Alex Montez was an Arkham Research Scientist before he becomes possessed by Eclipso, the former Angel of Vengence. The most obvious one is Harley Quinn, but Hugo Strange and Jonathan Crane/Scarecrow have also been placed on Arkham’s staff in various incarnations.Įven several lesser known characters have succumbed to this effect.
Many noted former Arkham psychiatrists have become a part of Batman’s rogues gallery. Instead of the psychiatrists working to stabilize the inmates, the inmates are driving the staff over to their side of the sanity fence. The prevalence of Batman villains that were one time Arkham doctors goes as far as to indicate the asylum is working in reverse. From the groundskeeper turned serial killer named Spider all the way up to Director Alyce Sinner - who killed her own family and has an obsession with the seven deadly sins - Arkham’s employee directory is full of past, present, and future criminals. In addition to their inability to keep psychopathic criminals locked up, Arkham has a long history of terrible employee hirings, with multiple villains having spent time working on Arkham’s staff.
This is a concept very much paralleled by Batman’s eternal struggle against the force of evil in Gotham City, the evil he tries to lock away in Arkham Asylum.Ī single quote from Lovecraft’s Call of the Cthulu could even be said to be the foundational philosophy behind Arham Asylum, and especially characters like the Joker: "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents." There’s even an “Arkham Sanitorium” featured in the short story The Thing on the Doorstep - which was unfortunately one of Lovecrafts less well-received works.Īrkham’s inmates, and much of Batman’s lore, can actually be linked back to elements of the philosophy of Cthulu in Lovecraft’s work, where the existence of ancient and powerful evils are used to show the nearly arbitrary plight of mankind in light of these ancient deities. Much of the inspiration behind Arkham Asylum comes from Arkham, Massachussets, a fictional town that serves as a fixture in H.P.
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