Dark Nights: Death Metal: Trinity Crisis #1 Review

Crisis Rewind

Written By: Scott Snyder 

Art By: Francis Manapul, Ian Herring, Tom Napolitano

Cover Price: $5.99

Release Date: September 8, 2020

Death Metal continues and even though we have an off-month with the main title, this tie-in should satiate all you Dark Multiverse fans as it seems bigger than anything else that we've dealt with in this event since it's all about going down into the dark and finding the worlds that the Crisis On Infinite Earths, Infinite Crisis and the Final Crisis are essentially playing on repeat to fill Perpetua with Crisis Energy to keep her destruction and eventual reimagining of the Multiverse going. Let's jump into this issue and see if our Trinity of heroes can do the impossible and actually win a battle in this long, long war against the Batman Who Laughs........ or as he goes by now, the Darkest Knight. Let's check it out.

As with the main Death Metal title, this tie-in suffers because of the size of the story and not having enough time, room, or want to really go in-depth with what's going on in this world beyond a vague explanation about how something is happening before moving on and just accepting that simple description. For this issue, we're told that the Trinity need to go to Castle Bat so that they can access a portal to the Dark Multiverse because three worlds are continually going through different Crises, that the Batman Who Laughs has somehow stabilized to fuel Perpetua with Crisis Energy and now it's up to our heroes to steal said energy and give it over to Wally West......... Oh man, I really hope that you're reading and understanding the main title because looking back at that description, it sounds like nonsense.  

Really though this issue plays less like a tie-in and comes off more like important, need to know information for going into Death Metal #4 because where the other tie-ins that we've gotten to this title just come off as simple backstory to Dark Multiverse Batmen that you don't really care about, this shows us Wonder Woman's plan in winning this war and actually sees characters go down, while our heroes implement their plans. So...... this is a pretty crucial issue that for all intents and purposes should have been been the fourth issue to our main series because I don't know if a few recap panels are going to work for everyone if they decided just to pick up the main title and skip out on the tie-ins. Maybe it will work out in the long run, but even though we do get the vague explanations about how things are working in this new dark world and what our heroes need to do, there is a sense of importance to what we're dealing with here and while I would like more overall since this whole event still comes off as a disarranged puzzle that desperately needs someone to put all its pieces into place.

All in all, I enjoyed the art in this issue a lot, but there are some moments where some of the characters come off a bit flat and blend into the background, making it a little tough to see and or understand what's going on on the page, but this only happened a few times and beyond that, I enjoyed what I was looking at here. As for the story, I love that we're moving forward in a direction that might see our heroes come away with a win, but I just wish that the concepts and worlds were better defined so I could understand exactly what we were dealing with in this Crisis scenario. From the Justice League series that led into this to this issue, it seems like explanations and ideas are constantly being changed and rearranged to fit whatever our heroes need to do to move on and that's frustrating, but if you can get beyond that there's a lot of big things happening here that I do want to see continued because they come off intriguing.

Bits and Pieces:

While you still get silly jokes and D-List Dark Multiverse Batmen in this tie-in, the scope of what we're dealing in this book overshadows most of its flaws and by the end, you get a book that feels less like a tie-in and a crucial installment to what should have been the main title. The art is fun and decent overall, but like most chapters to this event, I would like to have a better understanding of what's been going on and how things work beyond a vague explanation that everyone just goes with.

6.9/10