Jeremiah Arkham - Tumblr Posts
Jeremiah Arkham Reading List
Batman: Shadow of the Bat's anniversary is coming up soon (SotB #1's cover date was June 1992), and with that I thought it'd be a good time to make a reading list for a character that I think has been really underutilized... and generally maligned by writers, unfortunately. That'd be Jeremiah Arkham, who you've probably seen being a background character at some point or another.
I hope you enjoy this look into Jerry and, hey, if you think he's interesting - I'm here to talk about him!
As a closing remark: are All Star Western (2011) #22-24 good? No, not really. Were they a merciful absurd relief after slogging through Jeremiah as Black Mask II? Yes.
A thank you to @jlquarterly for their reading guides, which were a heavy inspiration for how I set this one up.
Any institution has its fair share of ghost stories – spirits walk the hallways of museums, schools, hospitals, prisons. Few, however, have as much of a storied history as Arkham State Hospital. Nor do they often have their own cemeteries, headstones beaten down from decades of hard rain. Jeremiah walks between the overgrown rows of paupers’ graves, a wreath of rue and forget-me-nots held to his chest. The pathway beneath him is grass sprouting in hard-packed dirt. It’s his hour for lunch.
The hospital rises to his back, ivy-covered brick and new additions to the Arkhams’ ancestral home sprawling out. The cemetery hasn’t expanded in any considerable way in recent years. More medication, more successes; less funding, less patients. The unfortunate few who have no one to claim them are buried with their names, now, instead of a number that often doesn’t correspond to anything at all. But Jeremiah is in the older part of the cemetery, dug before Thorazine. The numbers are weathered away to faded imprints. He counts by memory, by steps, and finds himself standing atop his great-uncle’s grave. Six feet below rests the bones of Amadeus Arkham, the founder of all that Arkham was and is.
He died decades ago in a scrawl-scratched room with the attending orderlies not even knowing his name. That room has been tiled over now, made shiny and new and clean. Jeremiah kneels to place the wreath.
It had taken him months of lunch breaks to piece together Amadeus’ final resting place, an hour a day spent in the dark dusty cellars that worm beneath the hospital. His predecessors had thought proper disposal of patient files too much effort and had locked them below for “archival” instead. Jeremiah had opened a rusted file cabinet only to discover a warren of dead rats. He’d wondered if Amadeus’ records would share the same fate. But he’d found them eventually, stuffed into a leather folio stuffed into a rotten bookshelf. They’re safe in his office now.
Jeremiah runs a finger along the headstone, along the numbers so faded that he only knows them from the mildewed paper they’d been written on. If it weren’t an act of gross favoritism, he would have another headstone made. He considered claiming the body and reinterring it, once. The historical Arkham family cemetery is only a short walk away. That too would have been favoritism, would have been unexplainable, would have rattled loose things that Jeremiah prefers under lock-and-key.
He gets to his feet, dusting at the green tinge to his knee. He says nothing, because he knows how much the staff talk of him already. He is an Arkham, madness and its cure run in his blood. It wouldn’t do for him to be seen talking to himself, even if such things are natural when any other man or woman does them at their family member’s grave.
In a few days, Jeremiah will return to take away the wilted wreath just like he has every year. He will bury it over the hill, where the cemetery will eventually stretch in future decades, and he will return to work as though it were any other lunch.
Today, Jeremiah stares down at the obliterated slab that marks a man’s grave. Then he returns to work as though it were any other lunch.
One more thing I'll say about Batman: Shadow of the Bat #80-82 is that I was very disappointed at Zsasz's small role. So, the fight between Pinhead and Croc in Wax Man and the Clown that Joker talked Jeremiah into arranging is basically just the fight between the patients and Batman in The Last Arkham that Zsasz talked Jeremiah into arranging. I suppose I should be disappointed at Grant for repeating stories like this, but I'm honestly more disappointed at him giving Zsasz's role to Joker. Joker already gets far too much time in the limelight, where Zsasz doesn't get enough. Also Joker and Jeremiah have 0 chemistry. Like, none. Jeremiah literally just sits there completely silent while Joker talks. Yes, I know it's because he's half asleep, but still. They shared one prior scene together at the beginning of Knightfall in Batman #491 and Jeremiah doesn't say a word in that scene either! They just feel like total strangers, even when they have history. I know had it been Zsasz, the scene would've been far more interesting. Those two definitely have chemistry, they have real history. They were instrumental in each other's stories. The way they are so tied together is what I think made their introduction work so well in The Last Arkham. Most of the time when a new villain is introduced, they are only tied to Batman. Batman is their enemy, they want to kill Batman, Batman is their only tie into the larger world of the DC universe. Only later on will they start to develop relationships with the other characters, IF you're lucky. The way Jeremiah and Zsasz were not only tied to Batman, but to each other made them fit into the larger world so much better, it made them feel far more real. That's why it's so disappointing to see that tie cut. The scene would've played out so much better with Zsasz. Jeremiah would've actually said something, he would've talked back. He would've remembered that he fell for Zsasz's schemes once and he would've been determent to not repeat that mistake. Zsasz would've had to try twice as hard, he would've had to give it everything he's got. They could've gone back and fort, they could've developed their relationship more, that tie could've grown so much stronger, but no. No more Jeremiah/Zsasz scenes for me I guess :/
No one talk to me i just had this really cool plot line in my head about Jeremiah Arkham actually being involved in the Arkham series
Jeremiah Arkham vampire au
hi jerry nation!!! i wrote these jeremiah journal entries a while back and figured i'd finally post them! maybe i'll add more periodically if i write them. i hope you enjoy!
#CRARKHAM - Líne ghorm faoin gearrtha. / Blue line under the cut.
Currently reading Shadow of the Bat and my current headcanon is that Jonathan Crane and Jeremiah Arkham fucked nasty in college, only for them to never speak of it again...
Panels from a comic I didn't want to finish
There is, apparently, a full audio adventure for the Batman Knightfall story. Naturally, Jeremiah makes a few appearances, he has more speaking lines than I’d thought but I think my favorite is when he sounds like a wet cat begging for help while set in one of Joker’s traps :D
what you look like
...rude.
I'm almost 50, not comparable to a cat.
I found out Batman: No Man's Land has a TEN HOUR audio book, so naturally i find the full thing on the internet archive and download it (surprisingly not a huge file) because I was like "surely there has to be a good section about Shadow of the Bat issue 80-82 on here, since that was a such a good little stint of balancing a ethical dilemma and also one of my favorite inside looks to Jeremiah as a character.
no, they just skip over the asylum issues entirely and sum it up in three sentences with jerry only being mentioned less than a handful of times. If you need me I'll be sulking with my lack of Jeremiah content in the corner.
In my arcrane household of me and my partner (predominantly me), I have a way of nicknaming jeremiah a few things. My partner has only one nickname for Jeremiah and is insistent that they call him by “Jerr Bear”. That’s right. “Jerr bear”. I think it’s so funny and cute because they don’t even really like Jeremiah as a character, they just like to see me get really happy when he’s referred to as such. So conversations go.
Me: ugh thinking about him.
My partner, who is used to this on the daily: who? Jerr Bear?
Me: SNIFFLE YEAH
Kissy moment!! Making that blond man blush!!!