Written by Grant Morrison and illustrated by Dave McKean, 1989's Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth hit the comics industry like an electric shock upon its release. Despite its art-house sensibility, a mainstream audience emerged to champion its experimental visuals, layered writing, and truly bizarre interpretation of the Batman mythos. Everything from the Arkham video game series to Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight film trilogy owes at least some debt to the graphic novel.

At one point, Arkham Asylum was the highest-selling graphic novel in history and has today moved over 600,000 copies. In spite of this, the book has been dismissed by some critics as needlessly pretentious and impossible to penetrate. The book's esoteric visuals are at times so audience-unfriendly that it turns out there's an Arkham inmate in the script virtually invisible to the naked eye.

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A Mind-Bending Asylum Epic

Dave McKean's art style with Joker and Two-Face in Arkham Asylum

A simple plot summary does little to hint at the graphic novel's unusual presentation. On the surface, Arkham Asylum is the story of Batman receiving a call on April Fool's Day to confront a riot within Arkham Asylum. The staff has been held hostage, and the Joker demands Batman arrive to free them. Once inside, Batman has individual skirmishes with figures from his traditional rogue's gallery, Joker, Two-Face, Maxie Zeus, Clayface, Mad Hatter, and Killer Croc. Heading deeper into the asylum, Batman stumbles across a dark secret that haunts the mansion.

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. Previously, this was the material found only in the undergrounds and unlikely to be presented with such superior production values.

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. 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. What its detractors also noted, however, was that portions of the narrative were impossible to comprehend.

Morrison's original script and its annotations greatly demystify the work. In fact, they reveal complexities in the narrative you'd only truly grasp were you given direct access to Morrison's brain. 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.

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One Good Story Based On One Bad Day

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This supplemental material reveals the liberties taken by McKean when visualizing Morrison's plot. In Grant Morrison: Combining the Worlds of Contemporary Comics, Morrison states, "I imagined [Arkham Asylum] 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. 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."

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. 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. The book was controversial upon release but also a sales behemoth, encouraging DC to pursue more adult-oriented stories featuring Batman. 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.

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McKean has been open about his antipathy towards American superheroes and what he perceives as the industry's stiff, "very overpainted" aesthetic in the past. In the years since the release of Arkham Asylum (as archived by Sequart), he's stated that he was "trying to make the book despite the subject, rather than because of it. At the end of the day, if you really love to do Batman comics, then that's probably the best thing to do. Not liking them, and then trying to make something out of them is just a waste of time." McKean's aversion to colorful superheroes had him refusing outright to draw Robin, although Morrison at one point attempted to compromise and keep the Boy Wonder in a trenchcoat.

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How A Missing Character Influences Arkham Asylum's Story

Lurking within Morrison's notes is another concept obscured by McKean's art. It's an entirely new character most readers have never noticed! Morrison's script describes a "huge shaven-headed man" who sits in the asylum's dining area, watching television. "He looks subnormal, inbred. Saliva runs down his weak chin. He smiles faintly, stupidly, clutching a rag doll to his breast. This guy is a killer named Bambi. His name doesn't get mentioned, but he does turn up later." Morrison's annotations indicate an earlier draft had Bambi physically attacking Batman after his entry.

Finding a huge, bald man watching television in the double-page spread rendered by McKean is...difficult. The final panel is McKean's representation of Bambi watching Psycho.

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Christening a murderous psychopath "Bambi" might initially seem to be dark humor on Morrison's part (maybe even an inside joke, since the script indicates he'll remain unnamed), but the name represents a much deeper theme. "Who kills Bambi?" asks a floating word balloon when Batman enters the Asylum, eliciting pop culture memories of the Disney film (which was based on German novelist Felix Salten's Bambi, a Life in the Woods.) Although classic Disney films are often mocked for sanitizing their source material, 1942's Bambi features a famous sequence with Bambi's mother gunned down by a hunter, a scene that's distressed countless children over the years.

The wrinkle in Batman's origin story found in Arkham Asylum has the Wayne family initially going to see Bambi at the theater, then leaving for a showing of Zorro instead. They exit Bambi because Bruce is traumatized by the onscreen death of Bambi's mother, used here by Morrison as foreshadowing the imminent death of Bruce's mother.

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. Morrison intended to play the deceased mothers of Bambi and Psycho against Batman's traumatic remembrance of his mother's murder. (While also subverting the usual portrayal of Bruce's trauma, which tends to focus more on his father, Thomas.) The occasional quotes from Psycho that appear throughout the story are meant to be Bambi watching the movie on television, though the visuals don't make this clear at all.

Morrison's intent is lost without an actual character rendered on-panel, watching a television set with Psycho onscreen. Based solely on the printed pages, it's hard to discern that Bambi even exists. And given DC's tendency to mine its past, this also means the audience never saw Bambi's likely return in the monthly comics titles, the Animated Series cameo, and boss fight battles in the Arkham games. Perhaps the next Arkham Asylum anniversary -- such as the 35th, which will be coming in 2024 -- will finally give Bambi his due.