Wonder Woman to lead DC Comics’ Dark Nights Metal sequel, Death Metal

Dark Nights Metal, the massive crossover that took the DC Universe by storm in 2017 and 2018, is coming back. Series architects Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo will team up once again for Death Metal, a six-issue miniseries kicking off in May of 2020.

But this time around, it won’t be Batman who sets the tempo, but one of his oldest allies. Death Metal puts Wonder Woman in the lead, and Snyder and Capullo say they’ve been dying to do a story about Diana of Themyscira for years.

“She was the character I was most intimidated by,” Capullo told The Hollywood Reporter, “but I gained my legs when we did the first Metal. I thought I was excited to do a Wonder Woman series. This is very Wonder Woman-centric.”

Death Metal will spin out of Snyder’s Justice League run, which recently wrapped up on a big cliffhanger and tease of a new series to come. Cosmic entities offered the Justice League a last ditch chance to do away with the evil goddess Perpetua once and for all, and turn humanity’s destiny in the direction of hope and compassion for the rest of time. The League accepted and stepped through the cosmic portal — and then the story ended.

“Something happens in between the end of Justice League and the beginning of [Death Metal] that’s part of the mystery,” Snyder told The Hollywood Reporter, “and when this story starts, the heroes are really down and it seems as though DC Universe has been transformed in such a way that Perpetua and the Batman Who Laughs have taken over, and the heroes are in a terrible, terrible way.”

Death Metal will build upon the twists and turns of Justice League, but also other DC Comics events, contemporary an otherwise, including Doomsday Clock, previous Crisis events, and Brian Michael Bendis’ work on the Superman titles, according to Snyder. The writer says that Dark Nights Metal — a story in which Batman met Dream of the Endless and the structure of the DC Multiverse was fundamentally rewritten — was “contained,” while Death Metal has “the chains off entirely.”

“There’s many evil Batmen in this story, just to let you know,” Snyder told The Hollywood Reporter, “and they come in all shapes and sizes. Some are kind of ludicrous. I said to Greg, I want a big monstrous one and I have a few options. One we were thinking of was maybe an evil monster truck Batmobile that eventually became sentient and then killed everybody and became Batman of his world, or, I was like, what about dinosaur if it was the robot dinosaur in the Batcave and Batman was about to die and he uploaded his consciousness into the mechanical dinosaur, and then that kind of gets out of control and becomes an evil Batman on its world. Those are the kind of things that we talk about.”

Whatever Snyder and Capullo came up with that they liked better than Evil Monster Truck Batman and Evil Dinosaur Batman, I’m curious to see it.

Death Metal’s six installments will run from May through July, and then break until it wraps up in September through November, with “Metalverse” tie-in issues planned to accompany the run. It’s a generous schedule for Capullo, who will be drawing the series’ interiors, but it also means that DC will have a big Wonder Woman event going on when Wonder Woman 1984 hits screens on June 5.