Dark Nights: Death Metal

 
Dark Nights Death Metal
DC Comics

2022

 

 

Sometimes it's nice to take a break with some good old fashioned comic book madness, and Dark Nights: Death Metal is just about the most unhinged superhero story I've ever seen.

 
Death Metal is one of those big annual crossover events, and a rough sequel to the Dark Nights: Metal event from a few years ago. In that outing, when the Batman Who Laughs (an evil Batman who's also the Joker) invaded with a small Justice League of other evil Batmen (evil Batman-Superman, evil Batman-Aquaman, etc) from the Dark Multiverse.

 
This time around, Batman Who Laughs has completely conquered the planet with an army of hundreds of evil Batmen, counterparts to seemingly every other DC hero and villain. Plus like, a Batman who uploaded his mind into the robot dinosaur from the Batcave, an evil sentient Batmobile, and an evil giant mecha Gotham City robot. This is the ridiculousness I crave! 

 
What about the good guys? Batman is undead and using a Black Lantern ring to raise an army of zombie heroes, Superman is turning to stone because evil Darkseid-Batman exposed him to Anti-Life, and Wonder Woman has turned her Lasso of Truth into the ripcord and 'chain' for a badass Chainsaw of Truth. It's nice to see her getting to have some fun!

 
To prevent the whole multiverse from being destroyed, there's a convoluted plan that involves revisiting the Crisis on Infinite Earths, Infinite Crisis, and Final Crisis, and funneling some of their 'crisis energy' to reboot another new multiverse, again. Whatever. Of course things go wrong, until eventually a skyscraper-tall metal-dipped goddess Wonder Woman faces off against an equally huge an powerful Batman Who Laughs whose brain has been transplanted into the body of a Dr Manhattan Batman, with the fate of everything at stake.

 
Wonder Woman seemingly loses, but actually wins, everything is reset, and DC announces its new approach to continuity, which is to stop pretending that each 'crisis' ushers in an actually new comic universe with new backstory, and go ahead and acknowledge that the history of the DC Comics universe is just the history of what's been printed in the comics. And yes a lot of it's contradictory, and collectively makes no sense, but while you can pretend or ignore parts you don't like, you can't actually go back and prevent them from having already been published. I don't expect this one to last any longer than any of their other, previous new approaches to continuity, but for what it's worth, I think this more relaxed attitude is the right way to go.

 
This volume contains the complete story, but there are companion volumes that add detail to various parts, so look forward to me reading those soon!