Everyone enjoying the craziness that is Dark Nights Metal? Snyder did promise us a fun, over the top ride and he seems to be delivering with, among other things, issue #2’s reveal of Darkseid as a baby:

(And is Darkseid making the devil’s horns sign beloved of the late, great Ronnie James Dio or am I just seeing what I want to?)

It’s jumping around and barking mad – and I’m really enjoying it. I may get around to annotating it further down the line, although it’s a little too embedded in the Batman books for me to get every single reference, but I did want to do my public duty and offer up one thing.

On page 20, the Court of Owls and the Strigydae trap Batman in order to raise the big bad guy, Barbatos, complete with a summoning ritual:

The font that’s used has been in DC’s comics for several years – among other places, it’s turned up in Blue Beetle as the language of the scarab; it was used in Pandora: Trinity of Sin when Pandora (remember her?) cast a spell; and even as far back as Final Crisis: Requiem when it was used as the Martian language.

Here, though, it’s the same phrase repeated three times, then the first three words repeated twice:

BEARS BIRDS BATS? CHANTING
IN ANCIENT TONGUES!

That’s all it says, folks. I’ll admit the question mark after BATS is a guess, but it’s not the same as the exclamation mark at the end of TONGUES.

You can thank me later.