Metal is finally over and the dust has settled and still find myself wondering: “What the heck happened?” I mean, sure, we got a multiverse spanning attack with the DCU at the center of the battle, but… Nth Metal? The Dark Universe? Music notes that reverberate through time and space? A Batman That Laughs? What?

At the core of the series, there’s a decent story. An evil from another dimension wants to destroy all creation and our heroes must stop him. Got it. This evil has grabbed different evil versions of Batman from different evil realities to build an evil Batman team to help him destroy this universe. Cool. Our Batman, the good Batman, must work together with the Justice League to stop this evil and save the universe. Okay.

…but…

To flavor this story and make it into something more interesting, Scott Snyder decided that he needed to layer a confusing story on top of that. Maybe it all makes sense with the right set of flow-charts and wikipedia references, but the story flies by at such a rapid pace that nothing is really explained and nothing is really explored. In issue #6, we get Batman from The Dark Knight, Swamp Thing in a bow tie, the New 52/Rebirth Batman working together with someone you’d never expect, and a panel finally showing the “New Age Of Heroes” DC has already been selling in spin-off books for the last couple of months. The problem is, these things just happen. These events aren’t foreshadowed, unfolded into a narrative, and played to a conclusion. They just are.

I know there’s some sort of music metaphor here, but I’m not a musician so here’s the best comparison I can come up with – Metal is a chorus sorely lacking in verses. We get the big parts, maybe even the bridge (in the form of those Batman one shots at $4 a pop), but the actual details of the story are missing. How do people know who Plastic Man is and why was he hidden in the Batcave? How do our heroes learn how to use Element X, the metal after Nth Metal? How does Wonder Woman get Element X to Batman and Superman who are busy in this big battle? How do these characters know that clanging together Eighth Metal and Ninth Metal will wake up their friends who are in comas/dreams/trances? The story makes leaps again and again without explanations and it suffers because of it. In another time and era, Metal would’ve been flanked by tie-in issues across the DCU and the story would’ve been better served by them.

As far as the artwork goes, I’m not the biggest fan of Greg Capullo’s style but I can recognize that he does a good job rendering the characters and keeping the action flowing. There’s an epilogue by another artist (there’s no credits page in this review copy and the names on the cover only appear to be Capullo’s inker and colorist) and it’s very different from the rest of the book. The epilogue also seems to imply that Batman wants to recreate the Justice League using the heroes in Metal (but oddly enough, not using the team he heads in Justice League of America. An oversight?)

When it’s all said and done, I can say that Metal is an enjoyable experience. There’s plenty of action and the art is bold and energetic, but the tune becomes repetitive and the theme is overplayed. I won’t be putting this one in the Hall of Fame and adding it to heavy rotation.