DC has announced the first extension to its upcoming Dark Nights: Death Metal event, with two special anthology issues scheduled for August featuring an all-star creative lineup including Warren Ellis, Garth Ennis, Becky Cloonan, Joëlle Jones, Daniel Warren Johnson and Death Metal co-creator Scott Snyder.
Both Dark Nights: Death Metal Guidebook and Dark Nights: Death Metal — Legends of the Dark Knights will offer all-new backstory to the altered reality seen in the main series, with Guidebook revealing the origins of the altered Justice League and Legends focusing on the multiple alternative versions of Batman to be found in the storyline, including the story of how Batman turned into a killer robot T-Rex (because, comics).
The two issues will be released a week apart, with Guidebook debuting Aug. 18 and Legends bowing Aug. 25.
Dark Nights: Death Metal, newly expanded to seven issues, is the culmination of the past few years of DC’s superhero line as a whole, bringing together plot threads from Dark Nights: Metal, Justice League, Year of the Villain and more; following the temporary publication suspension caused by COVID-19, the main series has been moved to a June 16 launch, with new issues appearing monthly through August, at which point the series will suspend publication until October. (New Death Metal material will be published during the break, however.)
The series picks up on the cliffhanger at the end of Scott Snyder’s Justice League run in January, in which Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and the rest of the Justice League disappeared through a set of mysterious doors after losing the battle with a cosmic entity called Perpetua, who had convinced humanity en masse to reject community in favor of selfishness and self-interest.
Snyder and Death Metal co-creator Greg Capullo told The Hollywood Reporter earlier this year that the series will center on Wonder Woman and is intended as a love letter to the DC Universe as a whole.
