Scans_Daily

 

"There's a monstrous turn to him -- that's what makes it a bad day. This isn't a decent day. That's a different story entirely. This is the day that Clayface gets close. He gets so close to learning the lesson and then ultimately is a villain. This is a tragedy, as all great Batman stories are wont to be. But watching as he struggles and fails, any time one of us has walked up to the brink and said, 'This line and no further.' Clayface steps over that line.

It's fascinating because the book cannot lose its empathy and our perspective on him, forcing the reader to really step into his muddy shoes and explore what it's like to be this guy, even as he's killing to still have the delusional self-confidence and self-worth to keep telling himself, 'This is good, this is right, this is what I deserve.' That was the magic trick that forced us to live in that toxic, self-delusional fantasy for a little bit, which was not entirely comfortable but very cathartic." -- Collin Kelly

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“The first shock came when I was told that the book had been canceled. Eager to embrace influences from Cabaret to the Theater of Cruelty, the Joker was to have been dressed in the conical bra worn by Madonna for her ‘Open Your Heart’ video. Warner Bros. objected to my portrayal on the grounds that it would encourage the widespread belief that Jack Nicholson, the feted actor lined up to play the Joker in an upcoming $40 million Batman movie, was a transvestite.

I wrote a long, impassioned letter to Jenette Kahn, and after some tense negotiations, we managed to keep the Joker in high heels at least, and Arkham Asylum went back on the schedule. I was sure that Nicholson would have loved it even more if he could have played the Clown Prince of Crime in a dress, but in the end, it was Heath Ledger who immortalized the [transvestite] Joker in 2008’s The Dark Knight, vindicating my foresight.” — Grant Morrison

( April Fool! )

"I'd also like to stress that the portrayal of Batman presented here is not definitive and is not necessarily how I would write the character otherwise. The repressed, armoured, uncertain and sexually frozen man in Arkham Asylum was intended as a critique of the '80s interpretation of Batman as violent, driven and borderline psychopathic. My own later portrayal of Batman in the JLA comic was one which emphasized the character's sanity and dignity; in the end, I figured that anyone who had gone so far and been so successful in his quest to avenge his parents' death and to help other people would have ended up pretty much straightened out. Bruce Wayne would only have become conflicted and mentally unstable if he had NOT put on his scary bat-suit and found the perfect outlet for his feelings of rage, guilt and revenge." - Grant Morrison

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