WARNING: The following contains major spoilers for Dark Nights: Death Metal #4 by Scott Snyder, Greg Capullo, Jonathan Glapion, FCO Plascencia and Tom Napolitano, on sale now.

As the crossover event Dark Nights: Death Metal reaches its halfway point, the story has continued to pull out all the stops as DC's heroes desperately scramble to restore the DC Multiverse from Perpetua and the Darkest Knight, the Batman Who Laughs' transformed omnipotent state. And while Wonder Woman was able to gain the surprise assistance of the villainous Superboy-Prime and receive the Crisis energy she sought, the energy inadvertently empowered the Darkest Knight into the greatest threat the multiverse has ever known in Dark Nights: Death Metal #4.

In an exclusive interview with CBR, co-creator Scott Snyder unpacks all the major revelations from Death Metal #4 and teases what readers can expect next.

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Superboy Prime

Superboy-Prime is one of the most surprising characters in this issue. What was the rationale behind his integration in this issue and surprising turn?

Scott Snyder: He's kind of loomed large over the mythology of Metal, the [2018 crossover event.] I'd get asked about him all the time because we broke the Source Wall with the first Metal, and he was ostensibly trapped in the Source Wall up to that point. So there was always the question if he was going to return in some way. For us, I think the thing that made him such a special character, and the reason we wanted to wait on bringing him back until now is he's someone who speaks so directly to a lot of what Death Metal is about. He's a character whose villainy lies in a desire to bring things back and to return to a time that had simpler versions of the heroes where things weren't as complicated. And a lot of what we're doing in Death Metal is speaking to why that's an impossibility and that we have to embrace the future and be welcoming of whatever that future looks like and have a DCU that celebrates the past, where everything that happened in the past story-wise matters but is also brave about creating and exploring new frontiers.

So Superboy-Prime was always sort of a character who, I think, existed right at the crossroads of a lot of things we were talking about. We wanted to bring him in in a way that would give him a real meaty role at a moment when the story is just at its turning point, that's why he comes in here. I also spoke to Geoff Johns a lot about the character recently and he was extremely helpful about making sure what we do with him -- not just in this issue but in the subsequent issues coming because he has a role in those as well -- tracks with who he is and makes for a good story with him. The issue that I'm working on with Geoff, Death Metal: The Secret Origin, is also about Superboy-Prime.

How'd you find his voice? He's less petulant than we normally see him here; he's pissed but more contemplative at the same time.

Snyder: Well, he's been through a lot! He was trapped in the wall for a long time and, honestly, I felt -- and Geoff felt the same way -- that he should grow up a bit. As a villain, you're right, "petulant" is a good word for him, but what he wanted in the Infinite Crisis was something that was more reductive. At a time when the DCU was robust when Infinite Crisis came out, it was such a rich moment in DC continuity, with so many writers and artists working at DC; it was a much bigger moment for us, in terms of how many books were coming out. I think there was a feeling of him wanting it to be simpler felt like a villainous action and the actions of someone like that -- petulant and more brattish -- simply because there was such an outpouring of creative energy and the world was much more stable.

Now, I think with events in the world and in comics and the marketplace with COVID and everything [making things] just so volatile and so nerve-wracking -- even though we're really hopeful and confident about the future -- it felt like his desire to return to simpler times was almost more understandable, more sympathetic. So I wanted to treat him with a little bit more maturity in the way that he spoke and approached things. There was a moment's thought about having him grown a little bit older so he would have been Superman-Prime in this world, but it just felt wrong.

When you see Darkseid, who was a baby in the first Metal, is an old man in this one, so we swapped it around as a kind of nod. And the Anti-Monitor is kind of reducing himself to eventually become nothing so he's young. So it's kind of like the stages of life where the Anti-Monitor is the child, Darkseid is the old man, Superboy-Prime is right in the middle in the prime of his life, being like "This is what I want. This is what should exist for the DCU."

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Death Metal Final Crisis Darkseid

Wonder Woman talking to Superboy-Prime makes sense; she's the P.O.V. character in all of this and embodies the truth. What made Superman going to the Final Crisis world and Batman going to the Crisis on Infinite Earths world make sense?

Snyder: Superman going to Final Crisis made sense because that whole story was about him and his mythology and how he's the fulcrum of so many things in the DC Universe. But for Crisis on Infinite Earths, I felt Batman made sense because the Anti-Monitor is kind of running everything back from maturity to birth, kind of like Anti-Life -- but not like the Omega Sanction -- but the idea of an inverted lifecycle. But Batman, being lord of the dead -- and people are speculating he may already be dead as a character -- felt like an interesting fit going against a child reducing life to its simplest building blocks before eliminating it.

You've built up the Robin King, and he's killed characters on other worlds, but now he's started killing characters in this DC Universe. He's so mean; he killed Jonah Hex twice! What made Jonah Hex make sense as the first casualty on this world?

Snyder: I didn't want to start killing characters right and left in some vicious, violent thing where we're disrespecting characters. I thought about killing Swamp Thing, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. I have too much love for that character in a way that I felt he needs a bigger ending if he's going to get it. But Hex, I felt was a character who had built up a lot of goodwill in the story, especially with Harley, who could go. But the Robin King special by Peter J. Tomasi, that has some deaths in it, and it's on his world and our world. It's definitely one of the darkest issues I've ever read, it's in our Metal-Verse, but it's also quite beautiful.

I love what he does with it, it explores the Robin King as a child who, instead of when his parents are killed -- by him [chuckles] -- when he's at the funeral, he knows Alfred must be staring at him, thinking about how his mind must be down in a cave somewhere, like bats running in the dark. But instead, he's looking up at a bird in a tree singing and that's he feels, free of his parents and the old guard and expectations, and he can't wait for other children to feel this way as well. But he's so evil and I enjoy him quite a bit. You see the making of his utility belt in that issue as well, he spent the Wayne fortune on it.

You're voicing the Robin King in the animatic series with the original score.

Snyder: They wanted me to do it and Greg [Capullo] keeps making fun of me. They want me to do the lines for the next one, and I don't know but they say it's because I'm pretty upbeat and optimistic about stuff usually even though it's reflected [in our work.] I feel like our stuff is super dark on the outside but hopeful on the inside. But I'm up for it! I'll try Robin King.

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Death Metal 5 cover

There are two big wild cards still off the table, at least in this core series: Lex Luthor and Lobo.

Snyder: They play a really big part in Issues #5 and 6 so you'll see them come back; they're not just off to the side. Luthor, for me, embodies the soul of the whole saga that we've been building from the start of Justice League until now. The other characters in that, Martian Manhunter and Hawkgirl, played a huge role but their stories kind of have a full cycle with that run even though it ended on a bit of a cliffhanger -- they just didn't win -- their full realizations happened over the course of those issues. But Luthor's story really continued, he was at the height of his hubris and arrogance at the end of Justice League and this story really completes it, it's where we want him to go. For the first time in his life, he found faith in something, his belief from this goddess, that humanity was meant to be predators and he would lead us there and be the shepherd and she betrays him and takes everything away.

And he's brought so low, and part of him is even ruined physically, but what he understands is the message he has to communicate to Diana about how she's going about this wrong. Ultimately, she doesn't realize it, but she's going about it like a villain. She's going after the Crisis energy and she's going after the thing a villain would use and -- even though she's going after it for the right reasons and would use it in the right way to restart the multiverse and make it brighter and more hopeful -- would make this moment overly important in the way Crises often do but, more importantly, how villains do things. They take everything and sort of control it and shape it. The energy that she's after is borne of that and that's what Luthor was after too: All the energies from the Totality which are part of this Crisis energy.

The idea of doing the opposite -- thinking small, being humble and realizing you're part of one epic generational story -- requires the opposite, it makes you have to let go. Instead of taking the energy to shape tomorrow, you have to accept whatever tomorrow is going to be, that you're in it with everybody else and do the best you can. That's the sort of flip that Luthor brings to the table that I hope is emotional; I had a lot of fun writing him in it.

Wonder Woman has sort of proved Superboy-Prime right by accidentally giving the Darkest Knight the keys to the kingdom: He has everything he wants and can overthrow Perpetua. She's kind of been away the first half of all of this.

Snyder: Yeah, I really didn't want her to come down and fight with them because she's so above all of it. The reason that she trusts the Batman Who Laughs, even though she knows he isn't trustworthy, is because the beings like hers -- called the Hands that make the Multiverses, like she did with ours -- would suspect that if she's doing what she's doing or she dies and is unable to shield us from their detection, they'll come here and wipe everything out. Not in a way that's destroying it, but undoing it so it never existed.

So she's like "I'm the only choice you have. If you take me down, there's nothing else to protect you from them. And they're far more powerful than anybody else here." And she just assumes that the Batman Who Laughs will see the ceiling to his own ambitions and stop...but he doesn't. He's like "I'm going to kill you and kill them and become bigger than them." She doesn't count on his crazy hubris, but I wanted to keep her removed and out there in space; she looms large but the whole special that James Tynion wrote, called Rise of the New God, that whole issue is the battle between Perpetua and him. So you'll see a lot about her there and we spent a lot of time with her in Justice League so I didn't want this to be a rehash of that; it was always a balancing act. But she's there in a big way now.

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What can readers expect as we go into Issue #5?

Snyder: Issue #5 is a lot of fun because you'll see some stuff that we've never seen before in terms of team-ups. It really is like everyone is on one side for the first time. I can't think of a time when it's all heroes, all villains, every single DC character that's left, back-to-back. That's kind of what Issue #5 is about, and Wonder Woman realizing she has to do something different than she thought, and it brings us back to something fun from the beginning.

Issue #6 brings us to the beginning of the big, final battle and it ties into the specials we're doing at that time, The Last Stories in the War of the DC Universe. I'm so proud of the work that people have done on those, both editorial and creative, there'll be a lot of fun. One of them is what would the superheroes do if they had one moment if they thought they were going to fall in battle, what would they do in that hour. We've brought in so many people that have done legacy work on some characters: Gail Simone for Black Canary and Mark Waid for Superman and brand-new writers for some of the stories in that one too, like Shea Grayson, Regine Sawyer, Mags Visaggio, Chris Sebela. There's a lot of up-and-comers and a lot of torch-carriers that have been with those characters for a long time so I'm thrilled about that as well.

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