"AIDS with two legs"; the Mad Hatter, whose obsession with Alice in Wonderland has pedophilic overtones and is a child molester; Killer Croc was originally drawn as suffering deformities similar to those of Joseph Merrick, the "Elephant Man", although his final incarnation is that of a humanoid crocodile; both Amadeus Arkham and Charles Cavendish are seen cross dressing. The Joker's mental condition is described as "super sanity"; he re-invents himself every day to suit his circumstances. He may be a harmless prankster one moment and a homicidal maniac the next. Joker is portrayed with a somewhat homosexual element, described as being indirectly "in love" with Batman. In the annotated script, Morrison initially wanted the Joker to "wear make-up and black lingerie in parody of Madonna". DC's editors, however, removed this, believing that readers might assume that Jack Nicholson's portrayal of the character in the Batman film would be portrayed as a transvestite. Batman in this graphic novel is described as '80s interpretation of the character's violent, driven, and borderline psychopathic when he is driven close to the breaking point as he ventures the entire asylum in the story. Despite the horror-oriented themes, Morrison clarified that the symbolic concept is only for this book alone, and that their future Batman projects would not have the same form of tone. Artwork Dave McKean drew the principal art and the cover art of the Arkham Asylum graphic novel with Morrison supplying their own thumbnail layouts to the artist as guide of how the author wanted the panels in each page to function coherently. In illustrating the story, McKean chose to blend paintings, drawings, photography, and mixed-media collage to come up with striking page designs, and dense symbols. The artist used symbolism, imagery, and surrealism, and many scenes involve the use of symbols to denote a particular psychological device. For example, a Greek inscription can be seen scratched on the doorway of Maxie Zeus's electroshock chamber, which translates into "Discover thyself"; much of the symbolism was later explained and expanded in the annotated script. Gaspar Saladino utilized distinctive lettering to give characters their own fonts and respective speech bubbles: Batman's is black with white lettering, Maxie gets blue with a Greek font, while Joker's speech is without a bubble at all; the red, ink-spattered script used for his dialogue is as ungovernable as the character himself. The practice of giving characters customized lettering treatments