Slightly Misplaced Comic Book Characters Case File #513: Arkham Knight

My original plan, following a write-up on Hyperion, was to do a column here on Nighthawk.  However, I’ve been trying to catch up on Detective Comics on DC Universe Infinite when the most interesting villain popped up, one I had seen before but knew nothing about.

Anyway, now I do, so I’m covering the Arkham Knight this time.

The Arkham Knight first appeared in Detective Comics #1000 in May of 2019.  Created by writer Peter J Tomasi and artist Doug Mahnke, the Arkham Knight was a teenage girl by the name of Astrid Arkham, and yes, she’s a member of that Arkham family.    Her father is the asylum head Dr. Jeremiah Arkham, and she grew up in the asylum named for her family, interacting routinely with the more infamous inmates despite her father’s best efforts.  Yes, the Joker read her fairy tales about knights and the like, and when she was big enough, Astrid got herself a suit of armor and a lot of likeminded followers, many from the Asylum itself, and set off to take out her one true enemy:  Batman.

Now, if you think that a girl who grew up in Arkham might find the criminal inmates to be her only friends and Batman as a force for evil, well, Arkhams aren’t known for their own mental health either.  I mean, sure, she probably got that “Arkham Knight” name because DC maybe wanted to tie her into the video game, but there’s a reason for Astrid’s hatred of Batman.  She started off with her forces attacking Batman after setting off a “sun bomb” to light up the night sky and take away Batman’s natural element.  Her subordinates, dubbed the Knights of the Sun, were dressed in armor built to resist Batman’s standard weapons while their crossbow bolts were designed to go through his.  Injured and needing to recover, Bruce sends Damien off to look for clues, but not only is Damien captured, but Astrid takes it upon herself to try and recruit Robin to her side.

She clearly has never met Damien.

It doesn’t quite work, but she does let him go, and when Bruce and Damien return to the Asylum, they find her father who explains what happened.  Apparently, when Jeremiah first arrived at the Asylum, he met and fell in love with the Asylum’s medical doctor, the eventual Ingrid Arkham.  Ingrid showed nothing but compassion and care for all of the inmates, and she was so good at showing such compassion that even the worst of the Arkham inmates actually treated her well.  As such, when a riot involving new arrivals hit the Asylum while Ingrid was nine months pregnant, Jeremiah panicked when Ingrid started to go into labor in the middle of the riot.

That’s when the remarkable happened:  a number of the longtime inmates moved to protect Ingrid and helped her deliver the baby girl.  Joker and Harley did most of the work, Ivy provided the medications, and Solomon Grundy and Clayface set themselves up as living barriers.  Meanwhile, Batman was cleaning up the riot.  The worst happened when a batarang went through Clayface’s body and hit Ingrid in a cartoid artery, causing Ingrid to bleed out.  Now, Batman was not responsible for this hit.  He wasn’t even in the room at the time.  Instead, Grundy found the guy responsible and crushed his head before the inmates then passed the infant Astrid to a stunned Jeremiah and quietly returned to their cells.

Years later, Astrid would review the video footage and decide Batman killed her mother.  He didn’t, but the person who threw the batarang wasn’t on the tape, just the results of the throw.  And somehow, I doubt Batman’s enemies that know better would tell her the truth.

Anyway, her first storyline ended when she tried to set off an even better sunbomb that nearly caused permanent blindness to most of the city, a job that got help from the likes of Anton Arcane (he’s in Arkham?) and Dr. Phosphorous.  That said, Astrid was among the inmates killed during the Infinite Frontier special issue that was revived with Lazarus Resign to be part of the “Task Force Z,” a special branch of the Suicide Squad that were basically zombies.  Will Astrid bring her twisted idea of chivalry back to Gotham?

Eh, maybe.