Batman: Last Knight on Earth #2: This issue is difficult to follow as it requires a pretty deep knowledge of DC characters to understand even a small portion of the Easter eggs that Snyder leaves scattered around the devastated United States. On the plus side, you only need to recognize a few of those Easter eggs to understand how bad the situation is. For example, the Flashes are trapped in some sort of Speed Force storm that ravages the country, the "Atlantean incident" has boiled the seas, the jars containing planets like Kandor are shattered across the plains, and extraterrestrial warships from the "space cavalry" lay rotting in the fields: it's technicolor horrors everywhere you look.
Observing this devastation as they glide across the broken heartland, Bruce and the Joker then come upon Fort Waller. This sequence is extremely heavy on Easter eggs, and I had to do a lot of internet research to understand even some of what happened. As far as I can tell, it was where Earth's good people had their last stand. Earth's most brilliant scientists gathered there to create a new generation of heroes to fight against Luthor and his army. Firestorm was its guardian, and the Green and the Red "blessed it with their avatars," meaning, I think, Swamp Man and Animal Man. Instead, it all collapsed into everyone fighting over the last dregs of power. Again, I'm not sure that I'm connecting the dots correctly, but I'm guessing that Firestorm exploded (or something) and irradiated the area. Legions of mutated Animal Men attack the remaining humans guarding the outpost while an enormous and mindless Swamp Thing wanders the area. It's very grim, and Snyder successfully uses it as a metaphor for the pointlessness of any war, let alone this one.
Bruce and the Joker move onto the Plains of Solitude in their search for Clark, but they instead find Luthor living on the Kent farm surrounded by Superman clones. He's trying to find a way to alter the space-time continuum in the exact way necessary to bring baby Superman's spaceship to Earth again. Bruce is unimpressed, and he instead wants to know what Luthor did to create this situation. Here, we learn the truth, and it's a doozy.
Luthor and Starro (seriously? Starro?) placed emotionally responsive sunstones in the minds of every person on Earth. Luthor then challenged Superman to a debate. If Superman convinced people to embrace good, Luthor would die, via kryptonite shards buried underneath the Earth that the sunstones would activate. If Luthor convinced people to embrace evil, Superman would die in the same way. Superman's speech was so good, Luthor expected that he'd win. He didn't. Essentially, Superman lost a superpowered debate. I have to say that I liked it better when it was just Luthor making an appeal to everyone's basest instincts and they followed his lead, to a disastrous result. In the current era, we'd all believe that. You didn't need emotionally responsive sunstones or hidden kryptonite shards. Our current view of humanity is dim enough.
At this point, Bane and Scarecrow arrive, somehow having tracked Bruce to the farm. I initially thought that Scarecrow used his drugs to turn the Supermen on their side, but upon re-reading this issue yet again I think that it may actually be Omega's Anti-Life Equation that does the job. Diana arrives just in time to save Bruce and the Joker, as Luthor sacrifices himself to buy them time to escape. Diana takes them to the Spectre's enormous cloak, which serves as a portal to Hades. As they travel down the River Styx, Bruce is overcome with doubt about everything. He wonders if the people left on the surface view it as a sort of Eden, exactly because it's so twisted. (It's now clear that Diana meant it literally when she said the people that she and the New Amazons are protecting in the Earth's core are the ones who chose good.) Diana is unable to provide much comfort, though notes that she's there because he's the one that opened the Justice League's door (i.e., he has inspired some hope in her). They arrive in Gotham where Omega has subjected everyone to his vision. They miraculously find Dick Grayson, injecting a little more hope into this enterprise.
All that said, I'm not sure where we go from here. I feel like it would all feel more believable if the story's foundation wasn't built on, let's repeat one more time, emotionally responsive sunstones. We could be watching a hopeless Bruce desperately cling to his ideals in the face of a lot of evidence encouraging him not to do so. But, Snyder distracts us with unnecessary flourishes that detract from the emotions we could be feeling. I'm hoping focusing on Gotham grounds us in a way only Gotham can.
Batman: Last Knight on Earth #3: For all the spectacular world-building that Snyder and Capullo did in the first issue of this series, it ends with a whimper.
Snyder reveals that the original Bruce Wayne is Omega, though he never explains how exactly he is. Old Bruce tells New Bruce that he "got back on his feet" without magic or pits, "just a vision." That said, he describes the rioters at the Hall of Justice cutting off pieces of him and setting him on fire; he had no tongue and no teeth by the end. Snyder never fills in this blank. How did no one realize he survived? How did he get back his tongue and his teeth without magic or pits? How is he not burned more than he is? Snyder also doesn't explain how Tim somehow didn't fall under the sway of the original Omega Signal, allowing him to build the suit that he used to free Dick and the rest of the Owls. (It was only on my second reading that I realized they somehow retrofitted Tim's suit for the Joker; you have to realize that Barbara unveiled said suit when she was showing Bruce Tim's body.) We also don't learn how New Bruce manages to escape the "throne" where Old Bruce is holding him with simply a penny; we just know that he does. In other words, loose ends, we have them.
The only real resolution we get is the Joker telling New Bruce that he was responsible for leading Old Batman to believe that Joe Chill killed his parents because a drunken Thomas Wayne accidentally killed his son in surgery. The Joker did it because he wanted to break Batman exactly because he saw what Luthor was planning and knew a too trusting Batman would open the door. He jokes that he didn't know if Alfred staked his head on the pike for being too cruel or not cruel enough. Sure, OK.
I'm not saying that I didn't enjoy the zaniness of this series. But, it had too many "Starro helped me implant emotionally responsive sunstones into everyone's minds" moments for me to consider it the classic that Snyder clearly wants it to be. The story was supposed to be a reborn Bruce trying to find a way to bring hope to this world without relying on Clark like he always did. He himself has to be that beacon of hope. Instead, we got...Starro.
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