Krypto #201: Death Metal Krypto

Category: Krypto
Last article published: 26 October 2019
This is the 202nd post under this label

From: Dark Nights: Death Metal - The Multiverse Who Laughs #1 (January 2021)

So yeah, you can see why I stopped my weekly stripping of every Krypto appearance ever! But wait, this cover is a lie! The Super-Pets story - written by Amanda Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti (hey! I like them!) - never turns the Dog of Steel into a Marvel Zombie! (Though maybe in the future of this dark time line, it will happen. We cut out before it does.)

So the conceit of the DC Universe of the past few years is that there's a Dark Multiverse out there that's essentially DC's answer to What If? Various Earths where things went wrong, where the heroes didn't win the day during those big events, or were corrupted, etc. You can hear the guitars wailing. In the grammatically-deficient The Multiverse Who Laughs, we get a bunch of short stories set in this Dark Multiverse (AKA The Last 52), and in "The Super-Threats!", Krypto returns from deep space after being a week away (49 days for him) to find Earth ravaged by a zombie virus. There's now a ring around the planet, as somebody's already taken care of business.

As it turns out, the Super-Pets are the only survivors thanks to Beppo finding a cure just a little too late. Mangual's lettering really does it for me though.

Each animal has its speech bubble shape and I love it. Not seen here: Ace uses an old Batman logo shape, Beppo has a banana, and Bat-Cow a cow bell. They catch Krypto up, but he has barely any time to mourn the loss of his wife and 6 pups when Beppo's rush job proves temporary.

Maybe the Kryptonians are more resistant to the virus, maybe we're heading for that cover after all. It IS the DARK Multiverse after all.