Review: Dark Nights: Death Metal: The Deluxe Edition hardcover/paperback (DC Comics)

Though arguably the DC Comics heroes have committed greater sins previously, there’s an undercurrent in Dark Nights: Death Metal that it’s predicated on a series of errors. That in a pitched battle with the god Perpetua, Wonder Woman hesitated, cowed by the implications of what victory might unleash. That despite numerous in-story multiversal reboots, villains still battle against heroes (even if such conflict is inherent in the storytelling itself). That given the choice, over a tumultuous “Year of the Villain,” humanity sided with Lex Luthor’s “Doom” over the heroes. That, with obvious meta implications, the DC Universe has even gone so far at times as to fight against its own growth and development.

Such are the charges leveled by the “Hands,” Death Metal’s uber-creators of the DC Universe (greater than both the Monitors and the Monitors' own progenitors). And though anhiliation is avoided due to Wonder Woman taking the high road and heroes, villains, and everyday people working together, Superman later notes that all they’ve earned is “a fragile chance … to show we can do better.” In that way, Death Metal feels timely, and prescient — that a “crisis” occurred (a word in which Death Metal puts a lot of stock), that humanity came together to defeat it (I know — more or less), and that we’ve earned a chance, maybe a last chance, to do better next time.

Death Metal is a perfectly satisfactory collaboration between comics stalwarts Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo, and one hopes it won’t be their last such for DC Comics. Snyder, particularly, shows a talent for writing Wonder Woman here without getting caught up in all the peccadillos of her history and origins. It is, if we’re comparing, lesser than both their Dark Nights: Metal and Batman: Last Knight on Earth, as if the two used up all their bombast on those projects and didn’t have anything left for this. Death Metal is assuredly a good story, Snyder offers a conception of the whole of the DC Universe to rival Grant Morrison’s metaphysics, and if it were not for Dark Nights: Metal, then Death Metal might be received with the original Metal’s fanfare. But it was, so it isn’t (or something).

[Review contains spoilers]

This is not to say, by any stretch, that Death Metal lacks for gusto, especially at its beginning. Wonder Woman yields an invisible chainsaw with aplomb; alt-Batmen come in such shapes as dinosaurs, living Batmobiles, and sentient cities; the Justice Society makes a heroic entrance; and zany fan favorites populate the corners, like Swamp Thing, Ambush Bug, a zombie Jonah Hex, Lobo, the Holly Granger Hawk, and on and on. Dr. Manhattan figures heavily into the plot, a notion that’s still pretty wild to think of. There’s the requisite giant robot in the form of a Composite Superman-Batman-Wonder Woman.

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And Snyder, as always, peppers the story with unexpected humor. I’m not sure my ideal Batman would respond to Wonder Woman’s complicated plan by asking if she’s having a stroke, but the bit gets a chuckle. So too does Lex Luthor, at random, pining over a mutated Superman’s flowing locks. Snyder’s Jarro is weird and wonderful, as is the unlikely, convincing friendship he builds between Swamp Thing, Harley Quinn, and a rapidly decaying Hex. (What Capullo does well on the more off the wall characters more than makes up for the button-nose sameness of many of the background players.)

None of that, however, necessarily equals Snyder bringing the Sandman Daniel back on the page in the original Metal, nor Metal’s rather more effective war sequence, nor Metal’s everyone-hold-hands-and-channel-the-power ending — Death Metal equally affirms that we’re all in this together, but Metal showed it better. Metal’s end, too, teased both events in the heroes' individual titles and also a new start for the Justice League; Death Metal’s “I remember it all” scope is ostensibly bigger, but we’re given absolutely no sense of what that means day-to-day beyond a nice phrase. I’m sure Snyder doesn’t want to step on Joshua Williamson’s Infinite Frontier toes, but there’s a lot of hubbub in Death Metal with no payoff.

Within, too, at times it seems Snyder has more going on than he can necessarily keep up with. Inasmuch as I enjoyed Jonah Hex’s role, he’s dispatched by a villain in the fourth chapter and never seen nor hardly mentioned again. To its credit Death Metal is not much reliant on its tie-ins except in between the third and fourth chapters (“Trinity Crisis” is the only tie-in I’d consider essential), but for those reading the tie-ins, there’s a lot of plot threads that never tie back to the main book — Robin King scheming against the Batman Who Laughs and the rebirth of the New God Metron, to name a few. Superboy-Prime is shown dealing a winning blow to the Batman Who Laughs in the “Secret Origin” tie-in, an event that’s ignored if not outright contradicted in the main book.

As mentioned, however, in Death Metal Snyder does succeed in offering a holistic vision of the DC Universe bar none, in which bad big-C “crisis” energies and good anti-crisis energies are at constant war. The crisis energies, as event Crises do, separate us from our past, start things over (that is, reboot), and generally favor the singular moment over the whole tapestry. It’s a metaphor that of course doesn’t account for all the exterior non-story reasons the DC Comics company may have instituted reboots¹, but does in-story collect the major DC events into a nicely cohesive package. I’m impressed with Snyder’s vision for the history of the DCU, on par with Geoff Johns and Grant Morrison before him.

I was also quite taken by the ethical conflict at the book’s end and Wonder Woman’s unsnarling of it. She is faced with the Batman Who Laugh’s true statement that the Hands are coming to destroy the DCU and that his absorption of the crisis power is the only way to fight them; it is not wholly different than conflicts we’ve seen before, even to an extent within the “Metal” saga, in which enemies becomes teammates against a greater evil. But uniquely, I think, even though it means utter destruction, Diana refuses to side with evil because it’s evil. It’s a moral absolute, one that might not always be the best choice, but I applauded Snyder for the road less taken.

2.5

Rating

It’s a tricky thing for a writer to claim the DC Universe will never be the same; this “fragile chance” that Superman acknowledges at the end of Dark Nights: Death Metal must assuredly come to naught, as there’s no chance the supervillains won’t rise up again against the superheroes — it is anathema to the genre. Not to mention that Scott Snyder is departing the DC Universe; not to mention the lack of any evidence in this story of what “it all matters” really means. But that Infinite Frontier follows, and especially Justice League Incarnate, gives me hope (misguided as it may be) that things might actually be different this time, continuity-wise — that the “multiverses revealed” ending of Death Metal might actually make its way to the day-to-day more than the “multiverses revealed” ending of Final Crisis before it, for instance, did. To be continued, as always.

[Includes original and variant covers, sketches]

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1. Verily for all the thumbing one‘s nose at the New 52, it’s equally possible there wouldn't still be a DC Comics without it.  ↩