Batman is a rich, nuanced hero. Since people admire him and there is always some sort of evil to defeat, he has been around for a very long time. He has encountered many different supervillains over the course of his long career as a crime fighter, but the one we will be discussing today will leave you reeling.
We will go deeply into the past and character of Omega, a Batman villain who first appeared in the Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo comic book series Batman: Last Knight on Earth. No one was ready for who would truly emerge from behind the mask, despite the fact that he was revealed to be a villain with uncanny similarities to Batman.
Tracing the origins of Omega
To reveal to you who exactly Omega is, we have to trace this villain’s origins. This character is a recent addition to the DC Universe but has quickly risen through the ranks of Batman’s rogues’ gallery to become one of the most prolific villains ever. While his first appearance is debated, there definitely is an origin story that lays bare everything we can possibly know about him.
The Dark Knight decides to embark on a mission through a post-apocalyptic DC landscape in Batman: Last Knight on Earth, which features a large cast of old characters from the DC Universe. He must unfold the cause of this dark future and hunt down the unfathomable force that ruined the world as he knew it, as he tries to assemble together the mystery of his past. Omega, the powerful enemy, was the source of this unfathomable power.
Batman: Last Knight on Earth, by Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo, is set in the future and hence outside of the standard DC continuity. The series will conclude the creative duo’s fan-favorite Batman run, which started with the New 52 and lasted up until Dark Nights: Metal.
Having understood the backdrop, now we move on to the story. In the series, Last Knight on Earth, the Batman we have been following is actually not the original Bruce Wayne. Instead, he’s a clone generated by a machine that was set up by the original Bruce himself, a long time ago, during Snyder and Capullo’s New 52 run. He set it up to make a set of fit and young backups of himself to ensure that Batman was always there to safeguard Gotham.
The most recent clone woke in a dark and dreary world he is unfamiliar with. Most of the heroes that we know and love were either dead or underground, and a villain named Omega had seized control of Gotham with the Anti-Life Equation, leaving most of the place barren wastelands filled with twisted beings. But Omega’s ideas went farther than that. He wanted to boost the signal, effectively controlling the entire world.
This clone Batman dives head first into this world of darkness in an effort to locate and identify the villain Omega, who was wreaking havoc on Gotham city and could potentially destroy the entire world.
Based on all the evidence that Wonder Woman provided about Omega, Batman assumed the villain was another one of the many clones of Bruce Wayne. He thought it was one who had become warped and perverted. When the new Batman eventually confronts the enemy in Last Knight on Earth #3, however, he is taken aback when he discovers his true identity. Omega reveals himself as the actual Bruce Wayne, now old and scarred, as he removes his mask. How did this happen? How did the actual Bruce Wayne turn into Omega? Well, this is how the events unfolded.
The beginnings of this Bruce Wayne appear to be identical to those of The Batman from Prime Earth and writer Scott Snyder’s first take on the character. Bruce Wayne was born into the rich Wayne family and witnessed his parents being murdered by a robber named Joe Chill when he was a child. Following their deaths, Bruce utilised his inherited fortune to train as a superb detective and combatant for several years. As an adult, he returned to Gotham City and adopted the alias Batman to stop crime and injustice in the city. But this is where the story takes a turn.
During a period of immense worldwide unrest due to global warming and an energy crisis, Superman and Lex Luthor planned to hold a live debate on the values of good versus evil, with the loser of the debate being impaled by Kryptonite tied to the human race’s will. Despite the fact that Lex was persuaded by Superman’s arguments and believed that he had lost, humanity as a whole sided with Luthor, resulting in Superman’s death.
A little while before Superman died as a result of the infamous debate, Bruce uncovered a decades-old corpse of a youngster in Crime Alley, who looked to be the son of his parents’ murderer Joe Chill. From the dead body, Batman inferred that Joe Chill had murdered his parents in retaliation against Dr. Wayne’s surgical malpractice that had murdered his own kid. It was, in fact, a clone manufactured by Batman’s arch-enemy, the Joker.
A mob of rioters arrived at the Hall of Justice following Superman’s death. Rather than fighting them, Batman invited them inside in the hopes of persuading them. The crowd, which included men, women, and children, assaulted him, leaving him horribly bruised and mutilated, leading the rest of the world to believe he was dead.
Bruce did survive in actuality, but he had lost confidence in humanity and had resolved to impose order through force. He did so by assassinating the New God Darkseid and impaling his skull on a pole, and then using the cosmic Anti-Life Equation coupled with a modified bat signal to break and enslave the people’s souls, all under the new moniker Omega. Omega inflicted tremendous devastation and even genocide against the Amazonians that Wonder Woman presided over while the surviving heroes attempted to slay him. Gotham became a city-state under his rule, which he utilised to gradually conquer the Earth.
Alfred Pennyworth was one of the only people who realised Bruce was Omega, and he used a cloning machine to produce a clone of Batman with his memories until the riots. Alfred would nurture this Batman to be powerful enough to overcome his genetic template once and for all.
The revelation was super surprising for fans because, as far as we knew, the actual Bruce Wayne was believed to have perished when the world first came apart as a result of Lex Luthor’s newest ploy. But now we know the real truth: Bruce did survive the original attack. He reveals that he eventually healed after being torn apart by ordinary citizens. He returned as Omega after a long journey. Bruce chose to save mankind from its own corrupted self by utilising the Anti-Life Equation to take control of every single living person on the globe, driven by fury and hatred for what had happened to him.
Unfortunately for Batman, he ended up becoming the very thing he had spent his whole life fighting against. He became the greatest villain after losing confidence in people. Nonetheless, it makes a great deal of sense. Despite his descent into villainy, Bruce remained committed to saving humanity, although this evil version did it against their choice. He also developed a fresh clone to change and convert into the next horrible version of himself when he realised that he was nearing the end of his life.
The Batman Who Laughs – exploring another demented story arc featuring the evil Batman!
Once again, none other than Bruce Wayne himself was the villain as the Batman Who Laughs from the Dark Multiverse’s Earth -22. He was Barbatos’ lieutenant and the head of the Dark Knights during the first Dark Multiverse invasion, as well as the Secret Six’s afflicted heroes. He persuaded Perpetua, the multiverse’s initial creator, to choose him as her lieutenant over Lex Luthor, whose vision was hampered by his ego. The Batman Who Laughs persisted in his ambitions, eventually gaining cosmic power and posing a greater menace than Perpetua herself.
The origin of Earth -22’s Batman was very similar to that of all the other incarnations of the Dark Knight. It starts off with Bruce Wayne witnessing his parents being killed in an alleyway when he was a child. He then spent years training and became the hero Batman, fighting powerful villains in Gotham City, vowing retribution against crime.
As a vigilante, Batman took on a variety of sidekicks, including Batgirl, Nightwing, Red Hood and Red Robin. The Justice League also included Bruce as a member. When his world’s Lex Luthor chose to become a hero and sought to persuade the League to let him join, Batman was the only one who objected, knowing that Luthor didn’t believe in being a hero but just in being a villain, only caring about himself in the whole world.
When the Joker went on a rampage across Gotham City killing people, everything went wrong for Batman. This was not your usual altercation between the Bat and the Clown. This would lead to a drastic and unimaginable change in Batman. The clown had found out that he was dying from the very same poisons that had turned him into the deranged villain that he was, and he wanted to take everybody down with him.
All of Batman’s foes, including the Penguin, Catwoman, Killer Croc and the Ventriloquist, were killed by him. Commissioner Jim Gordon, a friend of Batman’s, was slain by the Joker after an acid trap in his notebook accidentally melted his face off. Joker later drugged Batman, briefly paralyzing his body but not his mind, allowing him to observe the chaos he had created without being able to intervene.
In front of Bruce, the Joker attacked a hospital and, to make it personal, murdered the parents of several young children before injecting them with an incurable, permanent strain of Joker Venom. The Joker claims he did this in order to create a combination of Batman and the Joker. When Batman regained movement, he grabbed the Joker and snapped his neck, frightened and enraged by what he had witnessed.
This is already horrifying because Batman always had one rule – that he would never kill a person, even if it was a horrible villain. Fans have always speculated about what would happen to Bruce Wayne if he was ever pushed off the edge and gave in to his instincts and hatred… and well, this story arc has the answer for that. The Joker, unbeknownst to Batman, expelled a toxin from his heart, which infected anybody close to him if he died. It was Batman who was close to him in this situation because he had just snapped Joker’s neck. Thus began Bruce Wayne’s transformation into the Batman Who Laughs.
Two days after the Joker’s assassination, Batman and Superman discussed what had happened. Despite his lack of guilt, he stated that he had no intention of making murder a habit. Superman reassured him that the Metropolis division of S.T.A.R. Labs had committed to caring for all of the Joker Venom-infected children. When Superman described how one of the kids bit one of the physicians, Batman burst out laughing, surprising both of them and alarming Bruce.
Three days later, while exercising in the Batcave, Batgirl, Nightwing, Red Hood, and Red Robin spoke with Bruce about his deteriorating condition. Though they all offered to assist Batman in any way they could, Batman refused and stated that the actual reason he called them was that he knew they would be the first to discover something was wrong with him and alert the other heroes, which he couldn’t allow to happen.
Then he startled them by pulling out a pair of concealed machine guns and shooting them all down. Another step that Bruce Wayne would never take in his right mind. This showed that the toxin was really affecting him and would turn him into a deadly and deranged killer like the Joker if he was not able to stop it. Unfortunately for him, he was unable to stop the change and things only kept getting worse.
His evil deeds did not simply stop at him killing his friends. Things got much darker and much worse. Bruce later persuaded his son Damian to join his cause and converted him into the Joker Venom. He also rescued all of the Joker-converted youngsters from the previous attack and transformed them into his new Rabid Robins army.
Batman massacred the remainder of the Justice League nearly two weeks after the Joker’s death, utilizing an arsenal of various villains’ weaponry he had amassed over the years. He created a Black Kryptonite strain and used it against Supergirl, driving her insane and causing her to murder her own family before killing herself.
He confronted Superman on the Justice League Watchtower by blasting a Kryptonite-infused gas into the air and declaring that he didn’t want to hold back any longer. Bruce then summoned Clark’s wife Lois and son Jon, and instructed the Man of Steel to falsely promise his family that everything would be fine, which Clark refused. Bruce hurled a piece of Black Kryptonite at the Kryptonians and stood there watching as father and son ripped Lois apart before killing each other. Bruce’s metamorphosis into “The Batman Who Laughs” was complete at this very moment.
He went on to amass enormous cosmic power making him not just a villain, but such a massive force of evil that his presence threatened the very existence of mankind. Omega’s existence and outlook on humanity was also something that made him a threat to humanity. These alternative versions of Batman offer us a deep look into what could have happened if Bruce Wayne ever wavered from his morals and principles and that only makes Batman an even more impressive hero.
Why is Omega such a unique villain
Omega is a unique villain sheerly because of the fact that it is Batman himself who dons the suit and becomes the villain. The original Bruce Wayne, no less, not another clone. He truly went crazy and took a diametrically opposite outlook towards the world and saving lives. He went through experiences that changed him and it’s scary as a fan to think that Bruce Wayne could be changed so intensely as a result of new experiences in his life. If there is one thing Bruce Wayne was known for, that was how much he cared for people and wanted to protect people and the world. To fundamentally forego all of those ideals is immense.
We all know that there are villains who have often gained the upper hand on Batman, but in the end, the Dark Knight has always triumphed because he has his own ways of playing the game and dealing with people who need to be dealt with. This is because Batman has a unique thought process and a skill set that has been honed by years and years of practice and training under skilled combat masters. All of this goes right down the drain if the opponent that Bruce Wayne is facing, is Bruce Wayne himself. A clone against the original, gone rogue. This makes him a villain unlike any other, one who is truly impossible to predict and even tougher to deal with.
He has all the powers Batman possesses, from his various combat styles to his weapons mastery. However, what makes him even more formidable is how his mindset towards humanity and all of mankind has drastically changed for the worse. He still wants to save people, but he wants to do it his own way, against the will of the people because Omega truly believes that he knows best.
This is where the Omega’s dreaded Anti Life Equation comes in. He wanted to subdue the entire world using this. The Anti Life Equation is something that breaks the spirits and souls of anyone and everyone that comes under its influence. Their spirit is broken and they become slaves to their master – the one who owns the Anti Life Equation. Thus, he had plans for world domination and used a terrifying method to try and get there. It is beyond belief that the Bruce Wayne we know would have ever turned people into mindless hordes so that he could ‘save’ humanity.
His presence and the final reveal of who was beneath Omega’s mask was major and now it seems only fitting that it was none other than the Original Bruce Wayne. Batman fans have often said that Bruce Wayne’s worst enemy is not the Joker or the Riddler or Bane or any other villain he has encountered. His worst enemy is, in fact, he himself and this character literally interprets this notion to give us a major plot twist.
Batman has been around for a long, long time and people continue to adore this caped crusader. Generation after generation reads Batman comics and thus, we get all these new stories and takes on the Batman property. These new stories are getting fresh twists all the time and their additions to the Batman lore and larger mythos is extremely exciting because fans get to see and encounter new villains, incidents and ideas. What do you think about the major Omega reveal? Let us know in the comments section below!