I Hate Arkham

Chris Weston has an interesting post here in which he argues that Batman should kill the Joker.

I disagree strongly of course, because I don't think Batman ought to be killing. Not that I have anything against superheroes killing, mind, but I think Batman, as a character, skirts the line of "going too far" awful close sometimes. I think his intention not to kill is one of the few things keeping him on this side of the line.

Batman strikes me as the sort of fellow that needs those self-imposed boundaries or else he simply won't be able to function.

That said, the whole psychopathic murderer that's impossible to contain and breaks out all the time IS a problem. I certainly wouldn't be adverse to seeing heroes who ARE willing to exert lethal force actually deal with him. (Though I admit, I'd doubt it'd stick. It's comics and all. You kind of HAVE to have the recurring villains.)

What I'd like to see, and I'm fairly certain I've said this before on the blog, is Bruce Wayne actually put some money into Arkham to make it something that doesn't look like an early twentieth century house-of-horrors. Seriously, it's the sort of place you expect to hear someone screaming "IT'S ALIVE" during a thunderstorm, after they're done brutally electroshocking the patients and the like, of course.

Not to mention, I don't think "Asylum" is necessarily PC anymore. The connotations, you know. Besides, aren't places like that supposed to try to treat the mentally ill? Instead, all we get are mental health professionals losing their own minds. And who can blame them, working in a place like that. The place probably feeds into the delusions of the mad and breeds them into everyone else.

Sure these people are criminally insane lunatics, but Arkham is a lawsuit waiting to happen. You can't tell me, with Bruce's money, he couldn't team up with something like STAR Labs or Tyler Co. and make a dozen well-funded, state-of-the-art, up-to-date mental hospitals that could actually (and humanely) contain these criminals/patients.

I mean, sure, as a comic reader, I know they're going to get out anyway. But it would be nice to see Bruce use his money to take a proactive step in hindering these guys' inevitable escape. And as much as Arkham's an iconic image, it doesn't really suit the modern age. It'd make sense, maybe, as a secret headquarters for villainy, but you can't tell me the place would fly in our modern medical and criminal justice system. Hmph.