DC Death Metal: Lost without the notes

Superhero comics used to come loaded with footnotes, especially once they built up enough fans who were desperate to know the last time Batman met Sgt Rock. Editors seemed to relish the chance to point the reader in the right direction, and maybe even get in a joke if they could, usually at the creative talent's expense.

But they faded out of fashion at about the same time as thought balloons popped, too childish for the new generation of very serious comic book fans, another reminder of how inherently dopey superhero comics can be.

Which can be a hell of a shame, because I really needed them when I tried reading the DC's Death Metal event comic in collected form recently, and got totally lost without that kind of literary signpost.

The main story, which represented the apex of Scott Snyder's cosmic DC ideas, was easy enough to get in one big collected book, but there were also a bunch of other random tie-ins published in three other books, some of which were characterization filler, and some of which was vital to the overall plot.

It's not easy to keep track of these things - the superhero universes have built up such grand continuities that keeping on top of it all is, more than ever, a fool's errand. But just reading Death Metal in this way is deeply confusing, just as a story. Things build up to big moments that you never actually see and we cut to the aftermath, characters come and go behind the scenes and there is a tremendous amount of telling, rather than showing.

It was all over the place, and a more forgiving reader might appreciate it as some kind of non-linear tale, but it's mainly just confusing. The main characters go off into the big final battle that will kill them all, and three hundred pages later in a different book, they're all hanging out and telling each other they're family before they head off to their doom. But there is no guide, no explanation and certainly no footnotes to tell you where you are going.

It turned out to be a deeply unsatisfying way to follow the story. It might have worked in weekly installments, but collected like this, it's just nonsensical. It might have made a little more sense with some direction, even if the footnotes look corny as heck.