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A review by oddmara
Batman: Arkham Asylum - A Serious House on Serious Earth by Grant Morrison
1.0
I'm not going to lie, this felt like the comic version of what dude-bro film students think they're doing when they create their grim final year project. First of all, Batman felt very out of character, with the way he treated everyone? Doesn't feel right. The fact he stabbed his hand for some reason??? Him agreeing to play Joker's games??? Even if a lot of things would have been in character if the situation was different, with everything that happens in this story these normally usual reactions didn't make any sense.
It was all just angst for the hell of it, with no actual narrative reason. And I'd like to mention that he fully got impaled and then walked away as if he was fine. Because I guess they thought it would be a cool angsty shot to draw. Or something. Again, just doing things for funsies. What they did to Harvey? Fucking evil. Literally no reason to do that. Makes no sense canonically. And didn't he mostly use the coin to force other people to make decisions rather than himself? The mischaracterization here is actually painful, like, that could have very well been some random ass person. Not to mention that he let Bruce walk away at the end, which again, is not how his coin tosses work.
Moving on to the art, I honestly feel like this style, just like this story, don't fit within the batman universe. Like, it's absolutely gorgeous, but it's a bit too dark (literally, and by that I mean that I felt like watching a poorly lit movie while reading this) and too realistic for a comic, in my opinion, as well as too detailed. There's also so many useless shots that again, are just there to look cool. And don't get me started on the headache that was trying to read the font and colour that they used for the Joker's dialogue. Fucking evil.
The Plato's cavern allusion made me giggle, I'll give him that at least. Not sure the Joker knows who Plato is but you know. At least that was cool.
It was all just angst for the hell of it, with no actual narrative reason. And I'd like to mention that he fully got impaled and then walked away as if he was fine. Because I guess they thought it would be a cool angsty shot to draw. Or something. Again, just doing things for funsies. What they did to Harvey? Fucking evil. Literally no reason to do that. Makes no sense canonically. And didn't he mostly use the coin to force other people to make decisions rather than himself? The mischaracterization here is actually painful, like, that could have very well been some random ass person. Not to mention that he let Bruce walk away at the end, which again, is not how his coin tosses work.
Moving on to the art, I honestly feel like this style, just like this story, don't fit within the batman universe. Like, it's absolutely gorgeous, but it's a bit too dark (literally, and by that I mean that I felt like watching a poorly lit movie while reading this) and too realistic for a comic, in my opinion, as well as too detailed. There's also so many useless shots that again, are just there to look cool. And don't get me started on the headache that was trying to read the font and colour that they used for the Joker's dialogue. Fucking evil.
The Plato's cavern allusion made me giggle, I'll give him that at least. Not sure the Joker knows who Plato is but you know. At least that was cool.