Batman Who Laughs Doesn’t Even KNOW About DC’s Ultimate Foe

If there’s one thing that defines DC Comics’ universe-shattering new event Dark Nights: Death Metal, other than the guitar-heavy genre that gives the storyline its name, that thing is continuous escalation. Since the original storyline Death Metal is continuing, Dark Nights: Metal, writer Scott Snyder has taken readers through a series of larger and larger threats: first The Batman Who Laughs invaded from the nightmares of the Dark Multiverse, then Lex Luthor used the Dark Multiverse’s powers to awaken the villainous god Perpetua, and now The Batman Who Laughs has fused with a god himself as they rule over a ruined Earth. But even before we fully see what the new TBWL is capable of, Snyder is already dropping hints about an even more formidable threat that lies outside the multiverse.

In Dark Nights: Death Metal #1, Wonder Woman killed The Batman Who Laughs, but the nigh-omniscient trickster planned for it: his followers carried out a plan to reanimate his brain inside the body of a Bruce Wayne with the powers of Watchmen‘s Doctor Manhattan, creating a reality-warper named The Darkest Knight. The Batman Who Laughs (or, the being who used to be The Batman Who Laughs) hides this transformation from Perpetua, convincing her that nothing has changed so that he can further a secret plan of his own: to take control of the multiverse away from her and remake it in his own twisted image.

Perpetua has no idea what horrors TBWL has brewing, or the horror that he became, and leaves him to do what she thinks is her bidding. Before she does, however, she has a message for him: she knows he is a trickster, and she needs him to know that if “the beings like her” become aware of her efforts to reconquer and remake the multiverse, they will intervene as they did in her first attempt when the universe began. She calls her species “the Hands”, and warns TBWL: “If you usurp me, the Hands will come for us both, and my judgment… while harsh… is nothing compared to the reckoning they would bring.”

The Hands are a new addition to the DC cosmology, but the concept of the DC Universe being created by “hands” runs through its entire history. In the Silver Age volume of Green Lantern, a scientist named Krona traveled back to the beginning of time and saw the universe being created in a giant cosmic hand, believed to belong to The Presence, DCs equivalent of the Abrahamic God. Crisis On Infinite Earths revealed that the hand belonged to the Anti-Monitor. The recent DC Rebirth event recast the hand as that of Doctor Manhattan, whose experiment with the DC Universe created the New 52 reboot. And then, finally, the recent Justice League #22, the hand is revealed to have belonged to Perpetua, the true creator of the multiverse, before the other hands intervened and turned her work of doom and evil into a world of justice and optimism.

What do the other Hands look like? We may have seen one already in the work of Grant Morrison, the writer who established the villain Barbatos that was used in the first Dark Nights. In Grant Morrison’s Multiversity, an anthology with a wide cast of artists, the ultimate villain is known as the Empty Hand. This dark god from outside the universe attempts to destroy not just the DC Multiverse, but the very story they are a part of, as a test of its power. When The Batman Who Laughs executes his plan and usurps Perpetua, the Hands will come, and the DC Universe may be changed forever.

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