Scarecrow
46 years ago - Jonathan Crane is born.
41 years ago - 5-year-old Jonathan begins enduring lifelong bullying.
31 years ago - 15-year-old Jonathan first uses his scarecrow identity to frighten his main tormentors to death. He is not a suspect.
28 years ago - 18-year-old Jonathan goes to Gotham University to study psychology.
24 years ago - 22-year-old Jonathan starts medschool, studying phobias.
20 years ago - 26-year-old Jonathan begins his residency at Arkham Asylum while teaching at Gotham University. His fear experiments on inmates begins.
18 years ago - 28-year-old Jonathan is fired from the University for firing a gun during a lecture, scaring one student so severely she suffered a heart attack. He becomes a fulltime resident psychologist in Arkham.
16 years ago - 30-year-old Jonathan completes his residency and becomes a practicing psychologist in Arkham.
15 years ago - 31-year-old Jonathan becomes the new head of psychiatry at Arkham when the previous head dies mysteriously.
13 years ago - 33-year-old Jonathan begins using his fear toxins to kill the university officials responsible for his firing. His life unravels when he is stopped by Batman and he becomes the Scarecrow, holding the city randsom before he is captured and sent to Arkham as a patient. Hugo Strange becomes the new head psychologist of Arkham.
11 years ago - 35-year-old Jonathan is broken out of Arkham Asylum by Oswald Cobblepot so he can help Julian Gregory Day kill Carmine Falcone's son Alberto.
7 years ago - 39-year-old Jonathan uses his newest fear toxin that nearly destroys Batman. He is stopped by the Outsiders.
4 years ago - 42-year-old Jonathan is freed from Arkham by Bane. He attempts to attack Batman but is unprepaired for Jean Paul Valley's hightened level of violence.
3 years ago - 43-year-old Jonathan briefly captures Batman during No Man's Land. He reveals that he is addicted to fear, but is now immune to it save for his fear of Batman.
1 year ago - 45-year-old Jonathan's fear toxin makes Batman fear that Red Hood is a returned Jason Todd. He later joins the Legion of Doom.
The idea if a evil scarecrow is a pretty iconic horror trope. It makes a lot of sense that DC would feature one in it's eschelon of villains, but if that was all he was he would be a pretty one-note baddy. What makes Jonathan Crane such a long-lasting and effective villain is that his nitch isn't the idea of a scarecrow specifically, but the scarecrow as a representation of fear.
Fear is a huge part of Batman's mythos. It's stated way back in the first depiction of his origins; he is a character deliberatly attempting to manipulate and weild fear as a weapon. To have a enemy who twists fear to his own ends completely turns the tables on the hero. Batman also has a very interesting matrix of motivations that make him who he is, and stories featuring Scarecrow do an amazing jop of picking those motivations apart. The Joker might be Batman's archnemesis, but Scarecrow might actually be his perfect enemy.
Fear is a huge part of Batman's mythos. It's stated way back in the first depiction of his origins; he is a character deliberatly attempting to manipulate and weild fear as a weapon. To have a enemy who twists fear to his own ends completely turns the tables on the hero. Batman also has a very interesting matrix of motivations that make him who he is, and stories featuring Scarecrow do an amazing jop of picking those motivations apart. The Joker might be Batman's archnemesis, but Scarecrow might actually be his perfect enemy.
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Scarecrow's Comic HistoryThe Scarecrow is a first generation Batman villain, debuting all the way back in 1941. He's actually a bit of a holdover to an entirely different era of comics where monsters and horror elements were far more pervasive. 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.
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. 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. 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. Some of the best Batman stories are rooted in Scarecrow's fear toxin forcing him to literally confront the story elements that haunt him. 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. 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. Not bad for a dude wearing a burlap sack. |
Our Scarecrow StoryWe did quite a bit to define Crane's early years and training. 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. 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". It just fits with his development really well.
(As a note, sometimes in creating someone's backstory we have to do a little research into specific careers. I had no idea that psychiatrists actually have to attend medical school. Who said comics can't be educational?) 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. Virtually every time there is a breakout in Arkham Scarecrow is invariably in the background, because very few characters are so good at undermining the stoic confidence of Batman and challenging him where he is absolutely weakest. His toxin, also, becomes a regular part of Batman's world; Red Hood even uses it to enhance his effectiveness. This is a huge, incredibly relevant part of the Batman mythos. |
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Scarecrow's CostumeThere have been a lot of new takes on Scarecrow's look in recent years. He's traditionally just a tall skinny dude in a tattered costume with a straw hat and a sack over his face, but in some modern stories as people have really picked up on just how effective a bad guy he is we've seen some new unique takes on him. First, obviously, is his appearance in the Nolan movies where Crane is really a working psychiatrist first. He wears a normal suit, and just pulls on his burlap mask because "patients suffering delusional episodes often focus their paranoia on an external tormentor. Usually one conforming to Jungian archetypes." I immediately like this idea for the MOVIE but if we're talking about comics you're really missing a trick if you don't give him his big floppy hat and full costume. This is a inherently fantastic visual medium, it doesn't need a real-world grounding. Also, the Arkham games have introduced a few new elements; giving him hypodermic needles on his fingers to administer his drugs and elements of a gas mask filters in his burlap face mask... some clever ideas, as long as they don't become the WHOLE point of the costume. The biggest and best new idea, however, is the notion that when you see him within his toxin induced fearscapes he can appear far more monsterous. It means that visuals of the Scarecrow that are distorted and monsterous become far more common, and that really works for the character.
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Scarecrow's FutureModern appearances of the character are really starting to refocus his purpose, making him a far more effective villain to the point where he could feature a massive threat to many heroes all by himself. His status as the central villain of the final Arkham game certainly raised his profile, but the fact is that he's always been the one member of the Batman villains that has been the best equipped to pick apart Batman from the inside. Joker threatens Batman's morality, but Scarecrow manages to turn everything about Batman around on itself, often reducing him to the scared little boy that is core to his being.
He is currently a member of the Legion of Doom and will be a major threat to the Justice League, but when that story is completed it's very easy to imagine a larger plan that Crane could inact that will actually establish him as one of the most terrifying villains on the planet, because he is one of the only characters that is actually capable of undermining the core beliefs of the heroic characters and twisting them to do what they would usually find abhorent. Not could he do that, but he WOULD. His entire motivation is to explore the depths of fear, and there are few testing labs more effective than the ranks of the various heroes of the planet. Perhaps a story where he manages to pit groups of heroes, say, the Justice Society and the Doom Patrol, against each other. Anything is possible. |
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