Cardboard Prison / Comic Books

Cardboard Prison in Comic Books.

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• Batman: Arkham Asylum is one of the all-time classics, although this was lampshaded a few times in the comics (e.g., as the effect of a curse). Not only is Arkham Asylum worthless, it seems to make its inmates worse instead of better. (What did you expect? It's ARKHAM! Cue insane laughter.)
  • Mr. Freeze once murdered a psychiatrist who was questioning him (there were no guards to stop him, or even a surveillance camera in the room), somehow hacked the air conditioner systems with a pen, stepped outside and walked to a nearby room housing his suit. Bear in mind that if it wasn't for that suit, he wouldn't be able to escape at all. It's comforting that even after a general reboot, some things won't ever change.
  • One of the funniest lampshade hangings on this was in The Sandman, when a villain locked in Arkham learns that someone else intends to escape, and on a whim, with no planning at all, escapes as well.
  • In issue number two of The Joker's own comic book, a pair of bumbling Arkham security guards are fired because The Joker has escaped on their watch five times. This series was published in the mid-seventies. You know it's bad when people have lampshaded Arkham's poor security for forty-odd years.
    • This is even lampshaded in Joker, since no-one understands why the Joker is being released.
  • Arkham Asylum: Living Hell has Commissioner Gordon outraged and chewing out Dr. Carver about the fact a villain called Doodlebug was released, who then added insult to injury by having written in graffiti "Gone to Arkham. Back after lunch" on a wall in an in-universe lampshade of Arkham's security. It turns out that the "Dr. Carver" who issued Doodlebug's release was an imposter known as "Jane Doe" who'd killed the real Carver before the story, adding to Gordon's point, as does The Reveal of Doodlebug being a serial killer who uses his victim's blood in his paint.
  • One comic mentioned that Batman is a bit rougher with his more dangerous enemies than is strictly necessary to subdue them for precisely this reason. If he simply puts the Joker in Arkham, he escapes. If he puts the Joker in Arkham with a couple of broken bones he will take the time to convalesce before escaping. Usually.
  • Gotham City also has Blackgate Penitentiary for its non-insane criminals. It's just as bad as Arkham.
  • After trying to traffic in nuclear weapons during Birds of Prey, the Joker got sent to Slabside Penitentiary, which is nicknamed "the Slab". Supposedly, no villain has ever broken out of it. In Joker's Last Laugh, the Joker is informed that he has terminal cancer. It takes him all of about five minutes to think up a plan to not only break himself out, but break out most of the other villains with him, and use the prison's own anti-riot countermeasures to "Jokerize" them all. Maybe The DCU's prisons aren't cardboard prisons. Maybe the Joker is just that good. The two aren't mutually exclusive. However, after it, Status Quo Is God got invoked and subsequent stories would see the Joker once again being housed in Arkham.
  • In the case of the inmate named Amygdala, Arkham's treatment actually made him worse. A violent sociopath, after drugs and therapy failed, they tried experimental surgery, and removed the part of his brain he is now named after. It made him even more violent and nearly mindless, easily manipulated by Gotham's smarter criminals.
  • This is lampshaded in Batman: Hush by Dick.
    Dick: But you caught the bad guy. The Joker's back in Arkham for, like, the seventy-ninth time — where maybe we can hold onto him for more than an hour and a half this time...
  • In "Letter to Batman", from Legends of the Dark Knight, Batman drags an unconscious Joker by the collar to Arkham, and tells the guards, "Here he is. Again. Make sure he stays a while this time." The next page of the comic shows Alfred telling Bruce that the Joker just escaped from Arkham.
  • Also lampshaded in Whatever Happened to The Caped Crusader? by Alfred (context: in Alfred's story, all Batman's villains are actors employed by him to let Master Bruce live out his completely ridiculous fantasy without getting himself killed. Arkham doesn't hold its prisoners because it's not meant to.)
    Alfred: They took Eddie Nash to the madhouse. The real one, not Arkham.
  • This is discussed in one Batman/Superman team-up book. Batman meets his older Earth 2 counterpart, and finds out that Earth 2 Gotham is now crime-free thanks to the Supreme Court closing down Arkham and authorizing the use of cryogenic stasis to permanently inter supervillains. A brief glimpse of the facility shows The Joker and even Sinestro quietly locked up and frozen. That's not enough for the new Batman in the Earth 2 series, who shoots the Joker without waking him.
  • In the first episode of The Batman, Joker breaks into Arkham, quipping that he was feeling "a bit screwloose". He then proceeds to release everyone.
  • Even the much Lighter and Softer campy 60's version of Batman (1966) showed how poor Gotham corrections could be at times. At the beginning of one episode, King Tut was being examined by a doctor at the psychiatric ward where he was being held, who fell asleep while the villain was talking to him. When Tut noticed, he was simply able to walk away.
  • A recurring incident across multiple universes involves Poison Ivy. She's usually in a glass cell, ostensibly so she doesn't have access to growths like mold. Except she's constantly given potted plants. While one may presume it's for therapy reasons, she uses them to escape all the time.
  • Ironically, one time the doctors at Arkham seemed almost competent was in the Batman: The Animated Series episode "Dreams in Darkness"; they were actually able to hold Batman longer than most actual villains could, but this prevented the hero from tracking down the true culprit, the Scarecrow, who was engineering his sinister plot without even leaving Arkham.
  • When Superman decided it was time to start running the world himself in Injustice: Gods Among Us, one of the first things he did was shut down Arkham and relocate all the prisoners. He even pointed out in an interview how silly it was that Arkham is still open when it can't hold prisoners or reform them.
  • In Harleen, Harvey Dent knows of Arkham's cardboard status and tries to bully Doctor Harleen Quinzel into abandoning her research, reasoning that it would mean more criminals sent to Arkham who would otherwise have gone to Blackgate, which he thinks is more secure.
  • Batman: Arkham Asylum (whose own security faults are detailed in the Video Games folder) has a Played for Laughs case of awareness, as one of the signs on the way to the asylum is "Hitchhikers May Be Escaped Patients".
  • The one time the staff at Arkham was actually able to cure a patient, it made him worse as well. Said patient was Cluemaster, who had a variation of the Riddler's gimmick, namely leaving clues instead of riddles at crime scenes. His stint in Arkham cured him of his compulsion to leave clues... but not of his compulsion to commit crimes.
• Superman:
  • In All-Star Superman, Lex Luthor tells Quintus that if he wanted to leave prison, he would have hours ago. In the comic book, he demonstrates that he can leave at any time, and does so by getting Clark Kent out of a riot without stopping their interview.
  • Justified in the case of the Silver Age Mad Scientist version of Luthor, who was fond of MacGyvering a Phlebotinum-powered escape device out of absolutely anything. For instance, in one story he waited for the warden to go on vacation, knowing the temp who replaced him would trust him more, then sabotaged the prison newspaper's printing press. He offered to fix it for the temp guy, and instead turned it into an armored tank which he used to smash his way out of prison.
  • In The Death of Luthor, Lex boasts he will escape from prison within 48 hours, and he does so using mouth-wash, aspirin tablets and radio parts to create an invisibility serum.
  • Writer Elliot S! Maggin once had Luthor muse that it had reached the point where the only two items his guards would allow him to have were a pen and a pad of paper. Luthor had, in fact, long since figured out a way to turn the ink, metal, plastic, and wood pulp into a high explosive to blast his way out, but he would never do so, because then the next time Superman threw him in prison, the prison wouldn't let him have a pen and paper any more.
  • He once built a radio to the future and was able to engineer an escape by calling future supervillains.
  • Another had him use his radio — one radio — to build a combination holographic projection device and a ray that would hopefully give humans superpowers. Guess which mild-mannered reporter he tested it on? And when they checked, Luthor had reassembled the radio back to specs to boot.
  • In The Girl with the X-Ray Mind, Supergirl villain Lesla-Lar, called "Kandor's most dangerous outlaw", escapes her supposedly maximum-security cell by short-circuiting the energy bars using some unrevealed method.
  • The Super-Revenge of Lex Luthor: Superman throws Lex in a distant planet prison where escape attempts are harshly punished, and although Luthor spends several months in prison, he still manages to escape by looting parts of a derelict spaceship. It helps nobody was apparently watching him as he built his gadgets and took off. When Superman hears the news, he seriously wonders if Luthor can even be held.
    Prison Guard: "Interplanetary space prison calling Superman. Luthor has escaped!"
    Superman: "Great Krypton! Can no prison hold him?"
• Intermittently, The DCU attempts a solution to both the in-character problem of this trope and the metafictional problem of keeping losing villains effective, by having villains perform missions as part of the US government top-secret Task Force X, a.k.a. Suicide Squad. This program offers early releases for imprisoned supervillains if they participate in, and survive, extremely dangerous secret missions that are subject to official denial. Thus, the villains temporarily become Anti-Hero protagonists.
• The Flash:
  • His Rogues aren't imprisonable, because one of them can travel to an alternate dimension and back via mirror. Every time the Flash arrests any of his friends, Mirror Master goes and fetches them right back out again. The warden explains that they've tried to have the mirrors removed but prisoner-rights liberals won't have it.
  • There was also the time Abra Kadabra got out because he was allowed to work in the kitchen and somehow formed the equipment there into a hypno-ray.
  • And then there's Dr. Alchemy, who uses prison for reading time and when he finishes a book, he turns the walls into oxygen and walks out... only to walk back in a month later with a new stack of books.
• "The Vault" was the Marvel Universe's most secure prison, but villains still escape as needed for various comic book plots. Its cardboard nature was actually commented on by writer Kurt Busiek as the reason the writers had it destroyed. After its destruction and the resulting mass escape (the final shredding of the cardboard, if you will), supercriminals were incarcerated in lesser prisons nationwide, with predictable results.
• The Vault was later replaced by the Raft. It was first introduced in the first arc of New Avengers. Said arc is about a massive jail break. A running subplot was Mayor J. Jonah Jameson shutting the Raft down, noting how much of a failure it was. In Superior Spider-Man (2013), its last duty was to execute Alistair Smythe, the Spider-Slayer, only for him to execute a prison break. In short order, Ock!Spidey kills Smythe, blackmails Jolly Jonah for giving him that order, and takes control of it, turning it into Spider-Island II.
• This was lampshaded in the Young Avengers/Runaways crossover during Civil War. The Runaways end up fighting Flag-Smasher, only for Karolina to bemusedly point out that the kids had just beaten him and sent him off to prison only a few months prior.
• "Prison 42", nicknamed "Fantasy Island" by its inmates, debuted in Civil War. It's located in another dimension, accessible only by certain teleporter systems, secure and heavily coded. Many superheroes unwilling to register with the government were locked up there, and were indeed its first inmates. It was supposed to be the final answer to this trope. Naturally, the anti-registration heroes on the outside engineered a mass jailbreak. Likewise it serves to be a sort of deconstruction of what steps you would have to take to actually make a prison immune to the kind of crazy shit filling the Marvel Universe. And as predicted by some annoyed fans, it later got taken over by the residents of the Negative Zone. Because it just would've made too much sense to place the prison in a pocket dimension that wasn't already occupied by various fanatically xenophobic aliens. Ironically, this ended up being what ultimately subverted this trope for 42. With Blastaar's invasion and takeover of the prison, the remaining prisoners (who at this point were mostly villains) were trapped in the facility, the portal back to Earth permanently shut down due to a warning to Reed Richards from the Guardians of the Galaxy about Blastaar's invasion force, and any attempts to escape the facility itself would cause Blastaar or one of his minions to kill them on sight.
• Any prison was cardboard to the Serpent Society, at least when Sidewinder was in charge; one of the benefits of being a member was that he could rescue an imprisoned member via his ability to teleport himself and others. Being semi-retired at the time, it was the only condition for his personal involvement.
• In X of Swords, the swordbearers of Arakko offer freedom to Solem if he agrees to be among the champions. Solem immediately breaks his chains and jumps out of the pit. Overlaps Luxury Prison Suite, because when someone is thrown is the pit, admirers are allowed to drop food, books...
• Lucky Luke:
  • The prisons of the Lucky Luke comic, especially the penitentiary. The wardens are a bunch of incompetent morons, their dog is even stupider than they are, and the prisoners, especially the Daltons, escape constantly, sometimes right after being brought back to jail. They even managed to accidentally free Joe Dalton once. When he didn't even want to get out. This is subjected to frequent Lampshade Hanging, to the point Luke gets sick of it in later albums.
  • The Rantanplan spin-off even has an episode where a couple of Mad Scientists succeeded in kidnapping Averell Dalton from his cell without much problem. These guards don't just suck at preventing their prisoners from getting out, they also fail to keep people from coming in to take their prisoners forcefully. Even Joe is outraged by such a degree of ineffectiveness.
  • The same episode has Jack Dalton coming back to his cell and leaving again three times while one of the wardens is still trying to close the hole from their last escape. The warden just lets him take what he needs and go away, without even trying to stop him.
• The first time in DC Comics that the Crime Syndicate of Earth-3 showed up, they were beaten and imprisoned in a bubble created by Green Lantern, and THEN thrown into a limbo between dimensions/earths. They kept somehow breaking out and causing trouble. Although at first not that often and, at least the first time, only after outside interference. Johnny Quick, Power Ring, and Superwoman managed to escape from the bubble after an interdimensional traveler passed by and somehow weakened it (no real details given). That was about 14 years after their first appearance (real time; in comic time, it could have been anything from a week and a half later). A couple of years later, Ultraman got out, but nothing at all was said about how. Owlman wasn't seen again until the Crisis, and could well have been stuck in the bubble the whole time until the entire Syndicate returned home in time to die in the destruction of Earth-3.
• French comic book Le Mercenaire contains a literal example of a cardboard cell. The hero is imprisoned inside a flying castle, which is in fact a giant hot-air balloon. Hence, everything is constructed of light and hollow material, including the large jar used as a cell, which is thick cardboard. The prisoner was relieved of any item that could pierce it beforehand (including his belt buckle), but can cut through once he receives exterior help (in the form of a dagger).
• One Golden Age Captain Marvel comic has Dr. Sivana, sitting in prison grumbling that there's no point in escaping because Captain Marvel will only catch him again. He then thinks up a plan to destroy Captain Marvel and, his mood brightened, easily escapes by simply performing a mathematical calculation in his head that "opens a portal to the fifth dimension" and then walks out through a wall like a ghost. He later reminds his son that he's escaped jail 743 times.
• In Justice League of America v1 #5 Monty Moran "the Getaway Mastermind" breaks himself and 5 other supervillains out using a shrinking ray he somehow built that makes them half an inch tall. Then they use a balloon with a container underneath to get out.
• The Beagle Boys (Disney) use prisons as a temporary home, and are known to jailbreak at any convenient moment. A recurring gag is that they receive a cake filled with tools; once, the cake was the tool, as it was so dense and heavy that it could be used to smash the pavement, and the frosting used to dig.
• The Punisher: Occasionally, the Punisher will get himself thrown in jail, but it's usually part of a Batman Gambit to kill a crime lord who's already behind bars in the same prison (for example: the final level of the video game).

  • One time Daredevil, Spider-Man, and Wolverine all teamed up in an attempt to stop the Punisher once and for all, but at the end of the battle the Punisher points out that if they put him in jail he'll just kill every inmate in the prison before escaping again. The three heroes agree and let him go.

  • The Punisher: War Zone mini-series ends with a solution to this. The Avengers capture the Punisher and place him in an undersea prison designed by Tony Stark. It would seem this too failed, since the Punisher inexplicably escaped and is now part of the Thunderbolts.
  • The Cell has Frank escape his solitary confinement at Ryker's thanks to tricking the guard into his cell and threatening to break his arm before knocking him out, then causing a riot by framing said guard for the murder of a black inmate (said guard being the lover of an Aryan Brotherhood member, which he could hardly use as his alibi). Frank's escape from Ryker's itself is not shown, but the entire point of his being there was to kill a family of mafiosi in their Luxury Prison Suite.
• The absence of these is actually a plot point in Watchmen. Because all the supervillains the Minutemen thwarted tended to stay thwarted, they eventually ran out of situations that required a team of heroes to deal with. This was one of the factors that led to the Minutemen breaking up.
  • This factor is later used as a point of contention in Doomsday Clock during an argument between Batman and Ozymandias, with Ozymandias accusing Batman, and by extension the other DC heroes, of being so focused on putting super-villains into "prisons with revolving doors" that they haven't taken any steps to address the world's real problems.
• In a comic based on Batman Beyond featured on Scans Daily, the Royal Flush Gang are out committing crimes when they are supposed to be in prison. Terry doesn't know how they could have escaped, noting "This place is locked up tighter than a drum." Despite the outcome, Terry's comment still seems like an odd thing to say when Bruce Wayne has told him all about his past, with one person posting, "Uhh, Terry? You got in, didn't ya?"
• Any prison is this for Diabolik and his accomplice Eva Kant. The first time he had been arrested (alluded in his first story and shown in a flashback years later) it had been because his perfect masks weren't known yet, so the police didn't realize he was wearing one and he walked out of a maximum security prison with a stolen guard uniform after taking the mask off, but later imprisonments, which happened after his masks and real face were known, all ended with them breaking out rather easily in spite of always increasing measures to keep Eva in for life and him just long enough for his execution, with their first times being particularly ridiculous due to what they did to break each other out:
  • The first on-page arrest of Diabolik has the title character kept in jail long enough to be tried and sentenced to death, with Eva (who at the time had just become his lover and accomplice, thus their relationship wasn't publicly known yet) present at every session of the trial. Diabolik, expecting to die, winked in Morse code to tell Eva where she could find his loot and tools in public, so she could make herself a new life away from her Stalker with a Crush... Except Eva bribed the guards of the death cell to bring her Diabolik just for the night before his execution, kidnapped her stalker, and when the guards brought Diabolik to her he had the tools to make a mask with his face and brainwash the stalker, so that Diabolik could take the identity of the stalker (who just happened to be above suspicions, what with being a high-ranking functionary in the ministry of justice) and marry her, with the evidence being destroyed when the body of the fake Diabolik was cremated as per Diabolik's own last will (implying Eva somehow told him to do it, given it's the only reason he did it). The only reason it didn't work was that Ginko realized that 'Diabolik' had been drugged just as the executioner released the guillotine's blade, leading to the discovery and the bribed guards confessing what happened...
  • When Eva was first arrested, she was put in a women-only jail in a swamp, with a train as the only way in or out, and brought out only for the sessions of her trial. Diabolik first kidnapped a top model to convince the world he had ditched her, thus getting the jury to pity her enough to sentence her to life in jail while he prepared her break-out. Then, knowing she had been recently inoculated, he caused a cholera outbreak in the jail. As the jail was being evacuated, with Eva and the healthy patients in the last cars because the forward ones shook less, he derailed the train and freed Eva, with Ginko, who had been distracted by a fake sighting of Diabolik somewhere else, arriving right after they left.
• Thanks to the super strength granted to them by the magic potion, it is extremely rare for any prison to keep Asterix and Obelix in or out any longer than they feel like it.
• Exploited in Ric Hochet with "Le Bourreau" because he's an invaluable asset to the Eastern Bloc. Everytime he is jailed, foreign powers will request his release in exchange for France's captured secret agents.
• Iznogoud once wanted to hire the services of a master thief. He did not have to go looking far, as the thief was already in the Caliph's prison! ...some of the time. A nearby guard informed him that the thief is so good he comes and goes as he pleases, and nothing the jailers have done has managed to hinder him in the slightest. He basically treated his jail cell as a place where he could stay and eat for free and where people can contact him if they need to.
• Marvel's G.I. Joe comic had Cobra Commander employ an Army of Lawyers to ensure that if any of his mooks were captured, they would be Off on a Technicality before they did any real time behind bars. The Joes, in an attempt to avert this, once imprisoned Storm-Shadow in a windowless Alcatraz cell, but he still got out.
• Sam Wilson actually quipped about a pool for how long S.H.I.E.L.D. can actually hold a villain (this case being Crossbones and he said two weeks). Given that he and Maria Hill were in the midst of a bit of a spat at the time, it's not quite sure how serious he was about it given that Sam's neither the most serious nor most joking of heroes.
• Royals: At the beginning, Maximus the Mad is imprisoned, and later drugged into insensibility to prevent him doing anything so he won't escape. Three issues later, it turns out he'd escaped long before then, what with being Crazy-Prepared and all. After learning this, Medusa dryly notes there's no point trying to lock him up anywhere else, since he'll just escape again.
• Ultimate Marvel
  • Ultimate Wolverine: Quicksilver kept Black Box and Jimmy in a high-tech prison. Yes, that's right: a technopath mutant in a prison filled of high-tech stuff that bends to his will. He could have left them in the mall and save some trouble.
  • Ultimate X Men: Although he was arrested and incarcerated multiple times, Toad always manages to escape and rejoin Magneto somehow. Likewise, despite supposedly being under constant surveillance, Magneto was somehow able to escape off-screen.
• The Incredible Hulk: During the early issues of Jeph Loeb's Hulk, Bruce Banner was imprisoned in a tiny underground cell, which was designed to gas him if he touched the windows. After a few issues, he winds up touching the glass (banging for help when a nearby fight causes an earthquake), and as the gas is activated asks whoever might be listening if they really thought he couldn't just hold his breath, as he starts to turn green.
• Wonder Woman:
  • Volume 1: Usually averted as escapes from Reformation Island are quite rare. However Diana does have to turn over many of the criminals she captures to the US authorities rather than the Amazons, and Dr. Psycho rather easily escapes prison twice in in issue 18 alone.
  • Volume 2: When Circe decides she wants to invite just about every living female villain to hunt superheroes in New York she simply teleports them to her, including the many who were in prison at the time.
• Justice Society of America: As Metron informs the JSA, trying to imprison a being of pure entropy like Extant is pointless because any prison he's in becomes a cardboard prison. There's really only one way to stop him coming back...