WARNING: The following article contains major spoilers for Batman: Lost #1 by Scott Snyder, James Tynion IV, Joshua Williamson, Doug Mahnke, Yanick Paquette, Jaime Mendoza, Wil Quintana, Nathan Fairbairn, Alejandro Sanchez and Tom Napolitano, on sale now.


Dark Nights: Metal is shaping up to be one of Batman’s greatest tests of all time. But while the Dark Knights (evil Batmen with the powers of the Justice League) rampage through the DC Universe, Bruce Wayne is trapped in the Dark Multiverse, facing his inner demons. Batman: Lost gives us our first proper look at the torment Batman is enduring while under Barbatos’ spell, and features heavy callbacks to the earliest days of Scott Snyder’s run, deep dives into Grant Morrison’s more cosmic aspects of Batman, and references that reach all the way back to Batman’s very first case.

Tell Me A Story

The issue opens with an elderly Bruce Wayne relaxing in his retirement as his mansion is filled with the sounds of his grandchildren. At first glimpse, this looks like more of a happy ever after for Batman than the likes of Frank Miller and Lynn Varley’s The Dark Knight Returns. However, Bruce’s opening line, “I can see you,” immediately sets the tone as something far more sinister.

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“I can see you” brings to mind Grant Morrison and Chas Troug’s Animal Man, where Buddy Baker gained the ability to see beyond the fourth wall of his reality, and look directly at the reader. While in this instance, Bruce is addressing his granddaughter Janet, the use of words is certainly intentional, and will become more relevant for Bruce as the issue goes on.

Janet asks her grandfather (It's unclear who her parents are, and ultimately it doesn’t matter.) to tell her a story, a true Batman story from his youth. Examining his bookcase, we see that Batman has collected his adventures as books, something similar to what he did with the Black Casebook of Grant Morrison’s run. Among the books are “The Long Halloween,” “Knightfall” and even Snyder’s own “The Court of Owls.” But the story that Janet wants to hear is Batman’s very first adventure, “The Case of the Chemical Syndicate.”

“The Case of the Chemical Syndicate” was the lead story in Detective Comics #27 by Bill Finger and Bob Kane, which introduced the gun-toting, purple-gloved vigilante known as The Bat-Man. In that story, an industrialist is killed and his son framed for the murder; The Bat-Man eventually tracks the real killer down and punches him off a ledge into a vat of acid, killing him. However, the look at the story we’re given here is slightly off; the big retcon being that Batman doesn’t wield guns and, as we’ll get to, doesn’t kill the murderer. But it also contradicts continuity established by Scott Snyder himself. According to Snyder and Greg Capullo’s “Zero Year” storyline, Batman debuted to stop The Red Hood Gang, so by reintroducing “The Case of the Criminal Syndicate” here, Snyder is embracing the “everything happened” approach of Grant Morrison’s run with the character.

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The War Of Birds And Bats

Not too long after flashing back to “The Case of the Chemical Syndicate,” we see Bruce travel back even further, to caveman times to witness the war between the Bat Tribe and the Bird Tribe. The Bat Tribe is led by the man who would one day reincarnate as Hath-Set, while the Bird Tribe is led by the couple who would eventually reincarnate as Hawkman and Hawkgirl; another change to continuity, as in previous iterations those characters' recurring lives started in ancient Egypt after contact with Nth Metal. Now we know that their origin stretches back even further, when the man who will eventually become Hath-Set killed the couple with Nth Metal during the dawn of man, sparking a reincarnation cycle that would continue throughout time.

Batman-Lost-Thomas-Wayne

Batman briefly flashes to a Mad Max-style future where his son Damian leads a militia called the Hawk Patrol, before jumping back to "The Case of the Chemical Syndicate" yet again. The two scenes are important as Batman begins to realize the significance of both bats and birds in his life.

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But before he can fully put the pieces together, he’s cast into the body of Thomas Wayne, a revolutionary era ancestor and the man who would eventually become Dr. Simon Hurt. This scene is from Peter Milligan and Kieron Dwyer’s “Dark Knight, Dark City” story, which introduced the concept of Barbatos to the DC Universe. By sacrificing an anointed victim, the cult hoped to raise Barbatos but fled when their plan succeeded, trapping the woman underground with the demon.

The Batman Machine

In Snyder and Paquette’s version, the woman -- who bears a striking resemblance to Paquette’s Selina Kyle from Batman Incorporated, so much so that it can’t be a coincidence -- speaks directly to Batman, confirming that the cult that summoned Barbatos was The Judas Tribe, or what we know in the present as The Court of Owls. “Dark Knight, Dark City” posited that with Barbatos locked in that cellar and Gotham built on top of it, the city grew into a machine to build Batman, a decades-long Rube Goldberg device that would eventually result in the deaths of Thomas and Martha Wayne in Park Row. Grant Morrison and Tony S. Daniel’s “Batman RIP” also embraces this idea, with Bruce Wayne gaining the ability to see the Gotham machine as The Batman of Zur-En-Arrh.

Snyder explores this in his own way, by casting Bruce Wayne’s consciousness into his great-great-grandfather Alan Wayne, the man who built much of Gotham as we know it today. Looking through an owl-shaped telescope, Bruce sees Gotham as he’s never seen it before. Some of the buildings are a dark black, but some are a bright gold; together, they form the image of a bat. Bruce/Alan realizes The Court of Owls has laced Wayne Steel with dangerous metals, and is attacked by a Talon. He later finds himself on the streets of Gotham, trying to seek help from the police but he meets his fate down a manhole, as was established way back in Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo’s Batman #3.

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The Window

Sick of being tossed around as Batbatos’ plaything, Bruce Wayne realises the importance of the Bird Tribe and how he’s always surrounded himself with birds — in the form of the Robins — to remind him who he is and where he is. It’s at this point in the story that Bruce’s granddaughter Janet becomes cross with her grandfather for changing the story, and reveals herself to be a demon of some sort. Following the sinister voice calling out to him across the multiple timelines he’s simultaneously trapped in, Bruce sees his younger self in the reflection of the window in his study and realises that he’s face to face with Barbatos. Barbatos tells Bruce that he created Batman, he wrote his story and has always been right here, at the window. The window is of great significance to the Batman mythos, as it was the bat which crashed through that window that urged Bruce Wayne to become Batman. Grant Morrison hinted that the bat which crashed through the window was a manifestation of Barabatos, but here Snyder and his collaborators confirm it.

Barbatos first saw Bruce Wayne when Darkseid cast him back into time — referencing Grant Morrison’s The Return of Bruce Wayne another Barbatos story — and spent millennia preparing the world for his chosen avatar. He created Batman through Gotham, and as Bruce finds out by punching through the window into the Dark Multiverse itself, Barbatos created Batman to create an army of unstable doppelgangers in The Dark Knights. Barbatos forces Bruce Wayne to confront the reality of being Batman and that the decision to put on the cape and cowl led to this moment, right now. Showing him images of the Dark Knights clashing with the Justice League and winning, Batman does the unthinkable. He submits. Batman never gives up, but seeing him yell in pain that he doesn’t want to see, he doesn’t want to know, he gives up, is incredibly powerful and shocking.

Barbatos grants Bruce’s wish, placing him back in the form of his elder self, Janet Wayne back on his lap, we’re faced with the possibility that we don’t know how many times Bruce has been through this cycle. How many times has Batman been forced through all of that, thinking that he was winning only to be broken and forced to submit to Barbatos? It’s a kind of defeat Batman has never endured before, which raises the stakes higher than they’ve ever been and makes Dark Nights: Metal a truly unique Batman story.