WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Year of the Villain: Hell Arisen #3, by James Tynion IV, Steve Epting, Javier Fernandez, Nick Filardi, and Travis Lanham, on sale now.
While DC has dubbed most of the past year the Year of the Villain, it's really seemed more like the year of the Batman Who Laughs. This sadistic Batman from the Dark Multiverse has rocketed to become one of DC's most popular characters in record time. While he was ostensibly just a henchman for the dark god Barbatos in Dark Nights: Metal, he is now the ultimate embodiment of evil and strikes fear into the hearts of heroes and villains alike.
A big part of what makes him so terrifying how similar he is to Batman, the Dark Knight who has plans, tricks, escape routes and cunning solutions for every possible scenario. Just like Batman, the Batman Who Laughs is always one step ahead of everyone else, and he offers a hint about what he has hidden up his studded sleeve in Year of the Villain: Hell Arisen #3.
While the Joker and Lex Luthor are chatting it up at an abandoned amusement park, we find the Batman Who Laughs in a hall crowded with rows of large tanks filled with orange liquid. And floating in one of these tanks if Nix Uotan, the Last Monitor.
As The Batman Who Laughs begins speaking to Uotan, he mocks the powerless cosmic powerhouse as Perpetua converts more worlds to darkness. He also makes it clear that he plans to do much more with the Monitor than simply make him passively suffer.
While Uotan doesn't offer any information, the Batman Who Laughs has cloned some Dubbliexes to help him in his interrogation. And through that psychic probing, the Dark Multiverse despot reveals that he knows where the Monitors have been hiding great powers. Most ominously, he says that he's been dying to meet someone connected to all of this and that together they are going to show the DC Universe was a crisis really looks like.
For a character who has been at the center of crises since his debut, this is a pretty alarming statement. But as vague as his statements to Nix are, the Batman Who Laughs gives some clues as to what he may be planning.
The most obvious being who this Batman could be referring to is the Anti-Monitor, the villain behind the original Crisis on Infinite Earths. However, the Anti-Monitor isn't the worst threat in existence, and he even helped the Justice League fight Perpetua in the recent past.
Instead, the Batman Who Laughs could be looking to meet Mandrakk, the fallen Monitor and father of Nix Uotan.
Mandrakk was the First Monitor, who was corrupted and turned into a vampiric monitor who fed on the life-force of the multiverse. His purpose is as the evil behind all evils, and he arrives at the end of the multiverse to consume whatever remains until there is nothing left in existence. Since the Batman Who Laughs has already discussed the death of the multiverse, this could all play right into the Batman Who Laughs' ultimate endgame.
In Final Crisis, Nix Uotan was able to fend off Mandrakk after rallying the forces of good as Superman used the Miracle Machine to defeat Darkseid. But with more and more of DC's heroes being infected by the Batman Who Laughs and the Monitor firmly in his clutches, the DC Universe is going to need a real miracle to foil the Batman Who Laugh's dark plans.