Grant Morrison Abandons Batman: Arkham Asylum Sequel Plans

Grant Morrison has put his Arkham Asylum sequel on hold. DC Comics published the Batman graphic novel Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth in 1989. Morrison wrote the story and Dave McKean provided the artwork. When it debuted, it became the bestselling superhero graphic novel of all time and has sold 600,000 copies worldwide. In 2017, Morrison announced that he’d begun scripting a sequel to be drawn by Chris Burnham, his collaborator on Batman Incorporated. The sequel would take place in the future Morrison established in Batman #666, where Bruce Wayne’s son Damian had taken on the Batman mantle. But then television came calling, including Morrison’s adaptation of Brave New World. Because of that, he had to abandon the Arkham Asylum sequel, but he may return to it.

“I kind of wrote 26 pages of it, and it got shelved because the television work was taking up so much time,” Morrison tells TechRadar. “But again, I never say never because I think [those] 26 pages were pretty good. And I did enjoy doing a short story with Chris Burnham, the artist, recently [in Detective Comics 1027]. And it gave me the taste again because he was going to draw the second Arkham Asylum, too. But no, I had a story – it’s very, very, very different from the original book. It was more of a Philip K. Dick thing. It’s still there. It’s still one of these things that may happen.”

Arkham Asylum‘s story was heavy on symbolism. It saw Batman going into Arkham to quell a riot, encountering his many foes along the way. At the same time, Batman unravels a mystery about Amadeus Arkham, the asylum’s father, and about his own mind.

As for his television work, Morrison is several drafts into the adaptation of his massive sci-fi comic The Invisibles. “I’m currently working on The Invisibles, which is kind of the big one. And I’ve been hoping to do that for a long time. So yeah, I’m working on developing that for TV right now.”

Having already adapted Happy! for Syfy, Morrison told ComicBook.com in 2017 that he’d be eager to turn any and all of his comics for a new medium. “Most of the work that I’ve done has been more science fiction-oriented or pretty wild or specifically designed for comic books,” Morrison said. “At the same time, I still believe I know how to do an Invisibles TV show, I would know how to do a Filth TV show. I think all of these properties could be adapted to another medium, and Happy!‘s just the first one in. It’s something they could get their hooks on, it’s something that can kick down the doors a little bit. It’s been great because it’s such a small story — it’s not tackling The Invisibles or some of the longer works that I have done. It’s something that we can build on, we can take the basis of, and turn it into the basis of this whole world, which it now is.”

Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth is available in comic shops and digital comics platforms.