So, at Arkham they're just letting crazed super-villains sit around cells in their costumes? Including full face masks, which would make swapping identites to facilitate escapes that much easier?(Just to prove that I can answer my own questions, obviously it's a storytelling shortcut for those GL readers who might not recognize Jonathan Crane out of his business suit. Still...Alternatively, it's a "new therapy." Your choice.)
Second (and more important) question. After decades of failure at rehabilitating Gotham's many nut cases, and indeed of not even being able to hold them securely for more than 5 minutes at a time, why in the world doesn't billionaire Bruce Wayne buy Arkham and improve it? Or raze it to the ground and start over? Or, if it's not for sale, just start his own state of the art facility, staffed with the best shrinks in the world, etc.? This man can build flipping satellites for the JLA, but he lets the festering boil of Arkham continue to ooze on his own home turf??
I know that Bruce Wayne has more or less vanished as a character in the DC Universe, but even so the writers rarely take advantage of some of the story opportunities presented by the fact that Bruce is so rich, Bill Gates borrows cab fare from him...
3 comments:
Some things are not meant to change. Like Arkham being a madhouse run by madmen.
Given the chance I'd write a story for you in which Bruce Wayne puts a bid for the asylum only to be outbid at the last second (damn you eBay!) by a mystery buyer with the initials J.K...
Hilarity ensues.
Well, I wouldn't script it as a permanent change...the whole thing would go the rails for various reasons, including Bruce himself starting to be driven mad by being in charge of the nuthouse...
But my point was more that, within the bubble of the bat universe, Bruce could easily make a better effort at better use of his billions, couldn't he? Gotham's jail and Arkham are pits? Well, where's the grants from the Wayne Foundation? He splurges on all these wonderful Bat toys, but it's all too rare these days to see him, say, spend $125,000 to run a rigged kangaroo race to prevent someone from robbing a bank, or donating salaries for a few extra security guards at the next diamond exhibiton at the museum, or attempt a hostile takeover of Luthor Corp.
There's a lot of potential ideas for stories in Bruce's wealth, but no one's gonna do them because right now Goddamn Batman is the rage, not Bruce Wayne, and if it doesn't involve punching someone in the face, they don't wanna hear about it.
And just until you get a load of my story where Bruce Wayne is elected mayor of Gotham City...
Yeah, for just a second, that sounded like a really good idea; but then I figured, Batman probably doesn't want his fingerprints on that train wreck. Plus, he would take every escape as his personal fault then...
Haven't they established that the reason the Joker and all escape so easily is because Arkham is honeycombed with secret tunnels, false walls, and so forth? So, even if Bruce Wayne fronted the cash to build a new Arkham, inmates like the Joker would either extort or bribe contractors to add new escape routes, use shoddy materials, etc. I imagine even non-loon villains like the Penguin would get in on that, until there's more people working on tunnels then on the building itself.
This would be a good way to at least pay lip service to Batman trying to use Bruce's wealth as a tool for good, but lip service is all you can do: for story purposes, Gotham has to remain mostly crappy, right?
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