Tales from the DC Dark Multiverse Review (Scott Snyder, Kyle Higgins)

Tales from the DC Dark Multiverse is an anthology of really bad bumper-sized one-shots presenting What If…?-style retellings of famous, and also really bad, storylines. Two bad tastes that taste bad together. I’m guessing it’s “dark” because it’s spinning out of one of those Dark Nights things. Ugh…

The one-shots are framed by a Watcher-type character (because neither Marvel or DC can come up with anything original and will forever ape the other) called Tempus Fuginaut (a pun on the Latin phrase “tempus fugit” or “time flies”, which doesn’t really make sense given the multiverse setting).

First up is Batman: Knightfall, which sets the tone of what to expect, which is basically: duhhh, what if a “good” character went “bad”? So in this version of Knightfall, Batman dies and Jean-Paul Valley becomes Batman for years but he’s evil and that’s baaaad. Fascinating…

Jeff Loveness and Brad Walker’s take on The Death of Superman was the only story here that didn’t completely bore me. It’s as nihilistic and arbitrarily (read: tediously) “dark” as the others, but it presents an intriguing scenario, namely what if someone with the powers of Superman decided to take a hardline stance on crime, injustice, etc.

So Lois Lane becomes superpowered and makes the difficult choices none of the heroes ever made, ie. killing the likes of Lex Luthor and Joker, in an attempt to do, as she sees, more than Superman ever could to make the world a better place. It’s not an original concept but it’s executed well by Loveness. Walker’s art is excellent too, adapted to the early ‘90s style, and I liked that he mimics the full page presentation of the original story’s finale, at least to start with.

The rest of the book is pure, unrelenting garbage. Tim Seeley has never written a good comic and he continues that trend with his take on Blackest Night which was incoherent drivel about Sinestro being a White Lantern on a road trip with Lobo for some reason and there were some Old Gods or New Gods or whatever.

James Tynion IV and Aaron Lopresti do a version of Infinite Crisis where Blue Beetle - yes - goes “bad”, with “dark” consequences, while in Kyle Higgins, Mat Groom and Tom Raney’s take on Teen Titans: The Judas Contract, Terra goes “bad”, with “dark” consequences. Horrible, both.

Also included are single issues from each of the original arcs of the above which give you a flavour of how these newer versions differ, and hopefully dissuade readers from seeking out these terrible books, if they’ve never read them before.

Even though The Death of Superman entry was halfway readable, it in no way makes Tales from the DC Dark Multiverse worth reading. An horrendous - in all the bad ways - anthology of dull, trite nonsense; definitely avoid this one.