Batman #7

[cyberghostface]

"There's something I believe Grant Morrison came up with in Arkham Asylum with Dave McKean: that the Joker has super-sanity; he has to reinvent himself every day to try and keep up with all the stimuli the world throws at him that he can't regulate. And I have a friend who's a neurobiologist, and we were talking about stuff, and I read things about people with profound, untreatable depression issues.

"And this guy built a cap that regulates electricity. He had a patient whose entire life was depressive episodes, suicide attempts, institutionalisations, in an endless cycle, and at some point, on an MRI or a CT scan or something, he saw that some part of her brain wasn't lighting up as it should be. And he went to RadioShack and just made it; it literally just pings the dark parts of her mind. And at the time of the article, her life had changed. She had held a job for more than one year, and she was engaged to be married, like everything was different for this woman. It's just kind of playing with all this stuff like, what if that super sanity is generating like all this electrical activity beyond what people are supposed to have in your brain, and that's why he's so thin all the time, he's like just burning like a marathon's worth of calories every day, just being alive… And what happens if you stop that? That's where we meet our boy is in a tube, and because now his metabolism has stopped, he's not wraith-like and thin anymore." -- Matt Fraction

Comments

[metadronos]

Well, that got his attention. (But why is Batman barefoot? Static electricity prevention, or something else?)


Matt Fraction's anecdote about the neurobiologist's brain-stimulating cap intrigues me. I know that patients with major depressive disorder that doesn't respond to medication sometimes do better with ECT or TMS. This sounds like a rather less intense version of the former -- no convulsions, no anaesthetic needed. Interesting.

[beyondthefringe]

Bats is barefoot because the room's security measures include electrified floors. Just in case. The nice doctor asked.
I figure he's gotta be wearing invisible pseudoskin booties just so no one can record his footprints.

[cainofdreaming]

Or his soles are covered with an invisible film of bat-lastic, with the prints of Lex Luthor engraved on them.

[blues32]

Green is good. Red gets you fried.

[thanekos]

" .. what if that super sanity is generating like all this electrical activity beyond what people are supposed to have in your brain, and that's why he's so thin all the time, he's like just burning like a marathon's worth of calories every day, just being alive.. "

Microdosing super-sanity just for the weight loss.

[nyadnar17]

Can you imagine?

You can finaly lose the weight but it requires you to raw dog reality with no filters for an hour a day.

[agharta75]

The Joker Diet. He'll make billions!

[petermilley]

And issue #8 doesn't have a whisper of this shocking change to the status quo.