Gotham City has so many nutters in it that it has not one but two separate high security facilities to house them, Blackgate Penitentiary and the infamous Arkham Asylum. Discounting the amount of times that the lunatics have literally taken over the Asylum, and the countless prison breaks from Blackgate, you can't help but feel that maybe they've still not got all of the loonies that plague Gotham's streets locked up where they should be. And maybe that's because every single member of Gotham's population is in some way mentally disturbed, and that the city Batman swears to protect is simply beyond help? As the Arkham videogames have made clear, each and every member of the Dark Knight's spectacular rogues gallery represents a different sort of mental health problem: Hush is a sociopath, Two Face has multiple personalities, Victor Zsasz self-harms and kills in equal measure, and who even knows what the Joker's deal is. It's not just the bad guys that have issues, though. There's also the guy who dresses as a six-foot tall rodent with his pants over his trousers and punches them. In fact most of the Bat-Family are suffering from varying degrees of post traumatic stress disorder, maybe a little multiple personality disorder and schizophrenia. The citizens of Gotham must be nuts, too, to stay in a city so constantly under attack and seemingly perpetually in darkness. There's another theory that goes further than the idea of Gotham as a madhouse, though: that Gotham doesn't actually exist, and neither does Batman or any of his friends or enemies. They're all just figments of Bruce Wayne's imagination, a poor unfortunate whose mind broke upon seeing his parents killed in front of him, and escapes into a fantasy world where he can reach a kind of catharsis through jailing the sort of criminals that took his father and mother from him. And perhaps each of those colourful criminals represents an aspect of his own psyche...
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/
