2. Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth
Grant Morrison and Dave McKean’s Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth is a bit of a controversial item on this list, as it may be impossible for Arkham Asylum to exist as anything else other than a graphic novel. Even then Arkham Asylum, the book, bucks off any and all semblance of graphic novel maxims. It’s a tale about a prison uprising at Arkham Asylum, where the inmates agree to only let their hostages go if the Batman comes “back home” to the Asylum. Sounds simple enough, right? In theory, this is a traditional Batman adventure, but every page of the work just seethes with a hidden arcane power. Individual frames contain hidden references to Tarot cards and glyphs of Aleister Crowley magic-with-a-K levels of mysticism that twist the unconscious fibers of your mind into delirious ecstasy with its grotesque beauty. It’s a work of dreamscape, a graphic novel that reads like a song, and it’s a perfectly synchronic cacophony of a song at that.
As Grant Morrison describes in the attached script for the fifteenth anniversary collection of A Serious House on Serious Earth, the work was meant to be a right-brain twist on the traditional left-brained Bat-venture, complete with transvestism voodoo ritual, Two-Face soiling himself because he can’t make a decision of his own, and the Joker grabbing Batman’s bat-ass. Not an inch of a page goes to waste as David McKean’s surrealist twists on Batman and his rogue gallery bleed and echo into Arkham’s very halls as we learn the origins of its creation, as well as the inherent lunacy in the Batman himself. If I had to describe the interior artwork of Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth to a blind person, I would describe it as a German expressionist film making love to a Michael Bay-crafted implosion on a bed composed of the notebooks from Se7en while a weeping J. D. Salinger smashes his head against the wall to the beat of “Circuits of the Imagination” by SHPONGLE.
So if it may be impossible to turn McKean’s art to animation, why does Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth make it onto the list? Because the resulting animated movie would just have to be legitimately insane. How insane? Remembering that GC1-61 was the experimental chemical in The Secret World of Alex Mack but forgetting that a human lung is not a suitable substitute for a hat, levels of insane. Even with the script on hand, some of the symbolism and events of the book are hard to grasp, which, I now realize, may have been intentional. Seriously, if someone can explain to me what exactly the Scarecrow does in his one page appearance it would save me countless hours of listless pondering. He just stands there, and yet the Batman runs away…why? Scarecrow’s mere presence instills fear of the unknown, which is what the Scarecrow is all about. To try to capture this feeling, as well as the whole dark, mangy beauty of the novel itself, would be either a breakthrough in animation or the most interesting car crash ever.
Maybe an animated version of Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth would be able to clear up some of the ambiguous events, as well as fueling the nightmares of children accidentally watching this film, and most likely a few fully grown adults, for decades to come.
