Warning: contains spoilers for Dark Nights: Death Metal Multiverse Who Laughs #1!
DC Comics has just released the latest tie-in issue to Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo’s Dark Nights: Death Metal event titled The Multiverse Who Laughs. The tie-in issue serves as an anthology, featuring a collection of short stories that detail the new Dark Multiverse created by the Darkest Knight. In one of the first stories, the Robin King regales readers and his army of Groblins with dark tales featuring twisted and horrifying takes on the stories and heroes from the DC Universe that fans know and love. One such tale features the Flash who tried to share his speed, though it led to disaster and nightmarish results.
The first story in the Multiverse Who Laughs is titled “Scary Stories To Tell in the Dark Multiverse” coming from writers Scott Snyder, Joshua Williamson, and James Tynion IV with art by Juan Gedeon. In it, the Robin King is sitting in an armchair, wondering which story of the Dark Multiverse to tell. While he starts to share the normal origins of Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman, he claims that he can see his audiences’s eyes glazing over, as they’ve grown tired of hearing the standard origins and stories going exactly in the way they know they’re going to go. Instead, he shares tales from the worlds that have just been created by their evil master the Darkest Knight, sharing stories of corrupted and evil versions of DC heroes. This includes a terrifying Wonder Woman and a Flash who turned his world into a realm of pure horror.
According to the Robin King, the Darkest Knight created a world in which the Flash completely threw his world in chaos, though Robin King can’t remember which Flash it was (Barry Allen or Wally West). Regardless, the Flash apparently attempted to share his speed with the entire world, which sent the world into a rapid and lightning-paced spiral downward as told in the Multiverse Who Laughs.
According to the Robin King, it seems as though the Flash was trying to be altruistic by sharing his speed as a means to help the world. Instead, the Speed Force pretty harshly rejects this idea and evolves the human race into “vicious speed monsters” as the Robin King calls them. As a result, the human race wears itself out and collapses its own societies within seconds, and the human race reaches its heat death within hours. It’s a devastating idea – harnessing superspeed only to exhaust your remaining time in an instant – and mirrors the Robin King’s other stories in reiterating the rules of the Multiverse Who Laughs: altruism is always punished, cruelty always thrives.
The Flash‘s dark story told here isn’t the only one Robin King tells, and he prefaces and concludes them all the same way by saying that his dark, scary stories are better due to his belief that they’re more “real” than the original stories that are more idealistic and contain hope. In Robin King’s mind, real life is darkness and lacking in any kind of hope, just like his stories. However, the heroes and villains of the primary Earth are working to make sure Robin King is wrong as Dark Nights: Death Metal continues, fighting what very well may be their final fight and seeking to return hope to the Multiverse and defeat the Darkest Knight once and for all.
