The Multiverse Who Laughs

 
 
Dark Nights: Death Metal
The Multiverse Who Laughs

DC Comics

2021

 

 

The Multiverse Who Laughs is another volume of companion material to Dark Nights: Death Metal, and I'm beginning to wish I'd just stop with the original. 

 
The main story was fast-paced, overflowing with ideas, and has a fun sort of energy. These extra stories do sometimes add new ideas, but they're also almost all riffing on something already seen, and their structure as interstitial vignettes makes it difficult to carry much narrative momentum.

 
We get a longer evil Robin-Batmam story, a Lobo vs evil Lobo-Batman story, a Superboy Prime redemption story, and more shorts, including a Watcher-like figure wandering through the conflict on a sightseeing tour, and a Dark Multiverse story where the League of Super Pets get super rabies and kill everyone on their particular Dark Earth.

 
There's one companion volume left, and I'm going to read it, I think, but I'm also reevaluating how much I want to read of these giant crossover events in the future.

 
I really thought one of these volumes was going to expand on what happens to Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman when they travel to the worlds where the good guys are perpetually losing the Infinite Crisis, Final Crisis, and Crisis on Infinite Earths, because that seemed like the part of the story that would most benefit from a longer retelling. Not least because unless you super remember what happened originally, (which I don't,) it's hard to even understand how the Dark Multiverse versions are different, to say nothing of why. So fingers crossed that that's what's next!