Dark Nights: Metal - 8 Reasons To Be Excited About The Batman Crossover
The stuff of knightmares.
If you thought that scene from Batman Begins where the Scarecrow gets a whiff of his own fear toxin was terrifying, you ain't seen nothing yet.
The fan-favourite creative team of Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo have been working on a crossover storyline that promises to present the Dark Knight at his very darkest, not to mention reshape the world of DC Comics.
Dark Nights: Metal will see the DC Universe collide with the Dark Multiverse, a collection of twisted parallel universes that each play host to an evil version of the Caped Crusader, plucked straight from the horror genre.
The Batman-centric storyline is set to pit the Justice League's finest against one of their greatest challenges so far - a small army of malevolent Batmen... as if one of them wouldn't have been bad enough.
This event will continue the narrative of DC's Rebirth saga and play out across six core issues, with dozens of tie-ins to add a little something extra to the main story.
Yeah, we know, these line-wide events can get messy, but the good news is those main issues stand alone, and if the two prelude comics DC has already delivered are anything to go off, Metal could be the comic event of the year.
8. The Batman Dream Team Is Behind It
Few creative teams can claim to have nailed Batman quite to the same extent as Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo during their critically acclaimed run.
DC's New 52 initiative didn't quite pan out for too many reasons to list, but at least it brought us 50 issues of the writer-artist duo's stellar Batman series.
From the Court of Owls to Death of the Family, Snyder and Capullo have delivered some of the boldest and most refreshing Bat arcs of the modern era, and Dark Nights: Metal could be their most important project to date.
The team began plotting Metal way back in 2011, during the Court of Owls plotline, and have dropped teasers for it into several of the arcs which followed.
Here's what Snyder had to say about the storyline on DC's blog...
“I’ve been planning Metal for as long as I’ve been writing Batman, but this is bigger than Batman. Greg and I started dropping clues during Court of Owls, we continued through our Joker stories and we placed our biggest hints in the run that culminated with Batman #50. And now we’re back to tell a story that breaks everything apart. This will be the definitive project of our careers. Metal takes us in an entirely new direction. Greg and I will dig beneath the surface of all the stories we’ve told to find a place of terror and twisted nightmares.”
We're sure he meant to say knightmares at the end there, but even so, few creators know Batman like Snyder and Capullo, and this sounds like their most ambitious Bat project to date.