The long awaited Dark Nights: Death Metal is officially underway, promising to set a new status quo in the DC Comics universe… but not before it throws every hero, villain, and location fans know into an extreme, outrageous, and over-the-top future ruled by the cruelest nightmares the Dark Multiverse has to offer. And from the looks of things, Scott Snyder and his team have done it again.
It would be an understatement to say that Death Metal‘s predecessor, Dark Nights: Metal changed the DC Universe, creating new lore and re-defining old continuity into a more cohesive meta-narrative. The message at the time was that ‘everything mattered,’ whether the story beat, character, or series in question was ten years old or fifty. Now, the creative team of Scott Snyder, Greg Capullo, Jonathan Glapion, and FCO Plascencia have reunited to bring the story home. And at a time when people have never felt more divided–while others unite around real world causes–Snyder is setting the stage for everything Death Metal hopes to be. Both in the story itself, and the offices of DC Comics.
Screen Rant was one of a handful of outlets who spoke with Snyder about the start of the event, discussing the motivations, the story, the legacy, and his overall plan–impacted by more than one high-profile development at DC. This won’t be a repeat of Metal, or an attempt to rewrite history like Doomsday Clock. The full interview can be found below.
Scott Snyder: Josh Williamson and James Tynion were teasing me because we pitched the idea so long ago, we pitched it all the way back when we pitched “Metal” in 2016 as a kind of continuation of that story and a culmination of everything that we were going to build if “Metal” went well. So the idea was almost to do this event that would be bombastic and over the top and kind of explosive, but as a way of kind of hiding how personal it was at the time, and then fan out all these series that would allow us to explore things that were on our minds in those ensuing years, about the sort of… You can see as it’s themes running through, I think, all of our books, the idea of whether or not human nature leans bad, whether or not, when given the choice, we are going to pick what’s best for our own interests or collective achievement, all of it.
Then once “Metal” happened and went well, we fanned out into “Justice League,” and “Justice League Odyssey” and “[Justice League] Dark,” and “Batman/Superman.” We were planning this whole runway to “Death Metal.” And some of it got extended. Some of it got compressed due to different events at DC and all of that stuff. The map hasn’t really changed. So what “Death Metal” is to me is really the crescendo of all of the storytelling that we’ve been building since 2016 into 2017. And it’s always been a story that’s been partly about comics. They’re meant to point to what kind of a thing we want to be as a company. That’s what they’re for, right? They kind of re-jigger things and then set you on a path towards what you’re next iteration is going to look like.
For us, this one was always pitched as this idea that one of the issues with comics that I think is reflected nationally and globally right now, is this idea of isolation. Not just because of COVID coming along, but this idea of becoming more and more siloed in your own kind of insulated, subjective rabbit hole, and how the loudest voices in the room right now, the President among others, encourages us to do that, to sort of separate, divide, go into these kind of corkscrews of our own ideological fantasies, sometimes, or nightmares. And that comics also has a tendency when distracted or when under pressure to kind of sometimes dissipate in terms of one big narrative. I love the idea that DC can celebrate all of these different neighborhoods and have all kinds of different books and areas that are untouched and not influenced by what’s happening in this book, doesn’t have to happen in that book. But sometimes it becomes so disparate and so separated that the kind of core of what we are starts to get lost.
“Death Metal” was always set up as a way for as many books as wanted to buy in, to just make a statement that what’s great about comics and DC in particular, is how it’s all part of one epic, evolving generational story. And what we want to be right now both remembers the great moments that comics have helped shine a light on the best of human nature in the past during dark times, but also wants to kind of lead the way in terms of being, I think, a progressive leader with regard to inclusion, with regard to being bold and daring. All those things never mean forgetting the greatness of the past.
That’s “Death Metal” to me. Death Metal was always this kind of story about heroes being forced into a situation that’s so oppressive and so separated, where they’re so separated from one another and the odds are so stacked against them, that this argument that we’ve been building over and over for these past few years that says, look, there’s no hope. There’s no way we’re going to overcome any one of these challenges in the real world, from climate change to any kind of geopolitical conflict. You might as well just kind of focus on your life, get yours, be about you, the people you care about. There is no kind of objective center or truth or any of it. Let’s forget it. Civilization is this fallacy. The whole thing is a big farce. And collectivism and all of it is ridiculous.
So that argument that’s been building, The Batman Who Laughs, Luthor, all of it, this is the culmination where there’s never been a more convincing culmination of that argument than “Death Metal.” And the heroes have to look around and say, we keep losing. We’re separated from one another. We’re separated from the people that supported us, the humans that sided with the heroes are on these antennas in space. And ultimately they have to decide whether or not it’s worth it to try one last time, even when they know they’re likely going to lose.
It’s a really personal story, but at the same time it’s kind of easily the craziest thing we’ve done. And we want it be something that’s celebratory in terms of comic book lunacy and that kind of Kirby-esque inventive nuttiness, and yet at the same time be very clear from the very first page where Sgt. Rock is talking to you, that it is like a love letter and a kind of call to arms for the comic community to remember, ultimately, that even when we’re isolated because of COVID or we have differing opinions in terms of whether a move is good or bad, about digital or about this or about that, that ultimately we’re in it together, and that we have to find ways of being bold and never betraying who we are at core, as well.
When I started working with Greg, I was a very different kind of writer. I was so green. I was terrified when I went on “Batman” in 2011. I didn’t want to be on the book really yet. I felt like I needed years before I would competent. And he’s my favorite character, forever. So the idea of taking it when you’re not ready is the worst nightmare, where you’re like, I’m going to get my chance to write this character and I’m going to completely screw it up, and I don’t want it. And Greg, from the moment I started, was in conversation with me about that, where he understood that I was brand new and I was young and I was unsure of myself. He’s the one that really, as much as we didn’t get along at first, because I was so adamant about writing full script and I didn’t give him enough room and all this stuff, until we hit issue five, when it turns around in ‘Court of Owls,’ and I realized the more room you give him the better he’s going to be. And it was never about him, all of his lessons to me, it was always about, let me show you how you want to work with artists. You want to approach and talk to them about how they want to work, and if you can do that, you’ll get the best out of them.
The reason I’m bringing this up is because that was sort of lesson one, all the way back with Greg, but the things that I’ve learned over the years on a personal level about friendship, and the things that we’ve been through together, everything from deaths in the family, births, all of this. To craft things, which I’ve learned more from him in terms of how to write for other artists and the kind of writer I want to be, in terms of always challenging myself the way he always challenges himself. He always says, you have to always be the most exciting creator to yourself or there’s no point. And for me, that keeps me hungry all the time. It makes me say, if I’m going to do our last Batman story like “Last Knight [on Earth],” it has to something that I would pick up on a shelf and say, this is the story I never expected to see, but is perfect for me right now. With “Metal,” the deal was to do an event that kind of called back to the real over the top, unabashed, Saturday morning cartoon, “Infinity Gauntlet,” kind of bravado. Those events that were just totally sincere and earnest and crazy, but were personal, clearly, when you go back and you read them and contextualize them. And so, “Metal,” for us, was that. It was sort of like, we’re probably only going to get to do one of these…
Honestly, DC, not to throw anyone at DC under the bus, but DC at that time, Dan [DiDio] and them were not convinced that it was anything anybody wanted. It was a time when politics were everywhere, and the story was political in its way, the same way “Last Knight” is highly political when you look at it as a vote. I mean, the people literally vote for their villain instead of their heroes. But ultimately, what I’m trying to say is that, DC wasn’t really behind it until it began, and then they were incredibly supportive. And they still let us do whatever we wanted. So there was never any real resistance in that regard. It was just more of this sense like, is this going to work at this moment? And so the idea was when we did it, that we were just going to leave everything on the table and just go crazy, and make it something that we would feel like we took every risk and put everything we wanted to say about that moment in time in there, and why we thought heroes were important in that moment. And then if it worked, then we’d build to something even bigger now.
So there was never a question of… there was a point, again, not to get too inside the beltway but, it’s been a crazy couple of years at DC, in a great way, in ways that have been challenging at times. And I think the vision of what’s coming next shifted at times, between what was coming in 2021, what wasn’t going to come, what’s going to come in 2020. All of that kind of fluidity pushed back at times on “Metal,” and there was a desire to see, well maybe we don’t call it “Metal,” maybe we do something else. And one of the things I feel really good about was that ultimately they always supported us when we pushed back and said, it has to be this. It has to be “Metal,” and it’s us, and I’m not really willing to do a Crisis, and do it with a different team, or any of that kind of stuff. I want to do this. This is a culmination of what we’ve been building, and the reason is because these guys make me reach higher all the time as a writer and they have since the beginning of our relationship.
Everybody on this team is hungry in that same way and wants to make something that surprises on every page and inspires and that stuff. There’s an energy working with these guys that’s just really special. I mean, we’ve been together over 10 years now. That’s crazy. I was talking to Greg the other day, I was looking back at our first emails, and they’re from like 2009, 2010. After this we really do want to try and shift gears a bit, do some of our own stuff. Do things as well. We still have ideas for superheroes and for DC, but I’m not looking to do like a “Metal Three,” where it’s like… This was kind of the plan if things worked. And the volatility in terms of the world and the volatility in terms of DC at times made us unsure of whether or not we’d be able to pull it off. But the fact that we’re here and it wound up being something that I hope is even more resonant because, I mean, it was written right as COVID was happening, and it’s written to the comics industry in that moment. And now, as well, there’s so many more important things to focus on than a comic event, but I think it acknowledges that. That’s part of what I think it’s saying in some ways.
I’m very happy that it came out in a way that I feel like… At this point we were very left alone in terms of what we were building. Jim and Bob and them have been extremely supportive this time around. It is what we always wanted it to be. So my hope is really that it speaks to fans and just gives them a bit of enjoyment and they can see how personal a story it is, about how much faith we have in comics.
In the first issue, we see Sgt. Rock literally speaking to the reader, and there is a fair amount of meta-commentary about fandom and reading comics. There is also a sense of really hammering home the ‘everything matters’ piece of the story, with bringing in elements of “Blackest Night,” “Heroes in Crisis,” and various other books that never really intersected before. So my question was, how do you balance these subtextual ideas without overwhelming the actual text?
Scott Snyder: I think in this case they’re just really confluent and they’re pretty synergistic in the way that… Again, the whole thing was written before the protests and George Floyd, all the stuff happening right now that’s so important and that we’re extremely supportive of and all that as well. But it happened we were creating the event at a time where already, even a year ago, two years ago, three years ago even, the feeling was that we were drifting into different silos, do you know what I mean? Where the books weren’t interacting. And part of it was things were falling off schedule. Part of it was editorial, or sometimes holding things in different ways or repositioning them at Black Label or figuring out, they’re starting new initiatives and something should wait. And all of that’s comics, but sometimes it gets too much.
And I felt like things like “Doomsday Clock,” which we had all been expecting to have a bigger impact, weren’t able to, not for any fault of the creators or the line, or Geoff [Johns] or Gary [Frank], really, or anybody. It’s just a matter of the book took so long to make, and we started going double shift, which wasn’t really expected at that time, that there wasn’t a way to connect. And so there were things like that where we felt like stories became bottled and there was a lack of communication sometimes between different areas at DC, which again, is not throwing anyone under the bus. It’s my fault as much as anyone’s. But we were pregnant and we had the baby and the baby needed a craniotomy and all this stuff. So there was a lot of just, we didn’t get a chance to all work together to make a kind of immersive tapestry of a narrative, of a world, for readers, the way we should have.
So that feeling, of saying, look, this kind of fracturing and this kind of everybody falling into their neighborhood of DC, and those neighborhoods not only not connecting but sometimes being at odds with each other and their messaging, seems to also have a reflection in a much more important way, and a very reductive version in comics of what’s happening on a larger scale which you see everywhere, which is the conversation between different parts of the world breaking down. Countries retreating from the global stage. Us. And all of it becoming something that feels like people become more and more focused on sort of what we’re incapable of, rather than what we’re capable of.
That’s why a moment like this is so invigorating, where conversations are being forced. Things that people would shy away, I think, in general, now have to happen. And I think it’s fantastic. And in that regard, that’s part of, I think, what is getting people so excited and also furious about this moment. And what we were trying to say in Metal isn’t exactly that at all, but we were going for something that essentially said, comics is falling into these different… Or we’re, our company, we’re falling into these different neighborhoods and those neighborhoods are often not communicating with each other, they’re at odds with each other, and they’re big things that we face in the industry about the problem with variants and with FOCs. All of the kinds of those things that get sort of sublimated beneath easier conversations about, look at my book, or this, or that.
So what we were trying to say with “Metal” was also a reminder that we’re in it together. We’re all in it for love of comics. And it’s time for us to have tough conversations about what we need to do. And there’s a way of not seeing these different aspects of comics as competitive. Digital and print, Marvel and DC, indie and mainstream, direct market and speculator market. There’s a way of thinking about them in more robust, I think, and challenging ways, but ways that will get us to the other side of, I think, a period where a lot is in jeopardy. So it felt almost like it all kind of worked together.
And again, it was written before this particular moment. It was written during COVID. So there’s stuff right now in the book that I wish I could change, and I think be even more sort of sensitive and aware of everything going on now. But my hope is that it holds up and doesn’t feel in any way at odds with things happening, but instead feels like it’s the kind of book is about forcing difficult conversations and all of that. And again, everybody on the book, all of us, we’re not highly political all the time on our social media. My likes, I always say, if you want to see my politics, you can just glance at my likes half the time. Greg is the same way, and Jonathan is very open about his politics, and FCO is the same as us. So I think we try to put it in the book, and we try to have it be something that is really swept up in the fun and the epic nature of it, but is there as a kind of personal third rail beneath everything.
Similar to how Dark Nights: Metal reintroduced Hawkman back into DC continuity, can we expect the same thing to happen for another hero or heroes by the time Death Metal concludes?
Scott Snyder: We’re trying to do that with a few people. So Jonah Hex is in it. Sgt. Rock is in it. Sgt. Rock is kind of the narrator of the whole thing, which is a lot of fun for me and Greg. He’s the one trying to give a pep talk to comics. And he’s definitely off his rocker because you’ll see by the end of issue one, there are reasons he’s kind of half-crazy the whole time… And also, Lobo is another one that we really were trying to bring back and give some real legs to again, and it’s the classic iteration, but in a new way. And yeah, there are some surprises, Superboy-Prime and a bunch of other characters are coming back in ways that kind of reframe them. They’re still the originals.
Basically, the story is to save the DC Universe, the heroes realize they have to go into the Dark Multiverse and find the crises that happened in the past and collect the energy from those and use it to restart the DC Universe in a different way. When they go into the Dark, they don’t expect the crises have been twisted in a way that they don’t expect. So you’re going to see a bunch of characters there from the original series. You’ll see Darkseid and all kinds of characters reframed.
So, I think a lot of the idea with this was to try and bring back some characters that fit the idea of a war — that fit the idea of and themes of rebellion — battling to throw off old systems and trying to find new ways of doing things; throwing off oppressive overlords. So there’s even a Revolutionary War reference in the first issue, so [we’re] trying to pick characters that fit that from different times and then bringing them in to surprise you and then reframing of characters that you’re really familiar with in ways that will also — I think — catch you off-guard by the difference in the way that they’re thinking and behaving but still remain true to their core.
For example, when they get to Final Crisis, it’s a world where Darkseid won, and he’s now old. And he’s Anti-Life to everything. So you see him in a way that you haven’t seen him before. And part of it is fun because he was a baby in the first Metal. So we want everything to be surprising and invigorating because it’s a rethinking of what these characters are capable of and what they mean at different times without changing who they are. And Jarro is back in it. All kinds of characters are in it.
You’ve spoken about how Metal was a very different kind of adventure you were setting off on, and constantly wanting to challenge yourself and get better and raise the stakes. Coming out of Metal and going into Death Metal, did you think, “This is how I’m changing the roadmap,” to up your own game?
Scott Snyder: There were a few. It was just disconnected at that time. It was almost an “Experiment Metal.” To be frank, DC really saw Doomsday Clock and some other things as the levers that were going to pull whatever was on the other side of Rebirth and Metal. The first one was really just me, Greg [Capullo] and Jonathan [Glapion] and FCO getting to do something that we thought would create a pocket area for us to build a story. It was about the things we cared about on the other side, like Justice League, if we could do it.
And so it wasn’t designed to have the kind of broad impact that it wound up having at that moment. So there was a lot of last-minute figuring out of how we can shape some things in the line in a way that we can bring in different talent. So this time we wanted to go in prepared. There’s no flying by the seat of our pants, you know what I mean? There’s a very set plan. And there was a lot of change. There’s a lot of change about what was going to be on the other side with [Death] Metal, with some of the Generation stuff that was being planned before we were doing it. We were always supportive — just to be clear — even when we didn’t have a way of connecting to it, or I didn’t have a way into it story-wise for myself. Dan [DiDio] and I are still very close. He’s responsible for my whole career. He’s the guy that gave me a chance on 12 issues with Detective Comics and let me work with Jock and Francesco [Francavilla] when I was nobody. And even when we had big creative differences over the years — which we did have often — he still supported me and let me do it myself. And I supported him when he did things that I didn’t agree with.
So it was kind of like the first Metal all over again where I was like, “Okay, look, no big deal, we’ll do our thing and if they want to use some of this stuff, great, and if they don’t, we have plans to do different kind of work on the other side of this for a little while, anyway.” And then with Dan exiting, it became really fluid again, in terms of what we were going to do. And so now some of the planning with Jim [Lee] and Bob [Harras] is much more connective. So we are helping to architect or chime in with editorial about some of the stuff. Editorial has been great about their plans now, and they’re really something to crow about on our part. I’m excited about the talent they’re looking at. I’m excited about the stories and characters they want to highlight.
So Death Metal is more plugged in than we had hoped. I think some of Metal was more conservative in terms of what we were able to do and what we were ever expected to be able to do. And this time, we don’t have a lot to lose — this team never acts like we do anyway — but we don’t have anything to prove. Comics should cast a really wide net and be inclusive and be daring, and every part that seems to be at war with itself right now can work together in different ways. That’s part of what I’m hoping for on the other side. Not just the books coming out or story changes or creative changes, but some of the initiatives that the company is going to try out and embrace later are really forward-thinking and exciting.
The Death Metal checklist you recently shared on Twitter teased The Last 52 and Robin King. You previously said in a prior CBR interview that Robin King is the scariest character you’ve ever created. While both are farther down the line in Death Metal’s story, I was curious what makes Robin King more terrifying than The Batman Who Laughs, who has already cemented himself as a breakout character?
Well The Batman Who Laughs is terrifying to me because he is a Bruce Wayne who was once good but is now wholly evil…and the horror of that transition being so final and deadly is what makes him so scary. He’s Batman gone evil at the peak of his career. The Robin King is evil in the way the Batman Who Laughs is, but he’s almost scarier to me because he was always that way; he’s never been anything else. As a child, all he did was think about ways to kill his heroes…and wait until you see his belt!
Is there one moment in Death Metal that you’re most excited to see the fan reaction to?
Yes, but it’s the end, so I can’t tell you what it is! Only that Wonder Woman is at the heart of it.
Dark Nights: Death Metal #1 is on sale now from DC.
