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Amadeus Arkham
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Publication information
Publisher	DC Comics
First appearance	Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth
Created by	Grant Morrison
In-story information
Team affiliations	Arkham Asylum

Amadeus Arkham is a fictional character in DC Comics' Batman comic books, in which he was the founder of Arkham Asylum, an institution for the criminally insane. He debuted in 1989 in Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth. The story is interspersed with flashbacks to Arkham founder Amadeus Arkham's life and childhood. These flashbacks reveal that he was inspired to become a psychiatrist because of his mother's mental illness.

[edit] Fictional character biography

[edit] Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth

Main article: Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth

The one-shot graphic novel Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth establishes that the Asylum was named after Elizabeth Arkham, the mother of founder Amadeus Arkham. The original name of the asylum was Arkham Hospital. Its dark history began in the early 1900s when Arkham's mother, having suffered from mental illness most of her life, committed suicide. (It was later revealed that her son actually euthanized her, and repressed the memory.) Amadeus Arkham decided, then, as the sole heir to the Arkham estate, to remodel his family home in order to properly treat the mentally ill, so others might not suffer as his mother had. Prior to the period of the hospital's remodeling, Arkham treated patients at the State Psychiatric Hospital in Metropolis, where he and his wife, Constance, and daughter, Harriet, had been living for quite some time.

Upon telling his family of his plans, they moved back to his family home to oversee the remodeling. While there, Arkham received a call from the police notifying him that Martin "Mad Dog" Hawkins (a serial killer) referred to Arkham by Metropolis Penitentiary while at State Psychiatric Hospital — had escaped from prison, and sought his considered opinion on the murderer's state of mind. Shortly afterward, Arkham returned to his home to find his front door wide open. Inside, he discovered the raped and mutilated bodies of his wife and daughter in an upstairs room, with Hawkins' nickname carved on Harriet's body.

For many years Elizabeth suffered delusions that she was being tormented by a supernatural creature, and would call to her son to protect her. One day, however, he finally sees what his mother saw - a great bat, a spectre of death. Taking a pearl-handled straight razor from his pocket, he cuts his mother's throat to end her suffering. He then blocks out the memory, and attributes her death to suicide. Years later, the tragedy of the murders of his wife and daughter brings back the memory of killing his mother.

Traumatized, Amadeus puts on his mother's wedding dress and takes out the pearl-handled razor. Kneeling in the blood of his family, he vows to bind the evil spirit of "The Bat", which he believes inhabits the house, through ritual and sorcery. He treats "Mad Dog" Hawkins for months until finally electrocuting him in a shock therapy session. Although this incident is treated as an accident by the authorities, Arkham freefalls into madness. He continues his mission even after he is incarcerated in the Asylum himself; he scratches the words of the binding spell into the walls and floor of his cell with his fingernails until the day he dies.

[edit] In other media

[edit] Video games

The ghost of Dr. Amadeus Arkham was featured in Batman: Arkham Asylum.

[edit] Footnotes

[edit] References

Breyfogle, N. & Grant, A. (1996). Batman: The Last Arkham. DC comics. ISBN 1563891905.