailed art, paired with Moore's pessimistic tale of the 'one bad day' that birthed the Joker's insanity, unnerved readers of the era. Given Bolland's success with 1988's Batman: The Killing Joke (paired with writer Alan Moore), it's not surprising Morrison had Bolland in mind while conceiving the story. And I think that in a lot of ways, the ways we both approached it clashed in the middle…I think it would have been easier for people to deal with if it had been a lot more concrete.' In Grant Morrison: Combining the Worlds of Contemporary Comics, Morrison states, 'I imagined being done by someone like Brian Bolland, and my vision was of it being ultra-real to the point of being painful…But then when Dave McKean did it, it became something quite different, because he wanted to make it more abstract. This supplemental material reveals the liberties taken by McKean when visualizing Morrison's plot. The gender-bending qualities of clownfish, Batman's stunted fear of his own sexuality as symbolized by a vision of a carnival's 'Tunnel of Love' attraction, Clayface as a visual representation of 1980s AIDS anxieties, the visual significance of Batman skewering Killer Croc as an analog for the spear that impaled Christ…these are themes a layperson isn't likely to notice without the annotations. In fact, they reveal complexities in the narrative you'd only truly grasp were you given direct access to Morrison's brain. Morrison's original script and its annotations greatly demystify the work. What its detractors also noted, however, was that portions of the narrative were impossible to comprehend. Visually, Arkham Asylum is iconic, thanks to its portrayal of a Batman who's more shadow than man, surrealist page designs, and the innovative technique of designing unique word balloons for each major character. The graphic novel's reputation inspired DC to re-release Arkham Asylum periodically, which meant Morrison's original script and page layouts were presented to the public for the first time as ancillary material in the anniversary collections.

Previously, this was the material found only in the undergrounds and unlikely to be presented with such superior production values. However, readers expecting anything resembling the monthly Batman titles were in for a surprise when opening the book and discovering McKean's frenzied paintings and multimedia collages, paired with Morrison's seemingly chaotic, stream-of-consciousness narrative.

Batman arkham asylum dave mckean