WARNING: The following contains major spoilers for Batman: Gotham Nights #21 from Corinna Bechko, Mike Spicer, Juan Gedeon and ALW's Troy Peteri, available now.
While he might not be as famous as the Joker or Bane, Hugo Strange was one of the very first supervillains Batman ever faced. Shortly after he debuted, Strange and his Monster appeared in one of Batman's first truly memorable tales, "The Giants of Hugo Strange," by Bill Finger and Bob Kane in 1940's Batman #1. The doctor was injecting a mutant serum into humans, turning these people into massive, primitive Monster Men who could attack Gotham and distract the police while he robbed banks.
Strange would unsuccessfully try to turn Batman too, but the Dark Knight escaped and eventually brought the criminal empire down, killing some of the mutates in the process. But now, Batman: Gotham Nights #21 just saw Strange recreate this classic scheme with a cosmic twist.
At the start of this issue, Batman and Nightwing are in a rare disagreement when the Dark Knight goes off to chase creatures in the woods. Dick heads off to the city thinking Bruce is chasing Bigfoot, only to end up being ambushed by a crew that was supposed to keep Batman busy. It turns out that Strange hired them to hide his own sinister experiments near a satellite station. He didn't want to be disturbed, but Bruce tracks him down, discovering Strange is making Clayface-like monsters.
When the Caped Crusader confronts him, though, he discovers they're actually humans, similar to the story from 80 years ago. Except this time, it's not just something Strange cooked up in a lab -- he's actually been harnessing a signal from light-years away to turn humans into these behemoths. Batman's pretty upset, but Strange admits it was too good an opportunity to pass up, not realizing his experiments might have been the aliens creating soldiers on Earth for an invasion.
Nightwing ends up coming to Bruce's rescue after beating his attackers up and getting them to snitch, but he points out a major flaw in Strange's plan. After he reveals the signal's from light-years away, he maintains that it's an old signal so whoever sent it has probably died by now. Strange wasn't communicating with secret European colleagues as he thought, it was just the last embers of a dying species. Cognitive radio allowed their satellite signals to be protected, and the signal jumped from satellite to satellite to find the easiest path to its target. With this undetectable signal, Strange couldn't foresee that his monsters would be weak, outdated and the end result of faded messages from minds on the other side of the galaxy. He got so obsessed with selling these mindless entities as front-line soldiers on the black market, he lost sight of the basic foundation of science which allows Dick and Batman to take him down and incapacitate the legion of monsters.
The Dynamic Duo takes Strange into custody, and Dick posits that this alien signal wasn't meant for human minds. Strange, who just wanted a brain-dead army didn't realize the signal was meant to turn animals and other people to food as that's what the parent aliens probably ate to survive.
While the original tale ended with Batman killing Strange's Monster Men, this tale ends on a sunnier note, as he calls in Leslie Thompkins to help the victims recover from their unusual transformations.