Has anyone here been following this event from DC with all the tie-ins and everything?
Idk what everyone's opinions are, but I'm very interested so far. It's massive in scale. There are references to comics history in almost every page, both surface easy to see ones, and largely hidden and obscure ones. And thats the thing that I've been really drawn to. Trying to identify all of these are crazy difficult, and I'm no expert on the previous 50 years of comics I never read.
But one thing I do know is Batman. And I've read damn near everything I could ever get my hands on.
On the surface, this dark multiverse and the gang of corrupted Justice League Batmen are cool. But there is more going on there as far as the inspiration for these characters.
I just read the first tie-in issue about this dark group of Batmen called Batman: The Red Death. The Red Death is the Flash-esque dark batman, and the story of how that came about is fairly cool in its own right. But the ending caught my eye in a big way. There is one othe dark batman name that we know of in the series, and thats the "Batman Who Laughs", who is Joker-equse version of Bruce. But he says something at the end of The Red Death issue.
"One bad day will kill a world. But one bad week?"
Who else is a huge batman fan? Am I the only one who found this line as a massive callback to Allan Moores' The Killing Joke?
I read an article on CBR today that speculated that the Batman from The Red Death is the version of Batman from Frank Miller's All Star Batman and Robin, The Boy Wonder. Everything from Batmans demeaner and actions to the way he was drawn with the unshaven look, to never seeing Flash depicted in that series, really make a compelling connection.
The thing about this "Dark Multiverese" in Metal is that its a parrallell multiverse where all these worlds are created from the main multiverese but are destined to die and implode. Millers All Star Batman and Robin was shortlived and critically panned for how out of character and super dark everything was. It was created specifically out of continuity. Same thing for Moores' Killing Joke. They were created, told, and ended. What if all of these dark batmen are inspired or taken right from the pages of old comic stories?
The Batman Who Laughs coming from The Killing Joke seems possible, especially with the deliberate callback and given how Killing Joke ends, and how specifically referential to comic history this entire event has been.
This has me excited about the possibilities of which pages the other dark batmen draw their inspiration from.
