Metal Shavings: The Easter Eggs of Dark Nights: Metal #1 With Scott Snyder

Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo, one of the most acclaimed creative teams in modern comics history, come together again for the first time in over a year with the release of today’s Dark Nights: Metal #1 — and Snyder joined ComicBook.com to give us a guided tour of the issue.

Just this week, Metal has been an eclectic run around the DC Universe, taking place on Mongul’s Warworld, in top-secret installations, and more. At Comic Con, Snyder promised even more, including a trip to Skartaris — something that makes perfect sense when you see all those dinosaurs on some of the Metal #1 covers.

Accompanying our first look at Metal #1, Snyder provided ComicBook.com with a note, annotating some of his favorite moments in the issue. Without further ado, here’s what he had to say (and to help him out, we’ll be providing some of our own commentary following his comments further down)…

In a lot of ways, DC Metal is a love letter to the kinds of big, bonkers stories I grew up with reading DC. Crisis on Infinite Earths, Invasion!, Cosmic Odyssey. But it’s also written in tribute to some modern DC greats as well, everything from Infinite Crisis to Darkseid War.

The truth is, every issue of Metal has story beats and Easter Eggs linked to other tales of the DCU. Of course, you can read Metal blind, with no knowledge of DC history and be fine – it’s made to be a killer first comic for anyone just joining us now – but Greg and I hope that getting the references will only make the experience richer and more fun.

So, a few of my favorite (metal) Easter Eggs….

The Tribes

All these tribes are in continuity, linked to different characters (Wolf is the blood tribe of Vandal Savage, Bear is Immortal Man, and Bird is well… Carter Hall and Shiera). It’s all largely unused DC history.

I thought mining the secret history of the DCU for allegiances, rivalries… all of it could be deeply compelling stuff.

 

Toyman

Hiro!

I love this version of Toyman. One of my favorite big, crazy, bombastic DCU stories is Jeph Loeb’s Batman/Superman: Public Enemies, at the end of which Hiro makes a composite Superman/Batman robot that Batman flies into space.

So this beat is a tribute, but also a hint, at the JL Yeager coming a few pages later…

 

Challengers Mountain

I’ve loved the Challengers for a long time. In fact, one of the first projects I pitched DC was a new Challengers series (this was when I first started out), so to be able to bring back the mountain, the mysterious professor, and the adventurers themselves was a kick.

 

The Blackhawks

I’ve been building them for a while as a kind of extension of Argus (which itself is a bird term for the eyes on the peacock’s tail) and a super post-apocalyptic team.

I knew I wanted to use them a couple years back, so I seeded them in All Star Batman but they’re meant to also have parallels in design and purpose to the team that invaded Gotham to help the city in Zero Year.

 

Carter’s Mission

Part of the fun of the story was creating a history of Carter’s investigation of Nth Metal.

Nth Metal is weird – it’s this substance that has given different characters all very different powers over the years. The idea is that Carter Hall, who, as Hawkman, is a hero who is reincarnated over and over, has been investigating the mystery around this metal for generations.

This allowed me to bring in characters I love from DC’s exploratory wing – Red Tornado, Will Magnus and TO Morrow and the Metal Men. Starman. Even the early pilot heroes: the original Blackhawks.

The idea is that if Batman is a detective in the present day, he’s picking up a case that Carter had been following for eons as DC’s detective of history.

 

The Multiverse

I’m a tremendous fan of DC’s multiversal cosmology and have always adored stories that explore and (especially) expand on its nature.

Grant’s Multiversity is a triumph in this regard, so the challenge for us was to build on the map he designed, the structure he built, and make something new and additive, with the dark multiverse…

 

Barbatos

One of my favorite stories is Dark Knight, Dark City by Peter Milligan.

It imagines that many years ago, in colonial times, a group of Gothamites try to summon a bat demon called Barbatos. The mystery in the present involves the Riddler, who runs Batman through a gauntlet of weird cases, all to secretly treat him with the substances and ritualistic materials needed to open a gateway to let Barbados in again.

In the end we’re left unsure whether Barbatos was a real force in Gotham’s history and in Batman’s own construction.

Recently, Grant touched on this story with his creation of Dr. Hurt and the journey of the Hyper-Adapter… all things we’ll be building on in Metal to make Barbatos a villain like nothing you’ve ever seen.

 

Metals

Feel free to take a look back at the run Greg and I did on Batman for some of these metals.

We came up with the idea of a secret periodic table while doing Endgame, a table full of supernatural elements…

 

Crises

Metal ties to a lot of Crises – but it has direct ties to Final Crisis, at the end of which Batman is sent back in time by Darkseid.

The exciting thing was building something new that tied into favorites like this story, which itself builds on so much DC history.