DC is gearing up for one of their most ambitious Batman stories ever in Dark Nights: metal. This mini-series reunites Batman's New 52 creative team for a rollicking new adventure that introduces a realm known as "The Dark Multiverse" and pits Batman and the Justice League against an army of evil Batmen. It's a book that promises to reshape the DCU while also telling a very crazy, over-the-top story about good and evil clashing on a massive scale.
If you're not up to date on DC's current comic book universe, fear not. Here are the six things you should no before diving into Dark Nights: Metal #1 this week.
One of the big selling points with Dark Nights: Metal is that it's reuniting the full creative team behind DC's New 52 Batman comic, including writer Scott Snyder, artist Greg Capullo, inker Jonathan Glapion and colorist FCO Plascencia. Snyder himself has remained involved with the Batman franchise during the transition from the New 52 to the current DC Rebirth status quo thanks to All-Star Batman, but this will be the first time he and Capullo have worked together since Batman #50 in early 2016.
Naturally, Metal will build on the foundation Snyder and Capullo laid in their five-year Batman run and explore some loose ends in terms of several supernatural minerals introduced during the course of that run. The series will also build on some plot threads in Snyder's All-Star Batman, particularly the reintroduction of the Blackhawks. But Metal is as much as Justice League story as it is a Batman-centric tale, and the goal is to make the series accessible even to readers who have never read Snyder and Capullo's past work.
Snyder told us, "You always try to take into consideration that there's going to be a good number of people who have never read the book before or read any DC comic before. When you get to Metal, the idea is that if you've read nothing else, you'll still be okay. It's not like you'll have to have read our run on Batman - me and Greg - or you'll have to have read [the prologue issues] The Forge and The Casting."
It should also be pointed out that Metal will strike a very different tone compared to Snyder and Capullo's past work. The series is titled "Metal" not just because it deals with the mystery of Thanagarian Nth Metal and other powerful minerals in the DCU, but because the book is basically a superhero-themed heavy metal album, one that strives to be as bombastic and epic as possible. Even the cover to Dark Nights: Metal #1, with the members of the Justice League arranged to form the "sign of the horns," flaunts this fact,
At its core, Metal is a story about an ancient mystery dating back to the earliest days of humanity in the DCU. It doesn't just involve Batman and the Justice League battling villains in the present-day, but also the millennia-long efforts by Hawkman and Hawkgirl to understand the true nature of Nth Metal and the source of the power it contains. One of the goals with Metal is to reintroduce Hawkman as a major player in the DCU and build a bridge between his mythology and Batman's. In fact, the series will explore the connections between many bird-themed characters in the DCU, linking Hawkman, the various Robins and the Court of Owls in a vast conspiracy involving a feud between prehistoric Bat and Bird tribes.
Metal also centers around several powerful, supernaturally charged minerals in DC lore such as Dionesium (the substance that resurrected Batman and Joker after their climactic battle in Snyder and Capullo's Batman run), Electrum (the substance the Court of owls uses to create its undead Talon assassins) and Nth Metal itself. As we've learned in the prologue issues Dark Days: The Forge #1 and Dark Days: the Casting #1, these minerals are all variations of the same core metal, a substance that funnels dark power into the DC Universe from another realm. Moreover, this metal is actually the source of many metahuman powers. The word "metahuman" is even derived from "metal."
Basically, Metal is a story about Batman and the Justice League picking up the clues left behind by Hawkman and searching for the mysterious realm from which this metal hails. And as we've seen from DC's spoilery reveal of the first issue's cliffhanger, this mystery is one that extends to all corners of the DCU.
That realm Batman is searching for is called the Dark Multiverse. Many DC fans are no doubt familiar with the basic multiverse concept. In current DC continuity, there are 52 alternate universes, each of which contains a different Earth with its own lineup of heroes and villains (the main DCU being referred to as "Earth-0" or "New Earth"). The Dark Multiverse is something that exists outside of those 52 universes. It's basically the dark shadow of the DC multiverse, and a place where a terrible evil has spread from world to world.
As the Justice League try to make contact with the Dark Multiverse, they'll come into conflict with a group of seven villains known as the Dark Knights. Each of these villains is a twisted mash-up of Batman and another Justice League member or DC villain. That lineup includes The Murder Machine (Cyborg), The Red Death (Flash), The Devastator (Doomsday), The Merciless (Ares), The Drowned (Aquaman), The Dawnbreaker (Green Lantern) and the Batman Who Laughs (Joker). The Dark Nights look to be the main antagonists early on in this series, those it's probably safe to assume Snyder and Capullo have some major twists and shake-ups planned along the way.
It remains to be seen if Dark Nights: Metal will alter the makeup of the DC multiverse in the same way stories like Crisis on Infinite Earths and Infinite Crisis have in the past. We did learn in Dark Days: the Forge #1 that Batman has been hiding the Anti-Monitor's tower in the depths of the Fortress of Solitude. At this point, anything is possible.
Continues
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire