8. Arkham Asylum: A Serious House On A Serious Earth
You can say a lot about Kick-Ass and Sin City, but at least they're legible. Arkham Asylum: A Serious House On A Serious Earth was the first mainstream American comics work by writer Grant Morrison and artist Dave McKean, a match made in heaven in terms of the pair's unconventional and experimental styles. The combination of the two is less heavenly for readers, however, since it lead to a Batman graphic novel that's so difficult to follow that it's nigh-on unreadable. But hey, the title has a quote from a Philip Larkin poem, so it must be clever! Or pretentious. That might be a better word. Arkham Asylum was published as a graphic novel in 1989, was an instant critical and commercial hit and today frequently sits atop lists of the best Batman stories ever told. And yet Batman barely figures into it, and neither do the promise of "graphic novel". The idea of sequential art is that words and pictures tell a story in tandem. In Arkham Asylum, neither really fulfils that promise, instead leaving the reader to navigate a series of impressionistic paintings and scrawled missives that lack any sort of structure of logical sense. We're not total philistines here - we went to an art gallery once and very much enjoyed the gift shop - but we have our limits. Dave McKean's work is undeniably impressive, as he twists and morphs the Dark Knight's rogues gallery into terrifying funhouse mirror versions of their regular selves, and we've definitely enjoyed Grant Morrison's work before and since. Those things do not a cohesive or even fun read make, though. Morrison has copped to consciously penning "something that was more like a piece of music or an experimental film than a typical adventure comic book", which we can dig. We definitely prefer David Lynch to Brett Ratner. However his "dreamlike, emotional and irrational" version of Batman comics is just a headache to read, and leaves you feeling empty upon finishing it, as if you're missing something. Don't worry, you're not the only one.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
