Jonathan Crane

Scarecrow

Dr. Jonathan Crane (ジョナサン・クレイン, Jonasan Kurein), also known as "Scarecrow" (スケアクロウ, Sukeakurō), is both a fictional character and antagonist of the DC Batman series created by Jim Lee. He is one of Batman's oldest enemies in Gotham City.

He was a man of true intellect, expert doctor in the psychology of fear at Arkham Asylum, who fell from grace when he became absorbed by his own experiments dwelling into fear and the incredible effects it can have on a person's psychological condition.

After he conducted experiments on inmates, he developed an incredible gas agent that amplifies a person's worst fears and brings it to life in a horrifying fashion in his or her mental state. He guised himself into the terrifying image and become one of Gotham's most feared and nightmarish villains.

With his research the only motivating factor in his life, he feels nothing but delight when he sees his countless victims' minds break into insanity and death from his weaponized fear toxin. He hoped that no hero would be able to withstand its effects and planned to unleash it to break every soul forever.

"I am fear incarnate. I am the terror of Gotham. I am Scarecrow!"

—Scarecrow, to Batman.

Appearance & Biography

Voice actor: Dino Andrade (English), Not Known (Japanese), Not Known (Arabic), Not Known (Basque), Not Known (Brazilian), Not Known (Cantonese), Not Known (Catalan), Not Known (Chinese), Not Known (Croatian), Not Known (Danish), Not Known (Dutch), Not Known (Finnish), Not Known (Filipino), Not Known (French), Not Known (Galician), Not Known (German), Not Known (Greek), Not Known (Hebrew), Not Known (Hong Kong), Not Known (Hungarian), Not Known (Indonesian), Not Known (Italian), Not Known (Korean), Not Known (Mandarin), Not Known (Norwegian), Not Known (Polish), Not Known (Portuguese), Not Known (Romanian), Not Known (Russian), Not Known (Serbian), Not Known (Spanish), Not Known (Swedish), Not Known (Tagalog), Not Known (Thai), Not Known (Valencian), Not Known (Ukrainian), Not Known (Brazilian Portuguese), Not Known (Canadian French), Not Known (European Spanish), Not Known (European Portuguese), Not Known (Latin American Spanish), Not Known (Latin Spanish), Not Known (Spain-Spanish)

Biography

Taunted and bullied in his youth, Jonathan Crane vowed to overcome his fears through the study of psychology and biochemistry. Kicked out of his university for experimenting on human subjects, Jonathan adopted the identity of the Scarecrow and armed himself with a specialized fear-inducing gas that makes a person's deepest fears become frighteningly real. His ongoing criminal reign of terror makes him one of Batman's most psychologically dangerous foes.

Appearance

As Scarecrow

• Hair Color: Brown
• Skin Color: White
• Eye Color: Blue
• Age: Not Known
• Birthday: October 20th, 1973
• Height: 6' 0"
• Weight: 140 lbs. (64 kg)

Attributes

• Master of psychology and chemistry.
• Creator of fear-inducing gas.
• Motivated by an obsessive need to create fear in others.

Relationships

Friends/Allies

• Scarecrow's Thugs
• League of Assassins
  • Rā's al Ghūl
• Bane
• Children of Arkham
• Joker
• Harley Quinn
• Silver Banshee
• Solomon Grundy
• Clayface
• Two-Face
• Mad Hatter

Family

• Dr. Gerald Crane (father, deceased)
• Karen Crane (mother, deceased)

Neutral

• Falcone Crime Family
  • Carmine Falcone
• Amanda Waller
• Simon Stagg
• Killer Croc
• Robin/Arkham Knight/Red Hood
• Deathstroke

Enemies

• Bat Family
  • Batman
  • Alfred Pennyworth
• Teen Titans
  • Robin/Nightwing
• Young Justice
  • Red Robin
• GCPD
  • James Gordon
  • Harvey Bullock
• Justice League
  • Green Arrow
• Rachel Dawes
• Phillip Stryver

Abilities and Powers

Abilities

• Animal Training: He uses crows for committing crimes.
• Medical Science: Jonathan is an expert scientist and created a fear toxin from scratch.
• Genius Level Intellect: Jonathan is a master strategist and manipulator. He has planned out several contingency plans and hideouts for future crimes.
  • Psychiatry: Jonathan was a gifted psychiatric doctor in the study of anxiety disorders, specifically phobias. He is able to unnerve people by making them see everyday things as a product of fear, such as going to a doctor (fear of death), marriage (dying alone), having children (leaving nothing worthwhile behind).
  • Chemistry: Jonathan Crane is a proficient yet brilliant chemist and has used this skill to create his infamous "fear toxins".
    • Toxicology: Jonathan is an expert on poisons as well, specifically ones that affect the mind more than the body.
• Psychology: A brilliant psychologist, Scarecrow has vast knowledge on the psychology of fear, primarily anxiety disorders.
• Equestrianism:
• Toxicology: Jonathan's chemical genius brought him to develop a power fear-inducing aerosol that creates nightmarish hallucinations in the minds of anyone who inhales it. His toxin is usually dispersed in the form of a gas, but was also made into powder, darts, and capsules. One time, a powder version of Scarecrow's fear gas can easily absorb through the skin and, once the adrenaline is ignited whenever the victim is stressed, the chemical turns one's euphoria to fear. He has even managed to create a chemical that removed fear, which would've been used perfectly for treatment of phobias and other anxiety disorders, but instead made the patient reckless and chaotic.
• Pedagogy: Doctor of psychology at Gotham University.
• Hand-to-Hand Combat (Basic): While seemingly able to fight toe-to-toe with Batman he did not do so for long and was taken out even while Batman was under the effects of his fear toxin.
• Intimidation: Jonathan knows just how to use his toxin for maximum effectiveness including understand how he will appear when victims are terrified with his toxin. Jonathan is able to scare people even without the use of his toxin, due to either his reputation, mask and (later) his disfigured face. He takes considerable delight in frightening people.

Weaknesses

• Mental Illness: After being doused with his father's fear toxin, Jonathan is mentally unstable, unable to shake the hallucination of an animated scarecrow.
  • Phobia: Jonathan suffers from a severe case of chiropteraphobia (fear of bats) and a chronic fear of Batman.
  • Obsession: Since childhood, Scarecrow has become motivated by an obsessive need to create fear in others.
• Lack of Fear: Due to regularly being exposed to his Fear Toxin, Jonathan gradually began to lose his ability to feel fear. As a result, he became increasingly reckless with how he went about his fights with Batman, resulting in their final confrontation.
• Fear-Toxin: Scarecrow is led to dangerous risks of also contaminating himself with fear-gas, unless he uses it cautiously. When Jason injected him with it, it broke Scarecrow's mind, leaving him a fearful, blubbering mess.
• Below Strength Average: Jonathan depends on his fear toxins as his primary attack. If his targets somehow manage to fight the toxin and beat it, he is left almost defenseless for a physical attack.

Equipment

• Injection Needles: As his gas has a hit and miss effect as it can be evaded, Scarecrow wears a modified hand-brace that holds four syringes of Fear Toxin on his fingers. The syringes are linked to three stores of Fear Toxin on the brace.
  • After the events at the asylum, Crane designed a new brace, which had the syringes on four claws he could trigger by clenching his fist.
• Scarecrow's Mask: Jonathan carried a mask made out of cloth that he used to scare his victims, what his victims saw was reflected on the mask.
• Trench-coat: Later in life, Scarecrow wears a coat to hold extra vials of his Fear Toxin.
• Leg-brace: After Croc grabbed his leg, the bone in it broke. As a result, Scarecrow now has to walk with a leg-brace.

Weapons

• Scythe: Scarecrow at times wields a scythe which he uses in addition to his "violent dancing".
• Scarecrow's Fear-Toxin: A homemade chemical concoction toxin of his own design, which causes those infected with it to see their worst fears that makes completely real to them; in the worst case scenario, the victim would die. Simon Stagg noted that it could be used to cure depression and turn enemy armies against themselves.
  • Fear Projection: The hallucinations induced by his formula caused paralyzing fear, potentially driving the victim mad or leading to death in concentrated doses.
• Gun: Jonathan does keep a gun on him if he needs to kill someone without wishing to waste his fear toxin.

Transportation

• Militia Helicopter: As the client who hired them, Crane is able to come and go via their transport.

History

Past

Early Life

Unloved by his mother and abandoned by his father, Jonathan Crane lived mostly with his great-grandmother who was a religious zealot who tormented the boy in her care. Punishing Crane for the slightest misdemeanour, she would lock him in a church where he would be attacked by crows.

At school, he was the victim of other high school students both for his awkward, lanky gait and for his uncanny resemblance to the character Ichabod Crane from The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. The bullies, who cruelly dubbed the awkward child "Scarecrow" for his lanky, bookish resemblance. Although frightened by his attackers, Jonathan refused to give in to his tormentors and vowed to turn the tables on his attackers and make them fear him. He soon realized that "Scarecrow" would become the embodiment of fear.

Origin and Revenge

One day, Jonathan secretly watched his great-grandmother and discovered that she laced his clothes with a substance to get the crows to attack. Ostracizing himself from his peers, he became determined to become the master of fear by studying the psychiatry of phobias and the body's biochemical reactions to being afraid. Finding a library, he learned all he could about all types of sciences, particularly chemistry and developed his own version of his great-grandmother's mixture; testing it out on one of the bullies at school.

Delving even further into the workings of the human mind, Jonathan discovered how to manipulate the fear response in his intended victims and took his revenge against the bully ringleader; dressing up as a scarecrow and armed with an array of chemically-tainted smoke bombs, caused the high schooler to crash his car while driving; resulting in him killing his girlfriend and paralyzing himself from the waist down.

Progress on Fear Research

As he grew up, Jonathan's advanced knowledge parlayed him into a Gotham University professorship and career as a psychiatrist to dedicate himself to helping people rid themselves of their deepest fears. He believed that since fear kept people from fulfilling their everyday lives, he would need to minimize those fearful impulses, and by doing so, his patients would achieve peace if they wanted to be the best.

On the start of his research, Jonathan developed a thesis that to fight fear, one needed to substitute a fear that is controllable, and less inevitable, so it could replace the patients' overpowering dreads paralyzing them; for example, he replaced nyctophobia (fear of darkness) with hydrophobophobia (fear of rabies), and later arachnophobia (fear of spiders) with syphilophobia (fear of syphilis).

As an adult, Jonathan became an expert psychologist; specializing in fear, and acquired knowledge of how certain combinations of chemicals could affect the human psyche. He performed successful experiments on phobic substitution, and was a frequent visitor at Blackgate Penitentiary and later became the head physician of Arkham Asylum where he gave out advertisements on curing phobias and other psychological issues related to the subject.

The Birth of Scarecrow

Jonathan later discovered how fear was induced through biochemistry; the result of his discovery was an incredible panicogenic toxin that creates nightmarish hallucinatory manifestations of the patient's worst fears. His experiments were a success until his gift of entering a person's mind turned into a chronic obsession.

Jonathan's specialization in fear, unfortunately, went too far and his position was revoked due to the usage of unorthodox and dangerous teaching methods that resulted in endangerment and injury of his students and patients. Suffering a psychopathic breakdown after being kicked out, his fragile mind snapped, and renounced his previous identity, while adopting and donned his alter ego guise known as Scarecrow, using his toxin and knowledge to fulfill and exact his revenge against the university's faculty board members responsible for his suspension; killing them through their fears.

See also

• Scarecrow's Streetgang
• Fear Toxin

External links

• Scarecrow Wikipedia
• Scarecrow DC Database
• Scarecrow Batman Wiki
• Scarecrow Arkham Wiki

Notes & Trivia

• Scarecrow first appeared in World's Finest Comics #3 (1941).
• Scarecrow sometimes appears with a trained magpie named "Craw" and other times with a trained crow named "Nightmare".
• Due to his excessive use of psychological chemicals, Crane has become unable to feel fear and claims that Batman is the only one capable of scaring him.
• Crane is capable of mutating into an over fourteen-foot-tall monster known as "the Scarebeast" due to some genetic manipulation done to him secretly under the instruction of the Penguin.
• Although Scarecrow doesn't have real mental powers, he uses a gas to scare and reveal secrets of his enemies minds.