WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for The Batman Who Laughs #1 by James Tynion IV and Riley Rossmo, on sale now.


As a disquieting amalgamation of Batman and his most notorious foe, The Joker, The Batman Who Laughs has arguably been the creepiest and most disturbing of the seven Dark Knights featured – at least so far – in Dark Nights: Metal. Having served as Barbatos' Dark Multiverse lieutenant and gathering the remaining nightmarish incarnations of Batman for their incursion into the known multiverse, the origin of the eeriest of these personifications is the final one to be told, courtesy of James Tynion IV and Riley Rossmo's The Batman Who Laughs #1.

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Yes, as previously revealed by Scott Snyder in an interview with CBR, there is Joker toxin involved, but the issue shows that the character's beginnings have a much farther reach than just another encounter between two longstanding foes – beginnings that are drenched in the kind of darkness that readers have come to expect from any world in the Dark Multiverse.

The Joker's Last Laugh

That's not to say Batman and The Joker don't have a deadly encounter – in a decidedly high-stakes showdown along the same magnitude of Snyder and Greg Capullo's climactic "Endgame" arc in Batman, The Clown Prince of Earth -22 has Batman at his mercy as he launches a different kind of endgame. Having slain both the Gotham police force as well as the rest of Batman's foes, Joker embarks on a murder spree of Gotham's parents before proceeding to infect their orphaned children with his deadly toxin, engaging in a repeated perversion of Batman's own origin. When an enraged Batman breaks free, he commits an act atypical of the character in most worlds of the multiverse – whether intentionally or otherwise, he ends The Joker's killing spree by snapping the villain's neck during the course of their battle.

That's not the end of The Joker's impact on Batman's life, though, or on the rest of this world. Upon killing his foe in such close proximity, Batman is exposed to the very toxins that not only created The Joker in the first place, but continued to drive him into an increasingly downward spiral of insanity. These chemicals are shown to have the same adverse and slow-acting effects on Batman in the aftermath of The Joker's demise. Knowing that at some point that he will succumb to the nanotoxins and must be taken down, Batman establishes a rigid training protocol for Batgirl, Nightwing, Red Hood, and Red Robin to secretly prepare them for this eventual encounter. Upon revealing to them the reasons for this training, though, his mind snaps, and with The Joker's toxins now dominant, he fatally ambushes his four most trusted allies. Notably, Robin – aka his son Damian Wayne – is absent from this sequence.

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Batman Destroys the DC Universe, Or At Least One of Them

One week later, Batman has taken his madness up to the Justice League Watchtower, where he turns the weapons gathered there against his one-time colleagues, including Superman and his family. Before Clark, Lois, and Jon's demise, though, the psychotically insane Batman brings forth not only the once-absent Damian, now similarly transformed, but also his ghastly pet Robins – presumably selected from the children previously poisoned by The Joker. The twisted pseudo-family of the Batman, who now laughs, watches Superman turn and kill his own family off-panel after Batman exposes him to a sample of black Kryptonite.

The Batman Who Laughs is next seen sitting comfortably on a throne comprised of his victims' bodies, and along with his Robins-on-a-leash, is now adorned in his trademark spiked blindfold – completing not only his journey into madness, but also his seeming affinity with B&D fashion. All opposition thrown against him has failed, and having conquered his world, this Batman feels that there's little else for him to accomplish – that is, until Barbatos arrives, and enlists him in his quest to cast his darkness outside the sphere of the Dark Multiverse. This chronicle essentially brings The Batman Who Laugh's history into the present day, but there's still more that the character has to share regarding Barbatos' intentions.

Who Is That Masking-Taped Man?

The one-shot's entire narrative is a first-person account from the character who was once Earth -22's Batman, who relates his tale to an unknown and tormented figure who's been bloodied, bound in tape from head to toe, and chained to a wheelchair. The mysterious figure remains unidentified, although the Batman Who Laugh's ever-increasing madness combined with the now-absent Damian points towards one fairly obvious guess. There is precedent for a toxic aggressor/victim relationship between The Joker and Robin, after all, and this Batman is far more deadly and insane than The Joker ever was.

The Batman Who Laughs goes on to reveal to his victim the issue's coup de grâce – the pending incursion of something far worse than the Dark Knights. Yes, there is something worse – namely, a multiverse full of even more nightmarish versions of the Justice League. Among the corrupted versions of characters shown in Rossmo's two-page closing spread are additional iterations of Batman, including one who appears to be a primitive version akin to Bruce Wayne representing the game-changing Bat-tribe, and one who's possibly some kind of undead zombie. One prominent image appears to show a Superman/Parasite mashup, and another Superman bears a very strong Darkseid influence. The Flash, Green Lantern and Aquaman are also given the Dark Multiverse treatment.

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The Batman Who Laughs #1 not only completes the backstories of all seven Dark Knights, but also furthers the events of Dark Nights: Metal since the release of that series' most recent issue. The imminent invasion from the Dark Multiverse is set up to storm into Earth-0 in Dark Nights: Metal #4, on sale December 20.