GKO: MADHOUSE
Here you will find our rambalings on all area's of Batman, interviews and speical features!
CBR: All right, David! There's so much to talk about with all your work on the Bat Books these days, but let's start with how we got here. You've known about the plans for Jeremiah Arkham being the Black Mask since they were conceived, and it appears work on the character has split between Tony Daniel doing the crime side of the character with you taking on the psychosis through your asylum stories. What was it that made you gravitate towards the mad end of things?
David Hine: I have a natural affinity for crazy people. If you look at my work, particularly [my Image graphic novel] "Strange Embrace," you'll see I'm more interested in twisted psychological thrillers than action stories. I've learned to write action scenes because that's so much a part of the American mainstream comics scene, but those scenes are always less important than the psychological stuff. The trick is to externalize the psychosis so that you can make it work dramatically. Having a guy laying on a couch talking to his analyst for 22 pages is not going to sell comics.
Since Alan Grant and Norm Breyfogle created the character in the 1990s "Shadow of the Bat" storyline in the 1990s, the hook of Jeremiah Arkham has always been "the madman who runs the madhouse," which is an idea that follows strongly on what Grant Morrison built with Dave McKean in “Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth.” Was turning the doctor into one of Batman's rogues himself the natural conclusion for the character's decades-long arc?
You could see in Alan Grant's "The Last Arkham" that Batman and Jeremiah absolutely loathed one another and the tension has been there ever since. Grant Morrison and Dave McKean set all this up of course. "A Serious House on Serious Earth" was a brilliant piece of work and established Arkham Asylum as an extension of the warped personality of Amadeus Arkham. No matter how many times the building is torn down and rebuilt, that personality will always infest the building. The location itself is infected with the madness of Arkham, and it spreads out through the whole city. Gotham City is one big madhouse with the Asylum at its heart. This explains why there are so many crazy twisted villains in the Batman Universe. The city breeds them. And in a sense it all comes back to the Arkham bloodline. The Arkham name is of course, an allusion to Lovecraft's fictional city of Arkham, which is similarly infected with insanity.
You've spoken in the past with CBR about making your third and final Arkham story that starts in this week's "Detective Comics" #864 both a true mystery tale and an exploration of your ongoing theme of masks as metaphors for the characters’ inner lives. Taking these each in their own turn, I found it interesting that so far, the Black Mask side of the doctor and the Jeremiah side have remained separate and at odds. How will you reconcile the "sides" of his "mask" in this two-parter?
Jeremiah has always tried to deny the evil side to his nature and that's why he couldn't accept that he was The Black Mask. He always had an idealized notion of himself as a great psychiatrist, a healer. His greatest flaw is his own mediocrity. It's only when he wears the Black Mask that his true talents come to the fore. We'll see how far these two sides do actually reconcile themselves in this two-part story. We will see how the two sides of his personality have been relating to one another and how that schizophrenia came about, but the relationship between The Black Mask and Jeremiah Arkham hasn't yet run its course. It's interesting because the Black Mask can be worn by anyone. It's theoretically possible that anyone could have a Black Mask version of themselves. A Mister Hyde side to the personality that's just waiting to be released.
Check out the entire interview here,
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