Okay, let us get real: who do you think would be the most powerful version of Batman? We have been delving into each warped, destructive version of Bruce Wayne that evolved in the Dark Multiverse for a few weeks now, trying to figure out which one is the “most powerful version of Batman.”
Is it the Dawnbreaker, a Bruce Wayne so emotionally bankrupt that his will corrupted the lantern ring and wiped out the Guardians of the Universe? Is it Red Death, a Speed Force-absorbing Batman? Is it the Darkfather, a reincarnation of Bruce, who gained complete control of the Anti-Life Equation? What if we told you it is the combination of all of them, yet it is a completely different beast?
What if we told you that the most powerful version of Batman is a combination of two Bruce Waynes? What if we told you this version of Batman has the capacity to truly reshape the Multiverse? Because the Darkest Knight is precisely that: a cosmic, eldritch horror determined to ruin everything in existence. This is the Darkest Knight’s Origins – Explored, a look into the most powerful Batman in the world.
It Begins with Darkness & Laughter: The Bruce Wayne of Earth –ve 22
The Dark Multiverse has a lot of terrifying stories about the time’s Bruce Wayne’s worst fears created entire malevolent realities within its cosmic confines. And one of them represents perhaps his greatest fear to date; not being able to defeat The Joker without killing him, or worse yet, turning into something just like him. You might know this story because we’ve told it before on our channel*, but we’ll give you the abbreviated version of it just to catch you up.
Earth –ve 22- a world where Batman’s seemingly endless war with The Joker was pushed into overdrive by a dying Clown Prince of Crime. Given the fact that he probably had a few hours at best to live, Batman’s worst enemy decides to leave him with memories of his worst night. The Joker first eliminates the Caped Crusader’s entire rogues’ gallery so he’s the only one left standing.
He then kills James Gordon and takes Gotham City captive, triggering bombs all over the city and forcing Bruce to watch everything by paralyzing his body with a neurotoxin that negates his body movements but keeps his mind sharp. As his final grand gesture, he decides to re-create that fated night in Crime Alley over and over again, forcing Bruce to re-live his trauma, while injecting the children that survive his massacres with Joker Toxin to turn them into a twisted hybrid of himself & Batman; the “perfect being”, as he called it.
This finally made Bruce snap, so he proceeded to make Joker’s neck snap, whereupon he was infected by his toxin and transformed into his own worst nightmare: an entity with the highly-organized mind of Bruce Wayne and the moral compass of The Clown Prince of Crime.
The Batman Who Laughs proceeded to kill the entire Bat Family, including his son Damien, and then wipe out every superhero & villain from his reality; including a particularly ghastly death for Superman, whom he manipulated into killing Lois & Jon before killing himself with Black Kryptonite. He made short work of the rest of the world, rounding up every Jokerized child and turning them into his Rabid Robins. And as his reality started crumbling, he was given purpose by Barbatos who made him his 1st Dark Knight in his scheme to invade the Multiverse Above.
Crisis: The Batman Who Laughs Invades the Prime Universe with his Dark Knights
The Batman Who Laughs traversed the Dark Multiverse and assembled his personal version of the Justice League; except it was entirely comprised of evil Batmen who only wanted to watch the world burn. The original Dark Knights were: The Devastator, The Merciless, The Drowned, The Dawnbreaker, Murder Machine & Red Death. With this team, he invaded Prime Earth but was thwarted when Barbatos fell thanks to the meddling of Prime Earth Batman. After this, he spent some time wreaking havoc alongside the Grim Knight and his infected version of the Secret Six, before being taken captive by Lex Luthor who had become the general of Perpetua.
Using a combination of intellect & savage mockery, The One Who Laughs was able to depose Lex as Perpetua’s general and create another army of Dark Knights to attack Prime Earth again. The strategy is this: thanks to Bruce’s exceptional understanding of the inner workings of the Dark Multiverse, he was to create 3 worlds where every major Crisis Event is happening over & over again, feeding Perpetua a steady stream of Crisis Energy that she can use to destroy the 52 Earths in existence and effectively re-boot her Multiverse.
The Justice League’s plan of action is simple: enter the Dark Multiverse, destroy these 3 worlds, and re-direct all the energy they have generated to a being powerful enough to take down Perpetua. Oh, and also, taking out her demented war general. Wonder Woman is confident that killing him holds the key to stopping Perpetua’s grand plans, as he is the conduit tethering her to the Dark Multiverse, from where she draws her powers.
But as the saying goes, no matter how much you think you know or how prepared you are for a situation, in the end, Batman is always right. Bruce knows that killing The One Who Laughs is not the right call to make. But little does he know how right he himself is because Death Metal: Legends of the Dark Knights reveals a secret about him that no one knows; except the One Who Laughs himself.
The Beginning of the End & The Batman Who Laughs’ Secret Watchman
So, if you’ve consumed any form of Batman media in his 80+ years of existence, you will have noticed that one thing is pretty much consistent throughout his modus operandi; Batman is over-prepared to deal with everything. It’s a habit of his that has annoyed his fellow Bat-Family members for years. Fighting Bruce is never as straightforward as it seems because he always has contingency plans for his contingency plans.
It’s one of the reasons he is feared across the cosmos, despite being a mere mortal, and a human at that. One would assume that if Bruce was ever exposed to the Joker Toxin, he’d lose all sense of order & planning. If you’re one of those people, then boy are you in for a rude awakening. You see, while he was scouring the Dark Multiverse for versions of Bruce Wayne who would enjoy torturing Prime Earth out of existence, The One Who Laughs came upon a world that held great promise for him; and consequently became Ground Zero for the Beginning of the End.
In DC Rebirth issue #1, Bruce Wayne finds a blood-stained Smiley Face button sticking out of the wall of his Bat Cave. In that world, he investigates its origin alongside Barry Allen but is then attacked by Reverse-Flash who gets lost in a dimension opened by the button and comes back burning blue and claiming he’d seen “God”. This puts into motion the events of the Doomsday Clock storyline, which reveals that literally, everything that had happened to the DC continuity up to that point was because of Dr. Manhattan’s meddling.
It remains one of Geoff Johns’ greatest contributions to comic book history; but as you might have guessed, that isn’t how this story unfolds. No, instead of investigating the origin of The Comedian’s Button and uncovering the secret conspiracy that had its roots in the Watchmen Universe, Bruce Wayne decides to re-create the energy signature it was giving off. For months, he labors on creating an Intrinsic Field Generator; the same machine that gave John Osterman his powers in the Watchmen-verse. Being the all-around over-achiever that he is, Bruce is able to replicate Osterman’s device with relative ease and sets about uncovering its mysteries.
Unbeknownst to him, he’s been under observation this entire time. The Batman Who Laughs saw what this version of himself was trying to do, he knew what its eventual consequence would be, and he decided to make his greatest play without informing a soul about what it was going to be. As Bruce Wayne entered the Intrinsic Field Generator to fix it before it went awry, The One Who Laughs trapped him inside and- horrifyingly- switched it on. It immediately disintegrated Wayne’s body with radiation blasts so powerful they latched onto his cellular structure.
The One Who Laughs oversaw his months-long reconstruction process, whereby he puts himself back together molecule-by-molecule. Bruce Wayne doesn’t know what has happened to him yet; and sadly, he never will, because as soon as he takes the all-too-familiar form of Dr. Manhattan, he is lobotomized with a special energy knife by his Jokerized counterpart, effectively suspending him in a vegetative state.
It’s a shocking development because you’d assume that The Batman Who Laughs would do as he’d done on every other world and try to convince this Bruce to join him as well. He did have plans for Batmanhattan, mind you; they just didn’t involve him being…well, alive.
The Ultimate Fakeout: The Batman Who Laughs Ascends as The Darkest Knight
The 1st issue of Scott Snyder’s Dark Knights: Death Metal opens with a world under the literal thumb of Perpetua & her Dark Knights. The Batman Who Laughs has effectively turned Prime Earth into a hellscape, with Themiscyra as his prison & Wonder Woman as his warden. He seems to have everything under control, till Prime Earth Batman shows up to the battlefield rocking a Black Lantern Ring and commanding the “Dead Bats” who once protected Gotham City in battle. In the ensuing confusion, Wonder Woman is able to sneak back into the prison and talk to the special-grade prisoner that had just been brought in by the Dark Knights: Wally West.
As she’s sussing out information crucial to saving the Multiverse from the “new Dr. Manhattan”, The One Who Laughs shows up and goads her into killing him by taunting her weaknesses and playing with her vulnerability; which she does, courtesy of the awesome Chainsaw of Truth. She had hoped beyond hope that this death would solve much of their problems, but she couldn’t be more in the wrong; something Batman points out to her. You see, as soon as she kills the Batman Who Laughs, his minions in Castle Bat cannot believe it has happened; almost as if someone had predicted this outcome to them.
Turns out, that is exactly what happened; in Death Metal issue #2, it’s revealed that as soon as The One Who Laughs was killed, his body was transported to Castle Bat by his favorite “Goblins”, where 3 evil Alfreds surgically implant his brain into the energy-based construct that is Batmanhattan. For a while, nothing happens, and they fear that they might just have killed their dark lord. In reality, they had just given him a taste of cosmic grandeur. As his mind assimilated within his god-like body, The One Who Laughs experienced everything at once: Past, Present & Future.
Not of the Universe, but his; and when we say everything, we mean it. He experiences the infinite lives of corruption & desolation that Bruce Wayne is subjected to in the Dark Multiverse and burns them into his conscience. At that moment, he realizes that every version of Batman, even the ones born out of his paranoia, is a reactionary force, created in response to his earliest trauma. But now, with the body of Dr. Manhattan & the mind of the One Who Laughs, he finally had the power to become proactive.
He could finally do things on his own terms because he finally had the power he needed to do just that. He kills everyone present, except his favorite Goblin, whom he christens The Robin King. And then, he goes on to shape-shift into something more appropriate for an agent of darkness such as him. Gone are the hopeful tints of blue from his cosmic being; The Batman Who Laughs transforms into a malevolent, pitch-black entity that is on par with the greatest Gods in the DC Universe. And thus, the Darkest Knight was born; and an entire Multiverse paid for his laughing madness.
Exactly How Powerful is The Darkest Knight?
Given the fact that he was able to basically toy with Jay Garrick, Barry Allen & a Dr-Manhattan-amped Wally West like they were rookie high school athletes, we’d say the scope of his power ranges from anywhere between too-damn-OP to practically limitless. Keep in mind that the Darkest Knight isn’t the Batman Who Laughs; in body, anyway. His physical form is Batmanhattan’s, which is to say it is created out of pure energy and basically makes him a god; in all caps.
The Darkest Knight is both omnipotent & omniscient; being able to gaze into the past, present & futures of the cosmos as well as every Dark Multiverse Batman, while possessing the power to alter the very fabric of reality. We could mention things like flight, super-strength, shape-shifting, and energy-projection; but they all pale in comparison to the full extent of his powers.
Remember, Dr, Manhattan was practically THE God of the Watchmen-verse; and The Darkest Knight has at least twice his strength. He’s able to create entire worlds filled with demented versions of his former allies, like the planet he traps Barry, Jay & Wally in while he chases after them. He’s also like a cosmic virus, as he was able to observe “cracks in the Speed Force” and later “infect it” through them. He can summon & resurrect comrades at will, meaning if you are a Dark Knight and you aren’t alive, it’s by his command.
He can travel between dimensions like he’s crossing hallways in a high school, and even suck the powers out of a superhero; as he did with the Teen Titans. But that’s not all; after he tricked Wally West into taking the rigged Mobius Chair and gained his Dr. Manhattan powers as well as the accumulated Crisis Energy, he became the strongest entity in DC history. The Darkest Night was so powerful he started toying with Perpetua, hurling planets at her life they were mildly-annoying baseballs for him.
After killing her, he created his own, twisted version of the 52 Earths and called it his Dark 52; worlds that were entirely populated by evil versions of every superhero in existence, shaped in the form of their insane cosmic creator. To give you an idea of just how un-scalable he is, his fight with Wonder Woman literally broke the Divine Continuum and sent them hurtling through space & time; oh, and he was also confident that he could destroy The Hands That Created DC if Diana sided with him. So all things considered, we can safely say that the Darkest Knight is the strongest version of Batman we’ve ever seen and will ever see; unless DC decides it needs yet another Crisis to dwarf its previous crises.
Why The Darkest Knight is the most spine-chilling version of Batman to date
The Dark Multiverse’s entire shtick is that it’s the place where your nightmares not only survive; they thrive. It’s a realm of endless suffering & misery, a hard place that breeds monsters you wouldn’t dare dream up, and there are entire galaxies in it borne out of Bruce’s singularly paranoid nature. But the Darkest Knight is a true amalgamation of Batman and everything that he is afraid of becoming.
The Darkest Knight is a grim reminder of the fact that had Bruce Wayne possessed god-like abilities, he might have turned into something much more sinister than the Caped Crusader he ended up becoming. He is an omniscient, god-like figure with no moral compass; his only desire is to “win”, even if the Omniverse burns, so long as he gets to call himself King of the Ashes. The Darkest Knight is the most honest representation of what would happen if Batman was truly untethered: body, mind & soul.
The fact that he went through all the trouble of invading Prime Earth multiple times just to give himself a brain transplant is a classic Batman tactic, but what followed was decidedly more Joker-esque. In him, the worst fears of Bruce Wayne- and DC as a whole- are given form. And if that isn’t enough to send glaciers gliding down your spine, then we don’t know what will. This Final Bruce Wayne could have been a beacon of hope had he been allowed to explore life himself; instead, he was turned into a weapon capable to tearing reality itself into irreparable shreds.