Whacko Storage Facility: Batman Annual #2 Review

I have been reading Batman comics since I was five years old, and therefore, I know what the purpose of Arkham Asylum is: it’s to give supervillains a place to take a nice rest after the end of a starring turn, and a place to break out of at the start of the next starring turn. And that’s pretty much it.

Seriously: can you think of anyone who has ever been cured at Arkham Asylum? I mean, in theory, any insane asylum is actually a psychiatric hospital; here in Massachusetts, the local nuthatch is known as Bridgewater State Hospital, not the Southeastern Mass Whacko Storage Facility (however, that will be the name of my next punk band). And when a facility is a hospital, one would assume the application of some form of medical treatment… and yet at Arkham, no one ever gets better. Hell, no one ever tries; the only people I can think of who were released from Arkham are Harvey Dent and The Joker, and that was in Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, and it only happened as a way for Miller to mock liberals, and ended in the deaths of hundreds. If you believe the portrayal of psychiatry in Batman, the field only exists to clap you in a straitjacket and pump your full of antipsychotic drugs. Which is why I self-medicate with 30-packs of the Poor Man’s Valium. But I digress.

But if one stops to think about it, if there is a psychiatric hospital, there must be someone who went there under their own power looking for a little medical help, right? And what would happen if the place that that person went for healing became, over the course of years, the location where a city locked up its most dangerous and escape-prone homicidal maniacs?

It’s an interesting idea, and its the focus of Batman Annual #2, with a story by regular Batman writer Scott Snyder and new comics writer Marguerite Bennett, with the script by Bennett herself. And it is successful in giving readers a new point of view on comics’ favorite spastic hatch… even though it isn’t completely successful as a completely immersive and believable Batman story.

Meet Eric Border: the newest orderly at Arkham Asylum, fresh off the bus from Metropolis, and starting on the night that Batman is testing a new maximum security wing of the facility. As Batman is being locked up to attempt escape, Border goes to talk to The Anchoress: the longest resident of Arkham Asylum, who has been locked away in a forgotten wing, having been deemed incurable by Dr. Arkham. The Anchoress tells Border that she suffered an accident year ago that killed her parents and gave her the power to walk through walls. She then voluntarily committed herself, looking for help with her grief and guilt… but then Batman started work in Zero Year, violating the sanctity of the asylum and filling it to the brim with giggling rejects from a Tod Browning casting session. The Anchoress learns that Batman is inside the facility, uses her power to escape her cell, and vows to have vengeance upon Bats for turning her sanctuary into a prison…

What works best here is the overall high concept of Batman’s existence turning Arkham into the hellhole we all know and love. The idea that Batman’s mere presence has been causing nutjobs and public masturbators who happen to have chemistry degrees to dye their pants in lurid colors and troll Gotham City for armpit scalps is well-covered territory, but how Batman might affect your garden-variety disturbed person looking for a safe place to get some help is a concept I don’t recall seeing before, or even considering. And after almost 70 years, any writer who can come up with a new angle on Batman’s effect on Gotham City is kind of refreshing. It’s a cool concept.

However, the story itself has some inconsistencies that keep it from reaching the potential heights that its high concept promises. Starting with the opeing couple of pages, which intimate that we are about to read a story about Batman being incarcerated in Arkham as opposed to testing some security; Batman in handcuffs is a powerful image (there’s a reason Zack Snyder went with a similar Superman image to hype Man of Steel), and the statement from an Arkham orderly of…

They brought him into Arkham on my first night as an orderly…

They said he was the most dangerous man ever to set foot in Gotham…

Batman: What are you waiting for? Lock me up.

It was my first night… it was his too.

…well, that makes a certain promise, well, doesn’t it? And yet, after a three-page flashback to lay some story background – you know, background for a story about Batman locked up against his will – we flash back to the present and find out within a panel that the story is something completely different. It feels like Bennett threw down one hell of a gauntlet… and then picked it right back up to throw it down someplace else.

And then there was The Anchoress as a character herself. The character was perfectly fine, and I really dug the idea of someone with powers and intense personal grief who came to Arkham for help and found herself betrayed by Batman and his forced change in asylum policy from helping the sick toward tasing the nuts (in both senses of the phrase). The characterization of someone who went into Arkham voluntarily and feels that Batman is the one who turned her sanctuary into a cage, and who never, despite her powers, wanted to be or acted like a supervillain, is a really interesting idea.

The trouble is that Bennett explicitly tells the reader that Batman knows Arkham Asylum better than even Dr. Arkham himself. And she tells us that Border “did [his] homework,” because he knew who The Anchoress was… but when Batman meets her? Yeah, he has no idea whatsoever. And that might sound like a nitpick, but it is a gaping hole in the story, especially given the very specific information about Batman’s knowledge of Arkham we’re given right in the story. It was enough of a plot inconsistency to pop me right out of the story.

And while the idea that The Anchoress might attack Batman by forcing him to relive his greatest losses, like his parents’ and son’s death, isn’t a bad idea (albeit one we’ve seen in about a half-dozen Scarecrow stories), Bennett tells us that The Anchoress can make Batman feel like he is experiencing this loss for thousands of years, and that she is so powerful that she can keep Batman from ever escaping… but after a few pages of making him relive those memories, Batman just says, “no,” and breaks out with no problem… and more importantly, no explanation. And sure, we can assume that it’s because Batman is such a self-controlled badass, but it feels like it just kinda… happens. It’s just about anticlimactic, frankly.

Wes Craig’s art is pretty simple and a little abstract… but it’s honestly hard to really judge it, because his pencils were inked by six different people in this issue. That means that the look varies a bit throughout the issue, but in general, his lines are simple and a little European-looking (think mildly like Aeon Flux) and not too busy. There’s not a ton of action in this book – The Anchoress attacks Batman psychologically, not physically – but the panel layout is easy to follow and the pacing makes sense, particularly during those internal battle sequences, where big panels slow the reader down to make them feel what Batman is feeling.

Look: Bennett is a brand new comic writer, and to debut on DC’s biggest book, even in its annual issue, is one hell of a high-profile place to start out and learn your professional skills – after all, most of comics fandom will be watching. And there are several execution and plot missteps in this issue, make no mistake. However, on her first shot, Bennett came up with a pretty damn solid high-concept idea, and a reluctant supervillain with a unique motivation, right out of the gate. And the way I see it, the world is full of unimaginative writers who can pace a plot in a workmanlike manner, but whose comics are utterly unforgettable. So the structural and plot issues in Batman Annual #2 are there, but I figure those are craft issues that will improve over time. But the truly creative idea under the hood here is a promising start for a first-time comics writer.

I’m looking forward to seeing more from Bennett in the future… but this one is definitely a first effort from a new writer.