Spoilers ahead for Dark Days: The Forge #1, out today.
Videos by ComicBook.com
When DC announced that Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo were reuniting for a Batman-centric DC event titled Metal, some fans guessed right away what that metal would be.
Fast forward a bit, and the start of DC’s Dark Days event — Dark Days: The Forge from Snyder, James Tynion IV, and a roster of all-star artists including Jim Lee, John Romita, Jr., and Andy Kubert — seems to definitively answer the question in its opening pages.
The one-shot, out today, is narrated by Carter Hall, better known to DC fans as Hawkman, and it’s only a few pages in when he drops the first reference to Nth metal, the Thanagarian ore that allows Hawkman to fly.
The metal, from which you can craft something like a belt and negate gravity, also has other — not yet fully explored — abilities, including the ability to resist magical attacks, power augmentation (including one’s own magic), and it can enhance the strength, healing ability, etc., of the wearer.
Exposure to high levels of Nth metal began the cycle of reincarnation that allowed Prince Khufu and his lover Chay-ara to eventually become Carter Hall and Kendra Saunders, the superheroes known as Hawkman and Hawkwoman.
Besides the Hawks (and pretty much everyone on Thanagar), the metal has been used by Silver Scarab (himself a relative of the hawks, and a founding member of Infinity Inc.) and the villain Onimar Synn. A variant of Nth metal, called Valorium, is the material from which the Legion of Super-Heroes construct their flight rings.
The issue takes the backstory of Nth metal a step further, with Carter Hall seemingly hoarding all of it he can get his hands on, including dozens of relics and trinkets — and maybe even the head of a Manhunter robot?
There’s another, larger metal…thing…that plays heavily into the story in its final pages, but we’ll leave that for now. If that turns out to be made out of Nth Metal, though, it could change a lot of what we know about the DC multiverse.
