The Dark Multiverse (Spoilers)
mphil
Posts: 448
Hadn't seen much discussion about the upcoming Scott Snyder series, and I thought it might be worthy of its own thread.
For those of you aren't aware, Snyder is writing a series called Dark Nights: Metal, that involves... well we don't know yet. Leading up to it were/are Dark Days: The Forge and Dark Days: The Casting. The Forge came out last month, and the Casting came out last week.
For those of you aren't aware, Snyder is writing a series called Dark Nights: Metal, that involves... well we don't know yet. Leading up to it were/are Dark Days: The Forge and Dark Days: The Casting. The Forge came out last month, and the Casting came out last week.
Comments
I found this to be a fairly confusing issue. I'm not so familiar with Hawkman, so I didn't understand the connection between him and Batman. I suppose the point was to say that Batman is continuing on an investigation that Carter Hall had began decades earlier. Is that right?
Anyways, we have 2 stories going on at once that seem to be connected, but we don't know how. On the one hand we have Hal Jordan investigating the Batcave with Duke, and on the other we have Batman at the Fortress of Solitude where he has a secret room that even Superman is not allowed to enter. So naturally he asks Mister Miracle to open it for him, which reveals... I don't know what it was inside actually.
I read this a couple of weeks ago so my memory is a little fuzzy. Feel free to correct any mistakes I made.
Is the intent for this to be a spoiler thread? I've got thoughts that might lead to spoilery discussion.
Also, are others also reading that the little roman columns in the batcave are intended to be holographic projectors? One one page, they appear to be supporting / containing artifacts. One the next they seem to be displaying images of people. Holographic would make sense, but given the other areas that bats has been able to put so much technology in things that fit in his utility belt, the column bases as projector housings seem a but clunky. My first read through, I was really confused as to why/how he had the artifacts displayed... seemed like some really important people would be missing them.
The Hawkman interludes leave me believing Nth metal is going to be impacted in some fashion. I feel like thats consistent with something about Fate's helmet and with Aquaman's pentadent (I cannot bring myself to call it a trident) and maybe the other artifacts that were featured in Aquaman and the Others. It feels like Hawkman has gotten hosed enough.
As far as display vs projector, the image of the Outsiders on the page opposite of Fate's Helmet, Aquaman's pentadent and Wonder Woman's bracers seems to be using the same columns.
The shared art chores just doesn't work. It doesn't seem to be assigned based on tone of page or portion of storyline (at first, I thought that all of the Hawkman stuff was going to be Kubert, which made sense to me). The seemed to have fallen by the wayside this issue with at least one Hawk page being poorly delivered by JRJR.
I'm at a loss for Batman shoving a flaming god sword, unsheathed, between his hip and his utility belt. I'm at a loss that his utility belt is elastic enough to hold said flaming god sword.
Graphically, I continue to find the book hard to follow. We discussed the pillars previously and concluded that they were probably holographic representations of the artifacts, but then they make the machine and the artifacts show up there as well.
I didn't, initially, get the barrier between Joker and Duke/Green Lantern.
From a story standpoint, we're going to start with the 8th metal (from Hephaestus) and then go to the 9th (from the Wizard Shazam) and keep trading metals until we get to Nth? I don't think that we can hit infinity in a 6 issue series.
So far, I'm not seeing enough positive about the series to offset the price and the JRJR art.
Edited to correct book title to The Casting.
Was I the only one who thought/feared that Joker's letter-shoutout of the hospital's "M-E-T-A" flag implied that "meta" is linked to "metal?" - i.e. that the DCU's metahuman population is not simply due to genetic mutation, but to the molecular presence of Nth metal in a metahuman's bloodline?
Also, was I the only one who did not realize that Joker and Carter Hall are such chatty-Cathys? Holy crap were these characters overwritten in these issues. Does Snyder not write second drafts of his work? I'd have trimmed his Joker/Carter Hall scripting by 40% at least.
Lastly, we could make a drinking game around how many times characters say the word "Bruce." Especially Superman, Wonder Woman and Green Lantern. Sometimes they'd say it multiple times in the same word balloon. Are DC and Snyder seriously worried that we could ever forget the name of the secret identity of The Batman, Bruce? I mean Bruce, it really seemed that way, Bruce.
Yes, some of the characters were really, really wordy.
Intrigued, but not yet so much as to feel compelled to track it down.
I'm enjoying Metal. Especially for the way it's completely committing to being zany and over the top. I'm enjoying the larger DCU elements the most - the Immortals, the metals, secret behind metahumans, etc - regardless if they stick. The latest issue (#4) may have gone a bit too far in its extreme but I'm still curious to see how all of this ends. Of the tie-ins, the Dark Knights oneshots are pretty good/interesting. The "Gotham Resistance" tie-in story can be skipped. And I haven't read "Bats Out of Hell", Batman Lost or Hawkman Found just yet.
I was originally pretty high on this event. I thought the Casting and Forge were interesting and I was all set for a good ride...but this is a trainwreck, imho.