The Strange Origins of Batman's Arkham Asylum, Explained

In the latest Comic Book Legends Revealed, discover the somewhat secret origin of the famous piece of the Batman mythos, Arkham Asylum.

Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the eight hundred and twenty-third installment where we examine three comic book legends and determine whether they are true or false. As usual, there will be three posts, one for each of the three legends.

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COMIC LEGEND:

Denny O'Neil came up with the idea for Arkham Asylum

STATUS:

False

Reader James T. wrote in to ask, "Was Denny O'Neil inspired by the film Asylum (1972) when he created "Arkham Hospital (Asylum)" in "The Threat of the Two Headed Coin" in Batman #258 (1974)?"

It's an interesting question, as the timing sure does line up, but I was pretty sure I knew the origins of Arkham Asylum, so I was going to do this as a legend saying no to James while explaining how O'Neil came up with Arkham Asylum and that's when I remembered that it is all a bit of a trick question, as Denny O'Neil didn't actually come up with Arkham Asylum!

Arkham Asylum, then known as Arkham Hospital, debuted in Batman #258 (by Denny O'Neil, Irv Novick and Dick Giordano), as a general springs Two-Face from Arkham...

The general is named John Harris...

Arkham Asylum is almost assuredly a reference to H.P. Lovecraft, who had a number of stories featured in the fictional city of Arkham, with the story, "The Thing on the Doorstop" in January 1937's issue of Weird Tales being specifically set at a sanitorium in Arkham...

So I think that it is clear that the Lovecraft inspiration would be the central influence upon the introduction of Arkham Asylum, as O'Neil was a big fan of Lovecraft himself (when asked about his early Batman stories in 1970 and how it was so different than earlier versions of Batman, he explained, "I'm sure we didn't give that a second's thought. I just wanted to make it Gothic and spooky. I was being influenced by writers like Lovecraft and Poe, and I didn't think about Gotham City."

However, while O'Neil was definitely a Lovecraft fan and surely let that influence his darker version of Batman in the 1970s, in the case of Arkham Asylum, we know that the Lovecraft influence was more direct, especially since the creator was not actually Denny O'Neil.

In a great interview by Bryan D. Stroud, longtime DC writer and editor Jack C. Harris explained how it all went down...

I created Arkham Asylum. The story goes like this: Of course Arkham Asylum was not created by anyone at DC, it was created by H.P. Lovecraft. Arkham Asylum is where all the nuts who were driven crazy by Lovecraft's elder gods go. They were committed to Arkham Asylum, which is in Massachusetts in the Lovecraft stories. It's nothing that anybody at DC came up with. But during one of those times that Denny O'Neil came to visit and talk at my college course, I remember we were at dinner. We always took our guests to dinner. So I was talking to Denny and I said, "Denny, you know criminals like Two-Face and the Joker shouldn't be just jailed. They're nuts. They should be in an insane asylum. And what better one than Arkham Asylum from the Lovecraft stories?" He thought that was a great idea. So he used it. And if you look, it was in Batman #258 from September of 1974. That's the first mention of Arkham Asylum in DC comics history. It's been reported elsewhere, but that's incorrect. If you check it, this is the first time it's ever been mentioned, in this story. If you look at it, if you read it, the story involves Two-Face being brought in out of Arkham Asylum. The guy who breaks him out is a military man named John Harris. And that's Denny O'Neil's tip of the hat to me for the Arkham idea. Now I think it was Len Wein who picked up on that idea and later expanded the whole history of Arkham. But Denny did it first in that issue of Batman and I'm the one who gave him the idea for it. Every time I see Arkham Asylum I go nuts.

Denny O'Neil has himself been very open with Harris' role in the creation of Arkham Asylum, so it is not like Harris is claiming glory that is in dispute.

This is a standard problem that we have in comics where all we really have to go on is who wrote the actual story, as rarely do comics have an "Inspired by writer X" tag in them, although obviously those are not completely absent from comic book history. Still, it would be nice if Harris could get more credit for the idea from references to Arkham Asylum in the future.

Thanks to James T. for the suggestion and thanks so much to Bryan D. Stroud and Jack C. Harris for the excellent piece of information about the origins of Arkham Asylum, while confirming the Lovecraft influence of it all. Harris, by the way, later specifically recalled that the idea came following a summer where he had read a LOT of Lovecraft, noting in the foreword to The Dark Age: Grim, Great & Gimmicky Post-Modern Comics, "One summer, I immersed myself in the dark works of H. P. Lovecraft... It was during a conversation with writer Denny O'Neil, before I had even graduated from college, that I suggested that Batman villains such as Two-Face and Joker should never be housed in a common prison; they should be locked away in an insane asylum."