By Zack Quaintance — The musical metaphors are too easy with DC Comics’ big summer event, Dark Nights: Death Metal. You can call it an encore to the first event — Dark Nights: Metal — a simple echo of ideas, inflated to new volume to give the audience more of the things they’ve cheered all along. Or, perhaps you can call it a sophomore album, a tricky followup to an earlier success that needs to check similar boxes while also going in new, stimulating directions.

Both of those metaphors seem apt (ignoring, of course, that this book has absolutely nothing to do with music and is called Metal because it was about the material…but best not to think too about that). If, however, you really want to get to the essence of what this thing is so far, you should call it a cover. And it’s not a cover of its predecessor, but rather of the entire DC Comics superhero universe over the decades.

Dark Nights: Death Metal is more than a sequel. It’s a culmination of a sprawling, multi-title story woven by writer Scott Snyder with the help of fellow writers James Tynion and Joshua Williamson, along with a cadre of artists, from Jorge Jimenez to Greg Capullo (with Jonathan Glapion and FCO Plascencia). I’m not saying this as praise (not yet, anyway); it’s just what it is. Over roughly three years, this story has built a Dark Multiverse (a very Grant Morrison move), it’s broken the famed cosmic Source Wall (a very Jack Kirby move), it’s brought in evil Batmen from alternate worlds while its Big Bad Perpetua destroys the alternate realities of the DC Multiverse (a very Marv Wolfman and George Perez move), and in this week’s Dark Nights: Death Metal #2, it’s repurposing Watchmen characters within the DCU proper (a very Geoff Johns and Gary Frank move).

Sticking with that musical metaphor (I don’t care if it makes sense damn it, it’s easier!), Dark Nights: Death Metal so far has been a raucous college-town bar band bouncing through familiar eras and simple hits, playing a set of all that stuff you love. A little Guns and Roses, some Journey, a dash of Blink 182. It’s laying down discordant elements and ideas to weave a bigger familiar narrative capable of reeling in casual readers with scope and grandiosity.

In evaluating whether this story is working, the simple impulse, of course, is to decry a lack of originality. And certainly, I can see where the repurposing of so much material might turn off readers, especially those who have soured on the publisher as a whole over the past decade of near-constant continuity reconfiguring with a gritty frustrating tinge. I certainly would not begrudge anyone for feeling that, nor would I have a quarrel with readers disavowing this foundational idea of a dark multiverse as a lazy way to generate an army of stock villains, essentially base repurposings of familiar and beloved concepts remixed (more music! I can’t stop!) to look at first blush like something new.

While reading this week’s Dark Nights: Death Metal #2, though, it occurred to me that the event calls for a wait-and-see tact on whether any of it is working in the service of something new. This could be a case of a narrative that speeds through the familiar, featuring a first act of callbacks before deconstructing or repurposing them into something worthwhile. Could be.

From a perhaps naive perspective, this issue showed an underbelly of potential that hadn’t before been obvious before, an alternate universe if you will, where some of the most frustrating DC creative decisions of late are reversed in favor of common sense storytelling choices that leadership has ignored, missing the forrest for the trees (to borrow a cliche) as they mire in impractical logic (legacy characters are redundant and serve no purpose despite an entire generation of readers loving them and clamoring for better usage!).

And this is all captured in the way that this second issue handles the use of the Flash Family.

The Flash, a character whose lone ability is to move at a rapid speed, has been the most stalled book at DC Comics for years, seemingly running in place rather than moving toward any newness, and this owes to how thoroughly curtailed its narrative trajectory has become. From 1985 to 2005 or so, The Flash slowly grew to include one of the largest and most interesting literal families of characters in all of superhero storytelling. At various times it was a warm book heavy on wacky sci-fi that gave readers both reassurance and escapism in this trying era, doubling down on the familial constructions — both blood and chosen — that remain largely intact these days in most readers lives even as the world is riven by contentious divisions. There was a universality to the Flash, a superhero comic that had a deceased old-time dad, a kindly grandfather, an unlikely protagonist doing his best, and all manner of super odd extended family members bouncing around.

And while Death Metal #2 didn’t tap into that directly, it gave every indication that someone at the publisher was aware of family being that franchise’s strength. It remains to be seen whether this is just another tease (curse you DC Rebirth one-shot!), or whether people with decision-making capital in Burbank have thoroughly shaken their head and decided to give long-suffering readers a few wins as the very nature of distribution as well as the format of publication roils beneath them like an early morning tremor in Southern California.

And so yeah, TL;DR: so far Dark Nights: Death Metal has felt like a retread of past ideas from DC Comics superhero history, but that might be the point. In this new issue there is a glimmer of hope (this is me!) that in revisiting older stories — in covering the greatest hits, as it were — there may be a fixing of missteps, a band that essentially hits the notes even better than the originals did on the recorded tracks, remixing it into worthwhile nostalgia rather than the linewide mushy chaos we’ve seen of late. There’s a lot of skill in that, and it’s what this 80-plus year-old publisher has been trying to do for years with varied results.

Whether Dark Nights: Death Metal actually pulls it off is very much a question still waiting to be answered.

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Zack Quaintance is a tech reporter by day and freelance writer by night/weekend. He Tweets compulsively about storytelling and comics as Comics Bookcase.