The destruction of Batman’s Arkham Asylum was a chance to move past its troubled legacy but Gotham has embraced – it with deadly consequences.
WARNING: The following contains spoilers for the story “Foundations” Part 1 from Detective Comics #1044, on sale now from DC Comics.
The Arkham name has a troubling reputation. Everything associated with it seems to end in disaster and madness. Not just the fabled Asylum itself, but also those who lend their name to the building. Given the opportunity to move away from this seemingly cursed legacy, Mayor Nakano’s Gotham has decided to double down and keep up the troubled tradition. As expected, the new project is already cursed – with deadly consequences.
The next chapter in the Arkham legacy begins in the unsettling story “Foundations” Part 1 from Detective Comics #1044 by Stephanie Phillips, David Lapham, Trish Mulvihill and Rob Leigh. At a press conference, Mayor Nakano justifies naming Gotham’s new centralized mental health institute Arkham Tower. Since Arkham Asylum was destroyed during the events of “A-Day” in Infinite Frontier #0, the city needed somewhere new to house its criminally insane, but it didn’t have to call it Arkham.
As Bruce Wayne and Oracle listen to the press conference, they also note that the tower itself has a bad reputation, as it was the site of Hugo Strange’s latest schemes. However, when Bruce himself talks to Nakano about the project, the Mayor refuses to budge when it comes to the name.
As to why a name is such a problem, ever since it became associated with the original asylum, its caused numerous problems. This tale even opens on the first tragedy, that of the original architect of Arkham Asylum going mad himself and killing those who worked on the building with an axe. As for everything afterward, Amadeus Arkham, the founder of the infamous institute, had it built to treat his mentally ill mother but was eventually institutionalized in his own asylum. His descendants Jeremiah and Astrid Arkham both suffered a similar fate. The institute’s staff hasn’t faired much better, with the Harley Quinn and Hugo Strange being the most notable in a worryingly long list to become patients themselves.
Just as the Dark Knight is about to give up on his appeal to Nakano about Arkham Tower’s name, the press conference is interrupted by a man raving about how the tower is haunted and doomed. Though the Mayor dismisses these claims, Batman does not and decides that it’s time he looked into Arkham Asylum’s successor.
It seems there may be some truth to the man’s claims, and some of the journalists’ worries, before Batman even arrives. The construction workers at the tower find one of their colleagues bashing his head against a window in a rather disturbed manner. If that wasn’t unsettling in and of itself, that’s also something the architect of the original asylum did – shortly after he killed the original construction crew.
As Batman crashes into the scene, he sees history repeating itself. The man who was smashing his head against the window has attacked his fellow workers and looks set to kill them. This isn’t the only weird, horrific thing going down in Gotham right now, with zombies and parasites spilling into the streets, but the parallels between Arkham Tower’s construction and Arkham Asylum’s are too similar to brush them off as mere coincidence.
It seems that there’s a curse around the Arkham name and not just the original building. Though this could all turn out to be someone’s attempts to sabotage the new project, that doesn’t change the fact that the tower’s construction just added to the infamous Arkham legacy. Knowing the criminals of Gotham too, it seems unlikely that this will be the last of Arkham Towers’ problems.
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