By Rob Siebert
Editor, Fanboy Wonder

DC Comics has been in some hot water lately. The public hasn’t been too happy about it’s lack of female creators, nor it’s portrayal of certain female characters. Barnes & Noble pulled a bunch of DC books because of the company’s digital distribution deal with Amazon. Now, the publisher is catching some flack over its portrayal of the mentally ill.

The New York Times recently ran an editorial about a group of psychiatrists who are urging DC to tone down their negative depictions of mentally ill individuals as criminals. The story mentions The Joker, Harley Quinn and Two-Face by name, as well as the “criminally insane” orientation of Arkham Asylum. The story specifically calls out the solicitation for Batman & Robin#26, which reads: “Someone has freed the lunatics, and unless they can be stopped, they’ll turn Paris into a surreal Hell on Earth!”

In essence the article calls for DC Comics to redefine their definition of insane in an attempt to quell negative stereotypes about individuals with real mental health disorders. For instance, instead of “psychotic” The Joker might be called “psychopathic.”

I’ve got mixed feelings here. I understand that mental illness isn’t funny, or something to be taken lightly. While DC certainly isn’t the only entertainment company to use “criminally insane” bad guys, they’re definitely as guilty as anybody else. In addition to the comic books, their characters have now been featured in two widely successful video games about evil insane asylum inmates running around hurting people. That’s not even counting the stereotype’s presence in movies and on television.

But I think you have to give DC a bit of leeway on this one. No matter what version you’re seeing, Arkham Asylum never looks like an actual asylum for the mentally ill. It looks like a prison for wacky supervillains, because that’s what it is. The characters you see there aren’t heavily based in reality. Could there potentially be a homicidal clown or a schizophrenic man with half a face sitting in a an asylum somewhere? Sure. But that’s the exception, not the norm. Despite how thick-headed our society can be sometimes, I’m pretty sure most of us know that.

It’s also worth noting that villains like The Joker and Two-Face aren’t considered evil because they’re crazy. If anything it’s the other way around. Almost every one of these characters is portrayed as someone who at some point made a choice to be evil, just as they heroic counterparts have made the choice to be good. Do they think differently? Absolutely. But they’re condemned for their actions against others, not their thought processes.

But if that’s the case, why call them crazy at all? Why not just call them evil? I chalk it up to the simple matter of people being afraid of what they don’t understand, and most people can’t put themselves inside the mind of a madman. We don’t know what makes them tick, and that’s frightening to us. What’s even more frightening is the thought of what might drive us to lose our own sanity, and potentially be as outlandish as the characters we’re seeing.

Could DC stand to be a bit more sensitive? Sure. But so could just about everybody else in this world. I’m not suggesting we shrug this off, but let’s keep it all in perspective.

Front page image from dc.wikia.com. Image 1 from cognitivepractices.com. Image 2 from gaygamer.net.