Dark Nights: Death Metal #3: Effigy of the Forgotten

Despite being heavy with action, Dark Knights: Death Metal #3 manages to slow things down from a blast beat to a decent mid-tempo. @$$es are kicked, but lots of plans are laid out, too, and the path to the finale begins to become clear. It’s a much-needed breath of fresh air after two full issues of pedal-to-the-metal breakneck pacing, and shows that writer Scott Snyder is fully aware of what he’s doing: get the fun, fan service-y stuff out of the way first (but don’t worry, there’s still plenty more of that to be had) to hook readers in, then give the story a bit more teeth. (That’s not counting last week’s unfortunate and unnecessary Legends of the Dark Knights one-off.)

Going into Death Metal, Snyder’s official tagline for the miniseries was, “Everything counts.” He was referring to DC’s many, many continuity clean-ups and retcons and reboots; so far, that isn’t empty hyperbole. Final Crisis gets a clever callback this issue, and with Wonder Woman planning an assault on the individual relays and mechanisms involved with hearken echoes of the original Crisis on Infinite Earths. It’s also proving that this year’s Flash Forward was more critical than perhaps anyone realized, and of course, there’s the big, blue, naked elephant in the room, Doomsday Clock. The subsuming of, ahem, Batmanhattan by the Batman Who Laughs last issue was the most balls-out, direct injection of Watchmen into unencumbered DC continuity yet. (Haters gonna hate, but they’re just going to have to deal.) I eagerly await the Zero Hour shout-out…

The biggest action beat is the rescue of Superman from Apokolips, which has been taken over by a Batman/Darkseid hybrid and his cadre of flying ParaRobins. The trap Clark is trapped in is actually pretty ingenious; Batman’s McGuffin-infused solution is clever, to say the least. There’s a brief moment were Batman defies his Apokoliptian counterpart’s Omega Beam gun that’s… well, it wants to be clever, but could be perceived as sloppy writing disguising itself as clever on Snyder’s part. Otherwise, the sequence doesn’t miss a beat, hitting all the intended notes exactly right.

The other half of the issue brings forth the less-than-impressive debut of the Robin King, whom fandom has had (understandably) high hopes for but, like another recent much-hyped DC character, feels more like a punchline to a joke nobody was really asking for. He isn’t bad, per se, he just fails to make the intended impression. He does work as a warped-mirror counterpoint to the Batman Who Laughs, who, for whatever reason, has been visually reduced to a sort of all-black squiggle-scratchy hybrid of Doom Patrol foe Mr. Nobody, Batman, and Carnage’s mouth. Of all the developments thus far in Death Metal, BWL’s metamorphosis impresses least – both visually and narratively. Worse, none of this change has made him any more interesting, or added any necessary depth to him. The idea is that the BWL will soon have the power to supplant Perpetua (strangely absent for the most part so far, despite being so crucial to this story’s lead-up in Justice League) as the multiverse’s cruel overlord is fairly rote, but I’ll admit it does manage to give the heroes some impressively insurmountable foes to topple.

An important subplot starts to bear fruit this issue, too. Lobo has been tearing through space gathering mysterious artifacts for an unknown benefactor. This issue, we find out what he’s been pillaging, and for whom. This is crucial to the final act – and, not for nothing, Lobo absolutely steals the issue when he invades the 5th Dimension. There’s no way readers won’t laugh out loud at what occurs.

Visually, Greg Capullo, Jonathan Glapion, and FCO Plascencia continue to blow the doors off the joint. Just like in the previous two installments, there’s a lot here that requires some intense imagination on the artists’ parts, and Capullo sells it through and through. It’s disappointing that the rocket from the end of last issue is dispatched between that issue and this, especially given what a big deal it was presented as – but, honestly, that’s a minor complaint. Death Metal acts as a full-throated love letter to the entirety of DC’s storied – and convoluted – history. Sometimes, it’s great to have comics that are fun. Other times, ones that are smart. Death Metal is both.