Oh thank criminey, it’s over! With this fourth and final book, the nightmarishly tedious event Dark Nights: Metal is complete. And speaking of nightmares, here are the origin stories of The Nightmare Batmen. Any of them good? Nope. They add anything to the overall story? Nope. Total waste of time? Yup! And that’s Dark Nights: Metal!
I feel like Scott Snyder came up with some arbitrary dark versions of the Justice League with a Batman slant and didn’t think beyond their appearances. Because these flimsy one-dimensional “characters” are barely more than their visuals and their unimaginative and irrelevant origins are reflective of their overall creative shallowness.
The origins largely go: following some contrived traumatic experience, the Batman of a world decides to take a powerful tchotchke - a power ring (Green Lantern), Ares’ helm (Wonder Woman), the Atlantean trident (Aquaman) - and then they become an evil hybrid of Batman and that character. It’s formulaic and gets really repetitive really soon.
I liked Ethan Van Sciver’s art on Dawnbreaker (the evil Green Lantern Batman) though I hated the lame and cringey new oath rhyme and everything else about that issue. Tony S. Daniel’s art on Devastator (the evil Doomsday Batman) was similarly impressive, and the idea of the AI Alfred turning Bruce into the evil Cyborg Batman, Murder Machine, was interesting. The Red Death (the evil Flash Batman) has a cool name and design.
Everything else though? Just horrible. It’s one badly written, boring comic after another. I’ve already forgotten most of the characters, let alone their origins! The Batman Who Laughs’ origin was the only one I was looking forward to and James Tynion IV flubs it, serving up an utterly underwhelming load of nothing. He may as well have not bothered - in fact that would have been better and more in keeping with the Joker not having a concrete origin story.
Grant Morrison unexpectedly shows up at the end to co-write the Dark Knights Rising: The Wild Hunt issue though, despite a decent Detective Chimp side-story, it was another crap and pointless comic that added nothing to the event.
The Nightmare Batmen, like the rest of Dark Nights: Metal, is rubbish - avoid the whole stinking mess!
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