A mountain has appeared in the middle of Gotham somehow transforming the city into a dark fairyland or something for some reason. Dumb, vague outline? Sounds like Dark Nights: Metal to me! In The Resistance, heroes (and the Suicide Squad) resist villains… but don’t they always do that?!
This book collects some of the tie-in issues to that loathsome event, Dark Nights: Metal. Sometimes tie-ins are better than the event – that’s not the case here. Not a single comic was worth reading.
Batman stumbles about hallucinating in a comic that pointlessly references the likes of Grant Morrison’s The Return of Bruce Wayne #1, Peter Milligan’s Dark Knight, Dark City and Batman’s very first appearance in Detective Comics #27; a couple of one-note baddies – Murder Machine and Devastator – fight the Justice League while another one-note baddie – Dawnbreaker – takes on Green Lantern; that useless idiot Hawkman wanders around a mountain range somewhere for no reason; Barbatos minces around in the background like the pantomime villain he is; and Damian heads up a team consisting of nobody’s favourite B-listers, the Teen Titans, Suicide Squad and Green Arrow to scale the Gotham mountain and punch The Batman Who Laughs because the writers couldn’t come up with anything better.
It would’ve been helpful if we knew anything about the new characters, The Nightmare Batmen, so the encounters would mean something more than nothing, but no – no backstory, no clue who they are other than arbitrary villains, so they remain cyphers. I’d hoped to get answers in this book to help make some sense of the main event, which was a confusing mess, and got nothing.
What little plot there is as shambolic and murky as the main story. What do The Batman Who Laughs’ cards mean? Dunno. How are characters being mind-controlled and by who? Dunno. The only important aspect of the book is that Damian and co. find out that the Nth metal hurts the Nightmare Batmen… except the heroes find this out in the main event anyway so this “reveal” only underscores the book’s irrelevance.
And this volume is irrelevant. No part of The Resistance adds anything to the overall story, goes any way towards fleshing out the new characters or is even remotely entertaining. It’s just extra crap for DC to pick the pockets of fanboys some more. Stjepan Sejic’s art was good in that one issue – that’s what the one star is for – but everything else about The Resistance is, like anything connected to Dark Nights: Metal, a boring waste of time!