Dark Nights: Death Metal has finally come to a close, with the heroes of DC rising to battle the Dark Multiverse and setting the stage for the upcoming Infinite Frontier era.
While Dark Nights: Death Metal had its line of tie-in specials and anthologies, there were tentative plans for the crossover event to take over DC Comics' monthly issues. However, plans changed to publish a tighter crossover event. Writer Scott Snyder hinted that the Death Metal monthly would have featured Aquaman as a linking character while chatting with CBR.
"When it came to things that got cut, not really [anything]. The only thing that got cut is we had an Aquaman storyline that would basically happen in the stuff we have now but he was going to be one of the through lines when they asked to expand and it was going to take over the whole line for a month and it was going to be like fifty issues," Snyder tells CBR. "He was really going to be the through-line through a lot of it and when we wound up contracting -- there are still things I miss from that."
Rather than run the risk of potentially diluting the event and the dozens of tie-in issues, plans shifted to keep the event to a handful of specials and a tie-in storyline running in the pages of Justice League. Due to this reduction, several character arcs that were planned weren't able to be reincorporated back into the resulting story.
"It wasn't like it was planned but once we had the opportunity to put things over there, we couldn't pick [them] back up. There was a whole Swamp Thing story and there was a Sgt. Rock story and there was a whole Captain Marvel Family story. There were a lot of things I loved and it was all fun, like the Teen Tyrants -- the Teen Titans that were all badass -- there was a lot of stuff created when we had more space but then we couldn't do but there wasn't stuff in the original plan that we cut," Snyder elaborated. "It was more like we made it and then [it expanded] and then it got cut. I still wish some of the stuff made it, like the Aquaman stuff in particular, but I wouldn't trade doing fifty [issues] to get those things for what we have."
Written by Scott Snyder, penciled by Greg Capullo, Yanick Paquette and Bryan Hitch, inked by Jonathan Glapion, colored by FCO Plascencia, Nathan Fairbairn and Alex Sinclair and lettered by Tom Napolitano, Dark Nights: Death Metal #7 is on sale now from DC.