For five years, Scott Snyder and artist Greg Capullo charted the course of Batman’s adventures in the New 52 and gave the Dark Knight a modern spin. This summer, Snyder and Capullo are reuniting for Dark Nights: Metal , a new DC event that’s going far beyond Batman and the Justice League as it introduces brand new characters and even a brand new multiverse called the Dark Multiverse.

Art by Greg Capullo. (DC Comics)

Starting in June, Snyder and his co-writer, James Tynion IV will join superstar artists Jim Lee, John Romita, Jr., and Andy Kubert on Dark Days: The Forge; which will lead into the Dark Days: The Casting one-shot in July from the same creative team. Dark Nights: Metal will begin in August, before five new titles will spin out of the event this fall: The Silencer, Sideways, The Immortal Men, Damage, and New Challengers.Recently, IGN was invited to visit the DC office and speak directly to Snyder about the origins of the Metal event, the Dark Multiverse, the ramifications on the DCU, and his plans for New Challengers with artist Andy Kubert.

Art by Greg Capullo. (DC Comics)

Art by Andy Kubert. (DC Comics)

I can’t say too much about it. I don’t want to spoil too much, but ultimately, I got fascinated by this idea that our universe itself is comprised mostly of dark matter and dark energy. Things that we can’t perceive at all, and we’ve only discovered that relatively recently. So it’s almost as if our universe is the foam on the ocean of things that we can’t see, or know, or perceive, and yet we feel the affects of those things right and left.The Dark Multiverse is sort of a completely unexplored area of the DC cosmology that’s new to it, but fits in with the cosmology that’s been created by all of the writers and artists ahead of me. In terms of what Grant [Morrison] was able to do in Multiversity, with Geoff Johns in Infinite Crisis and all the way down to stories like Cosmic Odyssey. I had a great time re-reading all of that stuff.This event, Metal, is really about exploration. It’s about going to places that we couldn’t before, that we wouldn’t before. When things are going well, I feel like the great reward to fans is that you can try new stories, new characters, new creators, and take some risks. The Dark Multiverse is a place, although I can't tell you too much about it in terms of its nature and its effects on the DCU. Anything you think you know about it, or anything you would guess, I promise it will be something very different. One thing is that it's coming here to invade, so the story is largely about the Dark Multiverse bleeding into ours because of some mistakes and things that were done by a particular hero.Yeah. With a different nature. It will surprise people both in terms of its material qualities and the story potential for it, and the things that happen there. It's not just something where I think by the name you would think it was just dark or terrifying versions of that stuff, and certainly there are. There’s a part of it that’s very scary. But it's bigger than that. It’s sort of a tribute to a lot of great stories that I love, doing things in a new way, and exploring realms in the DCU that just haven’t existed before. So again, that’s more than I even thought I would say, so I should shut up before I start spoiling too much.Yes. Nth metal is the key to a story that goes back all the way to the origins of the DC Universe and the origins of man. Nth metal is a very mysterious substance in DCU. If you don't know what that is, Nth metal has all kinds of qualities that don’t really track with each other. It can make you fly, it can make you heal fast, it can give you different sorts of powers and make you reincarnate. Hawkman tries to get to the bottom of this mystery of where it comes from and what it is. He starts to believe that it might lie beyond the known cosmology of the DCU. It unlocks this mystery that leads him past the boundaries of anything that we’ve ever seen before.The breadcrumbs of that mystery are picked up by Batman, and once they are, it sort of leads the Justice League as a whole to this whole new realm of the DCU.No, in fact you'll see clues for it. It’s a story that I’ve wanted to do for a long time. And honestly, I told Greg about it quite a few years ago and was like “I don't think that we’ll ever be able to do this.” Just the nature of the way that comics go, and how events were being run, I just didn't know that we would ever get a chance to do it. So in terms of the mythology that it sets up, it ties into things that we did all the way back to “Court of Owls” very strongly, and all the way through Tom King’s run. Things that are in Detective [Comics]. Obviously, because James [Tynion] is my writing buddy he's doing the prelude to it: Dark Days: The Forge and Dark Days: The Casting.You’ll see that we’ve had this plan for Metal since before Rebirth started, and certainly it's been in coordination with everything happening in the Bat-books, in the Justice League books, and Wonder Woman -- all of that. The plans have been laid for a while, and I hope it'll be a lot of fun for readers to see Easter eggs from all the way back in “Superheavy,” the story we did about Jim Gordon as Batman. Even back in “Zero Year,” there’s some hints of the other developments that I was trying to begin to [build] a story out of, which would eventually become this.I would spoil so much if I answered that. What I’ll say about the Dark Multiverse is that if Rebirth – which has been so good to us and Geoff Johns did such a great job with – is largely about bringing back classic, restoring legacy and honoring the great characters from the past and bringing them back in a way to set them up, then Metal gets to be the bad brother. The one that gets to create all kinds of new stuff. I can say that it affects, or at least the properties of dark energy, dark matter and begin to affect the DCU.You'll see those very clearly in the Dark Matter books that they did an ashcan of for C2E2. What those things are about are creating characters from whole cloth. Some of them are reinventions of characters of the past, like the New Challengers book that I’m going to be doing. But others are brand new, like The Immortals that James is doing with Jim Lee, Sideways, The Silencer, there's a bunch of characters that are coming out. It was a great initiative that DC had, in my opinion, where they got us together for a summit and they said, “Look, Metal is about creating new things. We want to create a new heroes, new villains, and just take a risk."In terms of the ways in which the Dark Multiverse will affect the DCU in terms of Metal and its story, those I can't get into. But I can say the spirit of the Dark Multiverse and the exploration of it is present very much in the Dark Matter line and the ways in which we’re trying to bring in new talent. On the books that I'm gonna be doing for the Dark Matter line, I’m gonna bring in new voices, new writers, and new artists that I’ve gotten to know through my talent workshop.No. Everything Metal, everything Dark Matter everything is in this world. The event really is like if Frank Frazetta and Jack Kirby had a baby to a heavy metal soundtrack.Well, it is! You’ll see on page 2, the Justice League in the craziest battle armor in a war gladiator pit, and it's meant to be just sort of summer fun. There’s dinosaurs, robots... The idea is that we want you to have fun rocking out with us and feeling like DC has had a good year.We've been really lucky with things and thanks to guidance of Geoff and I think a lot of the stuff through Rebirth, the great writing and art that has come in the series, we're able at this point to do events that are celebratory and big. This will have a very big effect on the DCU and it will create new properties, new characters, and new stories in the books themselves with a lot of twists that I don’t think you will see coming.But ultimately, we want it to be just a big party this summer for you to come in and see everything from the most zany stuff that I think you wouldn't expect from characters that I think you'll be really surprised to see in there. All the way to locations that I think you’d never see us go, from Atlantis to the Source Wall, to all over the place. This is Greg and me getting to play with everything. We had such a good time on Batman. I love that character dearly, and he certainly play some lead guitar in this story. But this is really sort of a Justice League one that takes us to every corner of the DCU,And the thing I would stress again that it looks so crazy from the art released that people have been wondering if it takes place in this universe or Elseworlds or whatever. But it is a hundred, thousand, thousand percent in the DCU right now and the effects and the ramifications will be felt here.I’m really, really excited to get a chance to work with Andy [Kubert]. We’ve been friends for awhile, and we’ve done a little bit of work together, but we haven’t really had much of a chance. We started talking about properties we loved and the hundredth birthday of Kirby this year. The idea is that we wanted to do a series that would have the spirit of that bonkers adventure feel that both of us really gravitated towards both as kids and adults.We’re talking about doing Challengers. It’s a book I’ve always loved and I have the anthologies at home. But we decided that if we were going to do them, then we wanted to do it in a new way, in the spirit of Metal. So, the old Challengers exist, as you'll see both an in stories coming and in Dark Days and in Metal. But the team that we’re doing is brand new, and I'll wait until you see his incredible designs to tell you more about them. I don’t want to step on him because he is definitely a guiding force in it too. It also gives me a chance, because we haven't announced yet so I don't want to say. But it also gives me a chance to work with new talent.One of my big initiatives this year, honestly is it to take advantage of the fact that I’ve been able to teach through DC. I love teaching this writer’s workshop for the talent program. You know, it's hard sometimes to be able to find people places just because we’ve been doing double ship and all that stuff. Some of the spirit of Dark Matter, and a book like New Challengers, and some of the other stuff that I’m going to be involved with that will be announced soon, because it's all about “new,” it gives me a chance to bring in talent that I think will be new voices and new storytellers as well. For me it's a big honor and a thrill to get to do that with Andy, who is such a powerhouse artist.