Continuing my game of catch-up with last year’s “Dark Nights” event from DC, this week I read the Dark Nights Metal: Deluxe Edition. (In comic shops today and bookstores June 12.) The series was every bit as explosive and world-encompassing (and sometimes goofy) as I’d been told, but it’s a pretty deep wade for anyone who isn’t a regular DC reader. Greg Capullo’s art, though, makes it worth the work.
We jump into the story as the League is freeing themselves from a gladiator match, which accomplishes two things: gives us the words “Fulcum Abominus” (which roughly translates to “come together as one,” which we’ll hear again later) and lets us see the League go all “Combiner Wars” and merge into one big, awesome, war being.
“Wait, why do I have to be the foot?”
“Simple, Barry, so you can kick his—“
(It’s worth saying that this event, despite getting all kinds of bleak sometimes, never takes itself too seriously.)
(Some spoilers for the event below. Again, this recap is more for people who aren’t regular DC readers, since loyal readers will have a way better idea of what’s going on than I do.)
Once the League is free they return to Earth to find a giant mountain has destroyed part of Gotham, and find out about Batman’s obsessive investigation of the strange metals that have been giving people powers over the centuries.
We get a look at the journal of Carter Hall (Hawkman) from time to time: he was exploring the origins of MacGuffinite (sorry, Nth Metal) which gave him his powers and (possibly) eternal life. He discovered that the Multiverse (made up of matter and anti-matter) floats on top of a giant universe of Dark Matter, which is where Nth Metal comes from, and what Nth Metal connects us to.
There’s also a dragon, in some forms called Barbatos. And a vehicle/doorway that can bring him out of the Dark Matter Universe. It’s a little tangled, but if I understand right, Bruce Wayne is the vehicle that becomes the doorway that lets the dragon into our world.
Batman tricks Lady Blackhawk into getting a piece of Nth Metal to study and (somehow?) unlocks the location of the journal of Carter Hall and gets a visitation from an entity who confirms the nightmare is real. The entity in question? Dream of the Endless. I KNOW. As little as I understand what’s going in this event I was still yelling “OH HI I KNOW YOU SO NICE OF YOU TO DROP BY.”
The scattered members of the League (a lot of familiar faces HI CONSTANTINE) come together to hunt down Batman, because with the stealing and running and generally sounding like a crazy person he’s clearly gone off the rails.
From his research and reading he knows that if he’s infected with five metals from the Dark Matter Universe, he’ll become that vessel/doorway for Barbatos, switch places with Barbatos, and be dragged into the Dark Matter Universe. He’s already been infected with four (a lot of the stories in Dark Days: Road to Metal were actually points when he was infected, like drinking Electrum from the fountain in the Court of Owls’ labyrinth) and he’s desperate to keep the Judas Tribe from infecting him with the last one.
There’s a lot about awakening the Strigydae and Baby Darkseid and the Omega Sanction and the Tomb of Prince Khufu JUST KIDDING It’s really the tomb of Hat Set AHAHAHAHAHAH….but I got a little lost in the exposition. In short, Batman was obsessed with finding the answer and walked into a trap, which opened up the doorway to the Dark Matter universe, which gave us this insanely cool double page spread of Dark Matter Batman archetypes looking all sci-fi gothic. (Seriously, it’s my favorite panel of the whole book.)
Things go quickly downhill from there. The world goes dark, and the League fights for their lives. At one point through some deliberate but slightly vague magic, Superman’s taken to one of my favorite settings: an End of the World Bar. It’s a pretty neat way to deliver more exposition, as everyone explains exactly how bad things have gotten.
In the end someone (not saying who) heads somewhere based on a very cryptic interpretation of a message they got in a dream, and it goes badly. Really badly.
After that we follow the adventures of each team as they try to stop our world from sinking into the Dark Multiverse. It’s entertaining but very wordy, and every issue has at least one paragraph of superpower technobabble, sort of mini-deus-ex-machinas to handily explain how something works.
“Some exist at what we believe are Phantom Frequencies. Spots where cosmic energy conducted through the Earth’s metal core cancels itself out, creates a kind of ‘static’ that disrupts space-time.”
or
“You will take the Anti-Monitor’s astral brain and you will fire it through the core of the Multiverse, at the Rock of Eternity, and destroy the Dark Multiverse once and for all.”
or
“It’s like the Dark Energy is creating a link between what little Nth Metal is left and reactive metals here on earth.”
“Fate’s right, the egg…it’s vibrating…but in patterns…I think…they’re coordinates?”
and
“If we open a portal with the Phantom Zone Projector while we super-charge the antenna with the speed force, Steel’s connection to Nth Metal might create an energy link to the Dark Multiverse.”
In the comic-book world this kind of thing happens all the time, a made-up bit of logic to hang the plot on. But the sixth or seventh time someone says something like “It’s what we call a Phased Presence, built on zombie star-gas” I would think “Oh. Because of course it is.”
But the creators are very aware of how much they’re making deep pulls and tenuous connections: when Starro the Conqueror is mwah-ha-haaing his way through more exposition, he says “I psyched you out, sucker, and regrew myself from a piece of my own exploded tentaclaw!* The editor’s yellow word box at the bottom of the panel reads “*See issue….um, Scott, Greg…when did this happen?”
We get to see more of Daniel the Sandman, and it’s always nice to catch up with him. He provides more exposition in the form of mythology. (I feel like 50% of this book is pure exposition, but if you dress it up in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman I’m not going to mind.)
Every so often we get images of the Dark Matter Universe archetypes (nightmare versions of the Bat Family and the League) and it makes me impatient to read some of the tertiary books in the Dark Nights event, because I need a whole lot more of all of that.
I won’t give away the ending, partly because you should have the fun of seeing all the pieces come together yourself, and partly because there’s a lot I don’t understand, so recapping it is a little tough. (Hawkman and Hawkgirl’s history is very important, I found out a ton more in this newsarama article.) (The Astral Brain of the Anti-Monitor is also very important, and if you’d like to tell me why, please shout out in the comments.) It’s definitely changed the direction of the DC Universe to come (are we going to see a New 53?) But I think regular readers will catch a lot that I missed.
Also, so far I’ve only read this and the Dark Days collection. There was a lot going on in the other DC books at the time, I’m guessing I’ll be able to fill in a lot of the pieces after I read them.
I also think the story would have played out much better if I’d read the original issues when they came out, a month at a time. Taken in all at once, there are repeated patterns that probably wouldn’t have been as obtrusive if I had a little space between the issues: the mini-deus-ex-machinas above, but also the “I’ve lost hope and it’s worthless but wait the whole key to survival is to find hope no matter what and now I succeed” theme. That’s actually a pretty good theme to have, but it did seem to happen a lot.
For the first few issues it was pretty tough going, I felt like I was wading through too much exposition and technobabble. But I found that if I kept reading, I got more used to the style, and it went along a lot faster, and I liked it more (it could also be that as we got closer to the end things moved faster, and we already had all the exposition we needed.)
The other thing that kept things moving is Greg Capullo’s art. There’s so many fantastic images to linger on: Morpheus talking to Batman, Wonder Woman facing off against Black Adam, the Grim Reaper Batman, or any of the post-apocalyptic Dark Matter Universe landscapes. The preview images from this book were what convinced me to give it a look, and I was not disappointed.
(The epilogue art was by Mikel Janin and Alvaro Martinez. They do excellent work, but I would have loved to have the party scene drawn by Capullo too.)
People have complained that the DC Universe movies have gotten too dark and depressing. I thought this book showed a great alternative to that: it’s an extremely dark, depressing universe they’re exploring, but it doesn’t feel cynical. There’s a classic, superhero, good-will-prevail-if-your-heart-is-pure tone to even the darkest moments. It’s a neat trick to pull off.
The very very too-brief summary of the series could be: it’s a look at the nightmares of heroes, how goodness is balanced out by evil and sometimes evil wins, but if you can find a speck of hope in something you’ve got a chance.
Also that when evil is drawn by Greg Capulo it’s going to be very, very pretty.