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thesis on the etiology of the fear reflex in higher mammals, including homo sapiens. His dissertation committee called the paper “brilliant,” “groundbreaking,” “as important in its way as anything Freud ever wrote.” Jonathan Crane, now Doctor Jonathan Crane, was hired by Gotham University, the same university that had given him his degree, and ensconced in the psychology department where many predicted for him a long and distinguished career. Many, but not all. He did have a habit of annoying his colleagues, mostly by showing open contempt for achievements, ambitions and, occasionally, even their physical appearances. And he generally described his students as “dumber than pond scum.” But he was a professor, and weren’t professors supposed to be eccentric? For a while, Dr. Crane’s bad manners merely enhanced his mystique—for he did have a mystique, woven from his intelligence, youth and, yes, personal beauty. He was as handsome as he was smart, and he knew it—and let everyone else know he knew it.
    Then, the rumors began. Only Dr. Crane and five of his grad students knew they were more than rumors, these hushed tales of illicit experiments. Some said it was just a retelling of what had happened to Richard Alport and Timothy Leary at Harvard in the sixties: certain favored youngsters fed illegal drugs by a charismatic teacher. They stopped being rumors and became facts when one of Dr. Crane’s students ran through the a plate-glass window of a department store on Christmas Eve and tried to dismember the Santa Claus mannequin who was ho, ho, hoing to a bunch of mannequin elves. At the emergency room, she told the admitting nurse that she was only “trying to face” her fears. Further questioning revealed her connection to Dr. Crane; she had taken a shot of what Dr. Crane called a “party potion” an hour before her collision with Santa.
    That was the beginning of the end of Dr. Crane’s academic career. His situation got worse, and quickly. One of the other professors, a man Dr. Crane had treated with particular scorn, had been quietly investigating Crane’s vaunted doctoral thesis and discovered that the research was either plagiarized or faked. Crane was called before a meeting of the university staff and asked for an explanation. He had one: he said that he knew his conclusions were valid because his insight was so much deeper than that of his inquisitors and had chosen not to waste his valuable time doing the dreary, boring chores that would constitute “proof.” Most of the faculty wanted to fire him immediately and as publicly as possible. They were overruled by the school’s president, Dr. Titus V. Blaney, and some of them guessed why. Dr. Blaney, whose own doctorate was in psychology, had been especially voluble in praising young Crane, and had personally vouched for the dissertation. “I’d stake my reputation on this young wizard’s achievement,” he had told the Gotham Times. In making this statement, he had, in fact, staked his reputation on Crane, who now appeared to be more than an egotistical braggart; he was a fraudulent egotistical braggart. Not good for the university, not good for the fundraising effort and the repute of the president. A compromise was reached: Crane was quietly dismissed at the end of the semester. The public relations office distributed a press release stating that Dr. Crane was reluctantly leaving his post to pursue other opportunities, including research in the private sector.
    Members of the academic community knew the real story, of course. All the men and women who had been mocked by Jonathan Crane fired up their computers and spread the word, gleefully. Apparently, the doctors at Arkham Asylum didn’t get the bad news about Dr. Crane. They hired him as chief of research and gave him license to experiment on the inmates. There, at Arkham, he had discovered that putting on a mask furthered those experiments, and gradually he developed an alter ego