Dark Matter, Dark Multiverse

Galaxies Spin Faster Than We Can Explain

One of the things making superheroes different from ancient myths is the use of modern science – of course, not real science, but a fictional or misconstrued version of it – to explain the source of superheroes and supervillains powers and weapons. The first page of the first superhero story devotes some space to "explain" how the facts of insect strength make it plausible that a super-man could exist. Batman and Robin, back in the Forties, had communication devices resembling modern cellphones. The "Many Worlds" interpretation of quantum physics likely helped inspire the Earth Two (and, later, Multiverse) concocted by Gardner Fox and other creators. Antimatter helped inspire Qward and the Anti-Monitor. Radium and heavy water were used to explain kryptonite, the Flash's super speed, and various other things. The various Flashes use Einstein's theory of special relativity. Final Crisis mentions a graviton superhighway. Comic book pseudoscience draws upon real science– frequently newer and more speculative science, the results that have not been explained or understood completely. Dark Nights: Metal is the latest to forge a new connection between cutting-edge science and the comics.

Way back in 1940, when Flash Comics #1 debuted some of the first science-based superheroes to follow Superman, Hawkman's power of flight was said to depend upon the use of "ninth metal." Presumably, the first eight were those metals known to the ancients, which did indeed number approximately, if not exactly, eight (copper, tin, lead, iron, gold, silver, antimony, and mercury). By the time 1940 rolled around, the periodic table had dozens of metals, but the ancient Egyptian setting of Hawkman's pre-reincarnation origin made eight a more plausible number, and so one could imagine that some unknown, undiscovered metal would have unique new properties. The fictional ninth metal in the Hawk-universe, with anti-gravity powers and various bio-enhancements, is considerably more interesting than whatever the actual ninth metal to be discovered was (possibly bismuth, platinum, or nickel, depending on the source). As comic book science caught up with the real world post-1940, someone realized that "ninth" metal was discovered a long time ago and so the number ought to be bumped to the vague, but similar-sounding "nth." This substance is due to play a starring role in Dark Nights: Metal, and its already-impressive list of properties is certain to grow.

The (pseudo)scientific surprise in Metal #1 was the notion of the dark multiverse being something based on the (seemingly) real scientific phenomenon known as dark matter. Dark matter is real, or at least it's a serious proposition that it may be real.

A realization that goes back to Isaac Newton is that the paths of bodies in space are predictable given their masses and initial positions and motion. If you watch bodies in space move for a while, you can figure out their masses. This was applied to the solar system and worked like a charm. But as soon as someone tried to apply it to galaxies, the results came out strange, seeming to indicate that galaxies were heavier than the number and size of stars in them would indicate. In the 1880s, this was noticed in our galaxy. In 1933, the same year that Jerry Siegel published his first character named Superman, it was noticed in other galaxies. At first, scientists figured that whatever they were missing would eventually be found, but 130 years later, there's still no answer. There have been plenty of ideas, but for one reason or another, none of them work. The stars we can see don't weigh enough. Clouds of dust and gas would glow softly in infrared. Scientists even came up with one idea if the dark matter came in big lumps heavier than the Sun (MACHOs = massive, compact halo objects) and another if they were tiny subatomic particles (WIMPs = weakly interactive massive particles). As of 2017, the explanations for dark matter fall into two categories: Disproven or Inconclusive. We still don't know what dark matter is. Along the way, there have been suggestions that dark matter may not exist at all, and maybe something else that we think is true is actually false. Maybe gravity works differently than we think. All speculative. Nobody knows.

But here's why dark matter is such a big mystery: If dark matter exists, there's a lot of it. Really a lot. It's not that we have a universe with regular matter and dark matter is a little something extra on the side. Dark matter outweighs regular matter considerably, by a ratio of 5.5 to 1. However much you weigh, there are five and a half yous worth of dark matter out there somewhere. The universe is mainly dark matter. Well, unless you count something else called dark energy, which adds up to even more than the dark matter. If you add up the mass-energy together, the dark stuff is 19.4 times as much as the regular matter we're made of. For every you, there are nineteen and a half dark yous. Granted, real science speculates that this is probably not grouped into things like you, but we really don't know how it's composed or arranged.

This little science lesson impacts the story as follows. Remember back in a little crossover called Crisison Infinite Earths when we had an infinite number of matter dimensions and one antimatter dimension? Well, there's a real physics tidbit behind that. In our universe, there really is a lot of matter and, so far as we know, only a tiny bit of antimatter. On paper, they are equal and in some ways opposite, but out there in space, matter is enormously more common.

So, Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo, in invoking a dark multiverse, aren't just paraphrasing a couple of sentences from a science magazine into their story. They're setting up this dark (and hostile) thing up to be something big, bigger than whatever our heroes and their multiverse have to throw against it. As Kendra Saunders explains briefly in Metal #1, "Dark matter and dark energy actually make up the great majority of our universe."

So, credit the Metal creators with this: They have followed a long tradition of drawing upon real science as the basis for comic book pseudoscience, and will probably educate readers at least a bit along the way. But for now, the more striking thing is the implication that Kendra's speech balloon introduced and this post explains in more detail – this promises to be the biggest threat that has been introduced yet. At least, if we measure threats in kilograms. Suffice it to read their intention: This thing is big and bigger than our heroes. Unlike the Injustice Gang, unlike the Joker, or Sinestro, Bizarro, the Antimonitor, or the Crime Syndicate, the bad guys in this story aren't going to be like our heroes' dark doubles, but as something much bigger, stronger, and more numerous. Wish them well.

Zur En Arrh

Fifty years before Grant Morrison's epic-length run on Batman was beginning to peak in interest, a story that was key to his appeared in Batman #113. "Batman -- The Superman of Planet X" played with the boundaries of reality, opening with a framing scene that suggested that it was all a dream, but with no definite resolution by the story's end if it was a dream or strange but real. Set on a planet called Zur En Arrh, the adventure teams Batman up with a distant admirer of his named Tlano. The concept of the story was to invert the Superman-Batman team by making Batman the one with the super-powers and his partner the one with the scientific gadgets. This sort of role reversal or role reassignment was standard fare for Silver Age stories. What if Batman was Robin? What if Robin was Batman? What if Batman was fat?

If you imagine, however, that Batman had the experience as a dream, and apply the Freudian notion that dreams reveal hidden preoccupations, you can take it as evidence that Batman has, in comparison with Superman, an inferiority complex and that his subconscious created the fantasy to let him experience the superior role for a change. Grant Morrison fills in this explanation (along with the idea that exposure to a villain's hallucinogenic gas, not a mere dream, triggered the vision) in explicitly psychological terms in Batman #679, with Bat-Mite providing the analysis. Bruce, still reeling from Doctor Hurt's attack, provides Morrison's comparison of Batman and Superman, when he comments that his mind is "Like a streamlined engine. A silver bullet." This echoes Superman's catchphrase "Faster than a speeding bullet. More powerful than a locomotive." (A streamlined engine is a type of locomotive.) And that's an encapsulation of Batman that no one can deny -- his superpower is his mind.

Given the notion that Batman had something to compensate for, a vulnerability, what was it? In pre-Crisis (and pre-Dark Knight Returns) history, Batman had a measured sense of humility, and lacking powers, in comparison with Superman, might be cause enough (in the 1958 story, he comments, "It has been fun playing Superman"). But modern Batman asks and gives no quarter. Inasmuchas he lacks the powers of his JLA allies, he more than makes up for that with near-total self actualization, making him one of the hardest superheroes to beat. The limits he perceives for himself are few and far between and largely concern his past. First and foremost, there is his defining origin moment -- his helplessness on the night his parents were killed.

When Bruce speaks with the evil monk in Batman #681, he speaks of a hole in his mind, waiting to open up and swallow him whole. As he turns to discuss his plans for a defensive measure, a backup personality to save him in the event of an attack on his mind that may have already taken place, it is clear that he is describing, without being fully aware then of the details, the attack that Doctor Hurt began through some unrevealed brainwashing that took place during the ten days of the isolation experiment (the basis of another old story from Batman #156). This is a second weakness that Bruce has, because of the vulnerability that Doctor Hurt took advantage of. A single panel, easy to miss, reveals the connection between the two: the words "Zur En Arrh", in mirror image, is placed into the middle of this discussion. By the end of the issue, we know that this phrase was not a string of random syllables, but from a mishearing of one of the last things Thomas Wayne ever said -- a line that Bruce did not hear clearly enough to understand -- a comment that if Zorro actually existed, he would be branded mad -- Zorro in Arkham.

This itself points to a quality of Batman often considered a flaw of his (if an essential one): That his obsession with crime and dressing up like a bat is fundamentally insane. That perspective can be seen in the 1989 Batman movie, as well as Morrison's Arkham Asylum which presented Batman's jarring confession: "I'm afraid. I'm afraid that the Joker may be right about me. Sometimes I... question the rationality of my actions. And I'm afraid that when I walk through those Arkham gates... when I walk into Arkham and the doors close behind me... it'll be just like coming home." While Batman teeters on the edge of losing his composure in that story, he loses it utterly in Batman, R.I.P.

Morrison structures all of these vulnerabilities together: A line that alludes to the madness of the hero that Bruce will one day become is spoken by his father. Then the act that brutally sets him on his life's path takes his parents from him. The sounds of that phrase surface in a hallucination that exposes Batman's weakness in comparison to his friend and ally, Superman. When he thinks of weakness, that phrase, the thing ringing in his mind before the gunshots, brings it all together -- his helplessness, powerlessness, loss, and madness.

Therefore, it is not surprising that someone empowered to manipulate Bruce, with access to all of his memories, would choose a phrase that Bruce associates with weakness, instead of a random one, to trigger in him a weakened state. The phrase already has those associations -- it does part of Doctor Hurt's work for him already. Doctor Hurt sums it up in Batman #677: "The extreme lengths to which our boy has gone to make himself strong are powerful indicators of the weakness he feels he must overcome. That weakness is still there, inside. The fracture that will break the man." Doctor Hurt thereby asserts firmly that it is not just a psychological trigger phrase that was programmed into Bruce that will bring him down -- it is the very weakness that Bruce has been trying to overcome since the beginning. The loss of his parents. The tragedy that came with the sounds "Zur En Arrh" in Bruce's ears.

A plot point that led to some confusion was that the phrase that Doctor Hurt used to put Bruce into a helpless state was the same one that Bruce used to activate his savage backup personality, the Batman of Zur En Arrh. Given that Bruce had no conscious memory of the details of Doctor Hurt's plan until some of them began to resurface in #674, we cannot conclude that Bruce chose the trigger knowing that it was specifically the trigger that would be used to attack him. But it's not so strange that he would use the personality that was super-strong as his salvation, or the phrase associated with it. Coming from whatever subconscious sense that he had, Bruce put his weakness front and center to trigger his strength. That is the essence of his life: Everything strong that he is was caused by the defining moment of helplessness. Psychologically, he doesn't run from it -- when he needs to be strong, he remembers it. That's what he chooses to trigger the Batman of Zur En Arrh. (Note: The purple costume was the costume worn by Tlano, not by our Batman; that is a confound from the older story to Bruce's defense.) Somehow, Bruce was training himself to be the Batman of Zur En Arrh when he heard the phrase. His training was incomplete. If it had worked, he would have beaten the Club of Villains physically when they invaded the Batcave. Instead, he knew that he was not ready, fell to the ground, and endured their predations on his prostrate body. He needed to mutter the key phrase to himself more over the next day, all the more revived in his purpose by having been led again to Crime Alley.

The Zur En Arrh hallucination had a number of interesting follow-ups. In Batman #682, we see the Bat-Radia, the artifact Tlano gives Batman in the original story, in Batman's palm while he arranges items in the Batcave. This is presumably a small joke on Morrison's part, since the Bat-Radia should not exist if the adventure was a hallucination. Issue #678 opens with a panel showing a slightly different version of the Bat-Radia, evidentally part of the vision Bruce had, as Tim reads from the Black Casebook. Most recently, we see that Zur En Arrh is the acoustical password that Dick uses to access the vault where Bruce's body was placed after Blackest Night. It is a small mystery as to how a vault in Dick's use utilizes that phrase, but that mystery has more than one possible resolution.

This account of Bruce's vulnerabilities, all tied up into a tidy package, leaves one thing out. In Batman #673, Bruce recollects that when he was about five years old, he first senses "the presence of a toppling void in the center of existence. For the first time in my life, I suddenly grasp something. Mom and Dad are going to die." Is this an epiphany that anyone might have had -- the universality of death? Or did something -- besides the discovery of the cave under Wayne Manor depicted in the artwork of that scene -- make Bruce sense such a void? In the Detective #235 account of the costume party to which Thomas Wayne first wore the batsuit that inspired Bruce's, young Bruce sees his father in the costume before the party. Ten years later, the Waynes are killed. In Morrison's telling, the timeline must be somewhat different, but could the party have been the basis of young Bruce's sense of a toppling void? Did Black Glove iniquities take place and mark the Waynes for their eventual destruction, the way that criminal activities of a less grand kind did in Detective #235? When Doctor Hurt comments in #678 "How you've grown" does that indicate a meeting between Hurt and young Bruce? Given Morrison's notion that Bruce is 35 and the newspaper headline in #678 reading "GOTHAM'S HURT MISSING" marked 31 years in the past, the timeline works out very well for that toppling void to have coincided with the Waynes' first meeting with The Black Glove.

Update: While I have long associated the "toppling void" comment with a possible association between the Wayne family and the Black Glove when Bruce was about five, there is an existing explanation that is more prosaic. The scene depicted in the artwork at that point in #673 is a well-established scene, occuring in stories such as Batman #0 and "The Man Who Falls". #673 shows Bruce discovering the cave and its bats from above, but the earlier renditions show him falling ("toppling") into it and identify his age as four. This doesn't mean that there isn't something more to the scene -- it's not quite apparent why finding a scary cave would lead one to believe that one's parents would die. Whereas the party from Detective #235 is an event from roughly the same time frame (in #235's version, Bruce must have been about four at the party and fourteen when his parents died) and did confront Bruce with an event that led to his parents' deaths -- though without any obvious clues to that effect at the time.