The evil Batmen haunting the Page of DC ’s Dark Nights : metallic element event have each , in their own way , lay marginal different pieces of Bruce Wayne ’s humanity . Within ever one of them is a slice of Bruce that is blemished and fragile that if left unchecked could be the get-go of his descent into the darkness he ’s always kept in spite of appearance .
As we ’ve watched alternative reality versions of Batman kill and then take on the big businessman of his fellow Justice Leaguers , Dark Nights : Metal has been reminding us of how serious his humanity and fatality rate make him . What Batman lacks in right superpowers and magical artillery , he makes up for in hyper - preparedness that ’s deep rooted in his opinion that , at the end of the day , he has no one that he can ever in truth desire except for himself .
The care of involvement and trust that comes out of that kind of closing off is what ends up destroying Bruce Wayne in Batman : The Devastator , a story that easily could have only been about how Batman killed Superman . Instead , though , The Devastator give us the briefest of glimpses into the deep excited vulnerability that Bruce Wayne ’s solve so hard to conceal from the rest of the world .
Preparedness is Batman ’s thing . Even without the money and the gismo and the years of physical conditioning , Batman is able to hold his own against all mode of metahuman baddie specifically because he ’s always in the procedure of devising a plan about how to deal with any given spot at mitt . Given the telephone number of villain out there with mind controlling abilities , it makes sense that Batman would have file on every other fellow member of the Justice League just in casing it ever get to the breaker point where he would have to take one of them out .
But The Devastator begins in a universe where Batman was not entirely inclined to look at with a rogue Superman . On his earth ( Earth -1 ) , the Batman who would finally become the Devastator never imagined that he would ever have to fight Superman , to some extent , because he fully intrust in the friendly relationship they shared . The idea that Superman would ever turn on the existence he ’d sworn to protect was simply unfathomable and so , on the day that he went dark , Batman was thrust into a state of panic that we rarely see him in .
This sort of oversight would be unimaginable in one of DC ’s main continuity — who would Batman be touch about more than Superman ? But The Devastator require that you suspend your disbelief so as to apprise the very specific kind of Batman narrative that it ’s trying to distinguish . As Superman goes in for the final kill , Batman reveals the one contingency plan he has to deal with Kryptonian threats . He gain down to his bash and initiate a chronological sequence that inundate his blood stream with a modified version of the Doomsday virus that transmute him into a grotesque adaptation of himself with a bit of Doomsday ’s feature .
The transformation allows him to get the better of Clark with relief , but The Devastator is n’t particularly concerned with the mechanics of how Batman kill Superman , but rather about the headspace that Bruce incur himself in as a result of his action . The pain of being betrayed by Superman stays with Batman after his transformation . It festers like an assailable , septic would because in Bruce ’s mind , it ’s the trust that he put in Clark that eventually put the world in danger . That all too human flavor of being unmoored by the actions of a roll in the hay one mail Bruce into a spiral that leads to a strong-arm and metaphoric closing off of his faith in others .
In a desperate attempt to protect anyone else from get the annoyance that he ’s ineffectual to articulate , Bruce devises a architectural plan to infect all of Metropolis with the computer virus . While explaining this to Lois , Bruce insist that it ’s because he wants the world to be train for the attack like Superman ’s , but what he ’s really getting at is that he wants others to be prepared to have their kernel break by the the great unwashed they conceive to know so well well .
The Devastator is one of Dark Nights : Metal ’s more square one shots , but it get at an idea about Batman ’s inability to experience rightful emotional affaire that is n’t always articulated quite so poetically . Bruce Wayne is a profoundly lonely Isle of Man who ’s never truly gotten around to unpacking and deal with the tactual sensation of loss and abandonment that come in the viewing of his parent ’ death .
In his drive against criminal offense , he ’s found a reason to live and a chosen kinsperson that plays a major role in maintain him grounded , but to calculate at Bruce Wayne ’s life , it ’s easy to see that he ’s in a constant United States Department of State of having to act very hard to maintain the few deep emotional bonds he ’s forged over the years . That sort of sustentation is all too human , even without having experience the kind of hurt that Bruce has . The Devastator reminds us that in absence seizure of that important emotional body of work , there ’s the jeopardy of unplumbed climb-down from the cosmos and , at least in Batman ’s case , the chance that you could become the world ’s greatest threat .
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