Dark Knights Death Metal

 

This is another book that I picked up on a whim while at Cemetery Pulp over the weekend and decided to see what it was all about. Unfortunately, since I have not been following the DC Universe lately and certainly not their multi-verse (what was it - 52 different Earths?), and I wasn't even familiar with the main villains, this is a bit convoluted. Apparently, somehow, the entire multi-verse is now populated with evil versions of the different Batmen from the different worlds, as well as various Batman-themed villains and ex-heroes, all under the command of either "The Batman Who Laughs" or Perpetua, depending on who was around at that moment. Wonder Woman is one of the few remaining heroes who have not been mutated, and she is both prisoner and warden of Hell (or its equivalent), but she rebels and, in a roundabout way, leads a revolution in the hopes of saving the multiverse from complete destruction. 

I think that the writers tried to tackle too big of a subject in too small of a format, although, apparently, there are spin offs from this that I also have not read. But, besides the collapse of the multi-verse, worlds dying and being reborn and the ultimate battle of life over death (or chaos), there are also vague, supernatural beings ("The Hands") that created everything! It's all a bit much and it all overlaps and collides throughout the run in an odd way. It certainly is a long way off from the innocently simplistic DC stories of the 60's, although the good guys do still win in the end!

It ends up being overly tortuously tangled for me, although, again, that may simply be my unfamiliarity with this part of the DC multiverse. But for me, this was just ok and not as good as I thought it could have been.