![]() Once Crane becomes Scarecrow we do establish specific stories where he's the featured thread, but it's also important to just make sure he plays a small roll in most of the major Batman arcs. I had no idea that psychiatrists actually have to attend medical school. (As a note, sometimes in creating someone's backstory we have to do a little research into specific careers. It just fits with his development really well. Not every story has used the idea that he was the head psychiatrist of Arkham but it is a remarkably convenient framing device so we made sure to incorperate it, giving him a residency before his superior dies of "mysterious circumstances". He's a surprisingly well-defined character with a very clear life story the way his obsession with fear developed over his life, his career as a scientist and psychiatrist are all well-established elements of his backstory. We did quite a bit to define Crane's early years and training. Not bad for a dude wearing a burlap sack. I've recently read someone's blog post (sorry, I don't remember where) that suggested that Scarecrow is such an effective villain that he actually deserves to be someone's central antagonist. He's actually been showing up a LOT lately, both as the first badguy in the Chris Nolan Batman movies and as a recurring and eventually central villain in the Batman Arkham games. Some of the best Batman stories are rooted in Scarecrow's fear toxin forcing him to literally confront the story elements that haunt him. The applications of his fear toxin has continued to keep him relevant and powerful, alowing him to undermine any hero's reality and challenge them on a visceral, personal level. He was even a member of the animated Legion of Doom, a dude in a straw costume sitting right there at a table between the power ring-wearing space despot and a superintelligent gorilla. It's actually fascinating that Scarecrow has continued to thrive as one of Batman's enemies through the years as the character has undergone so many tonal shifts. Batman himself was initially built in a way to be almost a horror character himself, and many of Batman's earliest adventures featured him battling all sorts of pretty terrifying monsters. He's actually a bit of a holdover to an entirely different era of comics where monsters and horror elements were far more pervasive. The Scarecrow is a first generation Batman villain, debuting all the way back in 1941.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |