Somnopolis

Arkham Asylum is, simply put, one of the most successful games released in recent years. It is not only a fantastic action game, with cinematic cut-scenes that don’t distract from the gameplay but actually improve it (rare), side quests that add to replayability, but more than any of that it manages to synthesize every version of the Batman at once.

Written by Paul Dini, who also worked on the Batman animated series, Arkham Asylum also boasts the vocal stylings of three of the show’s voice actors. Returning are Arleen Sorkin as Harley, Kevin Conroy as Batman and Mark Hamill knocking it out of the park with his demented Joker taunting the player throughout the game.

The ‘inmates take over the asylum’, plot draws on two miniseries from DC Comics. Grant Morrison and Dave McKean’s Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth and Arkham Asylum: Living Hell by Dan Slott and Ryan Sook. The game retains the ghostly undertones of the first book, but also introduces characters from Slott’s less surreal and more plot-driven miniseries. Aaron Cash is one of the attending guards at Arkham, who lost his hand in an attack by Killer Croc. The game picks up on the allusions to J. M. Barrie’s Captain Hook, in keeping with the multitude of references stuffed into the Batman mythos by creators over the past seventy years.

Recently Mightygodking wrote an interesting piece regarding the animated series’ take on the Joker -

Now, the animated series’ Joker is a far more human character. One of the episodes I watched recently was “Joker’s Millions,” in which a flat-broke Joker gets a massive inheritance from a gangland rival, clears his name, and blows a bunch of money, only to find out later that most of the money was fake; with the IRS after him for inheritance tax, he can’t admit that he was fooled or he’ll be humiliated. Can you imagine the Joker, as seen in most contemporary comics, being portrayed as so down on his luck? [.....] This is a Joker with highs and lows, who feels joy and disappointment, a Joker with honest-to-God passion. This is a Joker who wants things, and can’t always have them. This is a Joker who retains the grandness of his philosophical and conceptual war against Batman, but is also petty enough offended when he’s tossed out of the Gotham City Comedy Competition.

Mark Hammill’s Joker sounds the same, cackling maniacally as he tears the asylum apart. But unlike in the animated series, this version of the villain is happy to take lives. Staff, emergency crews and police officers are slaughtered by his goons. The player’s Batman can do little more than contain the carnage on the island of Arkham (touches of Alcatraz here). The Batman does not kill, but there is something sick about the city of Gotham and life is cheap. The game embraces the twisted morality of the comic and while the masked Bruce Wayne does not take a life, he doesn’t go out of his way to save the criminals who fall to their death. A series of bonecrushing blows would appear to break every bone in a goon’s body, yet when the player checks them the game states they are ‘unconscious’. Yeah. Right.

The violent fight moves Batman uses in the game are acrobatic and swift, the most spectacular combos achieved by unbroken chains of contact hits against enemies. The developers introduce an inventive array of animations to give players the sense that they are the Batman. ‘Detective mode’, allows the player to analyse crime scenes and anticipate foes. It combines the character’s tech-savy side with his martial artist skills to great effect.

Now. Boss fights. Original games often introduce throwaway boss battles that become repetitive after the first couple of levels. Arkham Asylum has the advantage of being able to draw on an incredible rogues gallery. There’s the Joker’s lover and sidekick, created by Paul Dini and Bruce Timm for the animated series, Harley Quinn, here redesigned to look like a demented hospital nurse. Then we have Killer Croc, a monstrous sewer dweller, into whose lair you have to travel….moving very slowly. Bane is more muscle than man and in confronting the villain who broke the Bat’s back in the comics, you discover the true extent of the Joker’s plan. Poison Ivy essays a disturbing transformation that’s half hentai, half Audrey from Little Shop of Horrors. But the pick of the bunch, the absolute terror that is  – Scarecrow

The game makes excellent use of a villain who can cause nightmarish hallucinations due to a gas of his own invention. Batman is dosed at least three times during the game and forced to relive his parents’ deaths, not to mention in a great scene, a reversal of the game’s opening where he is brought to Arkham in chains by the Joker himself. The character’s redesign is a combination of the movie version played by Cillian Murphy and the comic book version, with some frighteningly Freudian dentata to boot. The Scarecrow boss fights are for me the highlight of the game.

Now I have heard complaints about the final fight with the Joker is anticlimactic, but personally I think it’s in keeping with his character. In a horrible way, once again in keeping with the Batman storyline, who’s to say he didn’t win in the end? Hundreds of lives lost, or destroyed and the Arkham institute itself turned into a death camp.

Fun game though.

On Wednesday evening Stephanie and I went to see Kevin Smith play a gig at Vicar Street. I will probably write up a piece on that later, but I just wanted to address one aspect of his ‘talk’. Smith enjoys the format of a Q & A session, which he has half converted into a stand-up comedy gig, his anecdotes ranging across his experiences in the movie industry, the comic industry and of course his sex life. He is highly opinionated  and prone to ‘fanboyitis’, that mode of argument that in the words of Peter Griffin ‘insists upon itself‘.

Case in point – Grant Morrison’s Batman.

With a mere shrug of his shoulders (Smith’s preferred form of argumentation) he wrote off the long-running story arc of the mad Scot’s, titled Batman RIP, as a rigmarole he preferred to avoid. His own Batman stories, with the infamous Walt Flanagan, are set in some indeterminate ‘out of continuity’ period for the Bat. None of that ‘Damian’ Wayne business, or shooting Darkseid with a gun (I mean the idea!), or Dick Grayson/Nightwing stepping up to become the Batman after his mentor’s supposed death. All of that Smith would prefer to avoid.

Which comes across as a bit rich, when we were also treated to a rant on how continuity matters. Ah continuity. What is it good for, huh? The fanboys do like to discuss continuity. Essentially a status quo has to be maintained, so that while every story within the continuum happened, a reader can still approach the book knowing Batman is not going to be on heroin this week. That’s just too different. So Smith and other fanboys-turned-writers place the importance of continuity before the story, as they are complicit in the franchising of comics. Stories should have a beginning, middle and an end. Comic book characters must continue forever. Hence the importance of continuity.

Morrison thinks differently. He places story first. His characters can live or die, become twisted or outgrow their surroundings. Inspired by Smith’s indifference I bought Batman RIP in trade and read through it in one sitting. I didn’t find it overly strange, or difficult to read, as it has been accused of. The main focus of the story is that the idea of Batman is destroyed and all the advantages he enjoys ripped away. The Wayne family’s good name is tarnished. His home ruined. Alfred beaten and kidnapped. Dick Grayson locked up in Arkham and subjected to a lobotomy. Robin on the run. Finally, the woman he loves takes a look around the Batcave, turns to Bruce and asks him a simple question – why are you doing this? These are the actions of a disturbed mind, hanging on to past trauma like a talisman.

That moment crystallises so much about Batman for me and also neatly sums up the mentality of fanboys. Perhaps it is the most objectionable scene within the story for long-time fans (leaving aside the ‘addicted to heroin’ stuff). For so much of RIP is about addressing every aspect of Batman’s history simultaneously, even to the inclusion of the forgotten ‘Bat-mite’ (here a projection of Bruce’s reason and imagination). The arc is a homage, but feels like root-canal as opposed to the usual attempts by 30-something men who should know better attempting to recreate whole storylines from their childhoods today.

Morrison has gone a different route entirely. Destroy the Bat and show how he can survive. How does the man live with what he does? He knows he is possibly psychotic, but chooses to do it anyway, because he has become necessary for the survival of Gotham itself, an entire cityscape gripped by insanity (with Arkham Asylum as its fulcrum).

The book is too abstract, more given to ideas than plot you can get your teeth into. I forgive Morrison this, as with Final Crisis, because the ideas are so crystalline pure to me. He’s a mad Scot, but he gets what makes a story. Take an idea and exhibit it, showing off every possible facet shining and bright.

Grant Morrison explains comic book franchising