“Let me tell you a secret. All it takes is one bad day….”
After hearing all the hype about DC’s Dark Nights: Metal saga, I was a little disappointed after reading Dark Days: Road to Metal and the Dark Nights Deluxe Edition: they’re fine, but they’re a little goofy, a little wordy, and they just didn’t capture my attention. I couldn’t understand what the fuss had been about.
And now I feel silly. Apparently Dark Knights Rising was actually the book I was supposed to read.
It’s an anthology collection, and the whole book is a big, glorious weird series of “What If” questions:
What if Batman decided he’d use the Speed Force better than the Flash?
What if Batman couldn’t let go of the the violent death of Alfred? What if he decided Cyborg’s technology was the answer?
What if Batman was given a Green Lantern ring, and it turned out to be a really, really bad idea.
What if in an alternate, gender-swapped universe, Batwoman took on Aquawoman and between the two of them they drowned the whole planet?
What if Batman decided it was worth the risk to use the God of War’s helmet? What if Wonder Woman didn’t agree with him?
What if Superman went off the rails, and Batman finally had to use a doomsday plan to take him out?
Why does Batman (usually) balk at killing the Joker? Sometimes it’s because of his code against killing. But what if it’s because he’s afraid of how the Joker would get him back for it.
And then there’s Bobo the Chimp. What if he was the key to everything? (Well, sort of.)
In each issue we visit an alternate, Dark Multiverse world. Each one was created when Batman thought of a worst case scenario, or had a nightmare, or a really bad day where he imagined how things could go very wrong, very quickly. There’s probably a Dark Multiverse of everyone’s bad decisions out there, but we’re only interested in Batman’s, because they’re the only ones who can come over into our Multiverse.
The alternate universe Batmen all find out the same thing: because their world is based on Batman’s nightmares and was never meant to be, it can’t survive. They’re rotten at the core and so they’ll flicker out much faster that the rest of the Multiverse. And then the Batman Who Laughs, scion of Barbatos, tells them that, sure, their world is doomed, but there’s a whole bright, lucky Multiverse of people who could maybe die instead.
The Man Who Laughs is like the Harlequin of the story (the traditional one from Italian Comedia, not Harley Quinn. Though she’s here too.) He appears at just the right moment, explains the situation, dangles temptation in front of the Dark Multiverse Batman (who always grabs it) and laughs and laughs and laughs.
The storytelling in this collection is really sophisticated that way. We’re not getting a ton of deux-ex-machina-like technobabble, we’re not getting overdone speeches about the meaning of life, about a Message or a Higher Purpose. We’re getting tragedy and rage and misery, and someone saying “well if you’re going to be miserable you might as well make sure everybody else is miserable too, right?” It’s extremely well done, in every issue.
Some of the stories are straightforward, and some have a great twist near the end. They all give us a version of Batman we never wanted to face: sometimes he tried to do the right thing and failed, sometimes he gave up on the difference between right and wrong, and sometimes he was just unlucky and lost everything.
As for the art, in the usual anthology collections I read I feel like there’s always one issue with art I don’t like. But not this collection. I’m having a really really hard time picking my favorite.
Carmine Di Giandomenico’s work in “The Red Death” is angular and angry and just distorted enough to put me in mind of Aeon Flux, but not so distorted to be uncomfortable; it’s beautifully chaotic.
In “Heavy Metal,” Riccardo Federici’s art (with Rain Beredo’s colors) is a more painted style, intensely detailed without being too detailed; no awkward lines on the lips or an outline on every tooth. I loved the shading on the faces, and the texture of the backgrounds. The color is almost pastels in some places, which contrasts nicely with the grey of the flashbacks or the reds of the city when everything’s on fire.
Ethan Van Sciver and Jason Wright’s art in Dawnbreaker “Fear of the Dark” is almost a retro style, and feels a little like it could’ve been drawn in the late 80s or early 90s, if you had a really good artist doing it, and they weren’t afraid to get all kinds of disturbing.
“The Drowned” was the story I’d been the most curious about: I kept seeing images of what looked like a female, pirate Batman, and I wanted to find out what that was all about. I wasn’t disappointed. The art is gorgeous. And while Bryce (it’s a gender-swapped Batman, not a dark-universe Batwoman, if that makes sense) is beautiful in flashbacks, in present day she’s given up her humanity in order to fight in a drowned Earth. Philip Tan and Tyler Kirkham (with colors by Dean White and Arif Prianto) don’t draw her like a steampunk fighter wench: she’s a monster who controls monsters and turns people into monsters. She is definitely not pretty, but she is all kinds of cool. I’d seriously like to cosplay her.
While the expressions and figures in “Batman: War Child” were amazing (and a lot of excellent texture on surfaces) it was the lighting that really blew me away. There’s so many panels with people being lit by computer screens, or emergency warning lights, or explosions, or white-hot metal, or lightning. It’s high-contrast and isn’t afraid to almost blow out the page in blinding light, and it’s really stunning.
Riley Rossmo and Ivan Plascencia’s work in “The Batman Who Laughs” has a wonderful, animated look to it (I’d love to see this one as a film.) The expressions are great, I love all the faces and poses, where you can tell exactly what someone’s thinking without them saying a word. But I especially love how this story starts out as a typical, Batman-against-the-Joker-and-then-the-Bat-Family-comes-to-help story, and then goes right over a cliff. This one gets intensely crazy, and the art went crazy right with it.
The art in “Riders on the Razor” (by artists Howard Porter, Jorge Jimenez and Doug Mahnke with Jaime Mendoza) is just gorgeous, and I loved the color palette of the whole issue. And the scenes of Raven and the Flash trying to stop the catastrophe are amazing, there’s a page of Flash in the foreground with Raven on the left and Cyborg on the right…it’s one of those “I’d love to have this hanging on my wall” pages. Also, I swear they must have studied chimpanzees for months to make Bobo look so good.
I don’t want to bag too much on the other Dark Nights: Metal collections, I think in the end they just weren’t for me. But I don’t think any of the issues in Dark Days or the main Dark Nights book could compare to even one of the stories in Dark Knights Rising. And a whole book of these stories is just flat-out awesome.
“So yeah. One bad day will kill a world. But one bad week?
That could kill a multiverse.”
Dark Nights Metal: Dark Knights Rising is available in comic stores today and bookstores June 26, 2018.
EDIT – *siiiigh* Yes, I originally wrote it as “Dark Nights Rising” at least three times, it’s “Dark Knights Rising.” But it’s still “Dark Nights: Metal.” I got that one right anyway.