Written by: Scott Snyder
Art by: Greg Capullo, Jonathon Glapion, & FCO Plascencia
Published by: DC Comics
“The real Clark never had any imagination for weapons…I call this gauntlet the ‘Five Finger Death Punch.'” ~Batman
(Fuck off Batman.)
I’ve been comparing Dark Knights: Metal to bad Shonen anime because it’s the closest example I can find to messy nonsense. But really, that’s doing Shonen a bit of a disservice. Bleach and Dragonball Z aren’t good, but they aren’t incoherent either. There are characters and plots to be found. There’s a through-line. Dark Knights: Metal reads like a parody of Shonen then, where nothing makes sense because that’s the joke. Think Chinpokemon from South Park.
The thing is, I can’t tell what’s being self aware, what isn’t, and what’s just bad storytelling regardless of irony.
Much like the last issue, this one is a big vessel of action. There are three or four groups off looking for Nth metal, and they gotta fight their way to it. We jump between Wonder Woman fighting big monsters with characters I don’t recognize; Deathstroke pillaging an Atlantis grave I don’t recognize; and Green Lantern wandering into a group of alien things I don’t recognize. Everyone talks and spouts nonsense as if what is going on is the most obvious thing in the world, which maybe it is. Maybe I missed something.
Or maybe I just don’t sense it! Because God knows everyone else can sense the next big bad guy, Macguffin, or betrayal! How else would we move this story along? Certainly not with real storytelling.
“I sense the [redacted] is up ahead.”
“I sense a dark, unknown presence here.”
“I can sense the Nth metal down there.”
All the while, there is no through-line, and there are no characters. We have a book filled with DC’s most recognizable, but other than maybe a brief scene at the very end between Batman and Superman, there are no people here. I hesitate to call anyone a caricature because even that implies something exists; instead, we’re given husks. Wonder Woman slices a monster in half and mentions her lasso before giving Aquaman a ring on his cell phone. Onwards we go, because there’s too much to cover and not enough page space to do it. At some point we’re watching Green Lantern crack a joke and then get stunned by an alien that speaks in nonsense.
I get that I’m supposed to be having fun, that I’m supposed to be dazzled by the spectacle, but I’m not finding this all that spectacular. It’s just stupid.
And then there’s Dream. He showed up early on in this event much to my dismay, and now he’s back. Don’t worry though; he’s just here to deliver a bunch of exposition. Most of it doesn’t make a damn lick of sense because it’s this book, and what does I think we already knew. At this point it’s hard to tell.
At least it’s pretty to look at.
Shonen. I’m still stuck on that comparison. This really feels like one, or at least like some kind of crazy anime. The thing is, crazy anime run on and on for hundreds of episodes. There’s a pacing to them, even if the plotting and character work aren’t always good. There’s a through-line. Dark Knights: Metal is a crazy big anime without the page space. It’s trying to cram the big reveals and betrayals in the entirety of Hunter x Hunter into five or six issues, and it just doesn’t work.