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Batman: Urban Legends #8 reveals what happened to Gotham City after Future State, and it’s scarier than anything that’s happened before.
WARNING: This article contains major spoilers for Batman: Urban Legends #8, available now from DC Comics.
Filled with crime and villains looking to wreak havoc, Gotham has never been a great place to live. In “Future State,” the authoritarian Magistrate transformed Gotham into a full-blown police state where anybody with a mask was immediately arrested. But what happened to the city thirty years after “Future State” is much worse than anything that’s ever happened to the city before.
Batman: Urban Legends #8 story “The Fearful” depicts a nightmare version of Gotham City, whose few remaining heroes are constantly being hunted by fear zombies and their leader The Fearful. This Gotham is a city where “Fear State” became eternal. The issue opens with an adult Signal riding Klarion the Witch Boy’s cat Teekl being chased through a destroyed Gotham by fear zombies. Black Lightning, who’s still trapped in Katana’s Soultaker sword, hits the rushing mob with a bolt of lightning allowing the trio to escape. They go to the ruins of Arkham Asylum, now called the Ark. Inside, Teekl transforms into a humanoid shape, then teams up with Black Lightning to face off against the approaching horde. Meanwhile, Duke uses his tattooed demon arm to cast a spell that opens a portal through a reality tear that’s supposed to go back to the present. Signal draws Black Lightning back, then throws him through the portal just as the Fearful defeats Teekl and approaches Signal to kill him.
As Black Lightning, in sword form, travels through the portal, Signal remembers the series of events that led Gotham to become such a nightmare. Two years after “Future State,” Signal and Black Lightning fought the authoritarian police force in Gotham. Six years after, the duo visited a magician to see if they could fix Black Lightning’s bond to the sword. Eighteen years later, Signal, Katana and Black lightning fly through the skies of Gotham. Twenty-four years after, a demon takes possession of Signal’s arm, imbuing it with supernatural powers. All of these events lead up to the state that Gotham is at the beginning of the story, destroyed and apocalyptic.
In the present, Black Lightning approached the Outsiders and asked them for help finding the man behind Gotham’s destruction, Jonah Winfield aka the Fearful. Winfield was once a student of the Scarecrow who exposed him to a potent fear toxin that permanently changed him. Black Lightning told the Outsiders he had been exposed for the second time the week before at one of the “living labs” Scarecrow was creating with fear toxin attacks. When they tried to apprehend the Fearful, he accidentally doused them with fear toxin and made them fight each other. Luckily, Red Robin was able to stop the Fearful before he managed to escape.
Post-Future State Gotham is worse than anything that has happened to Gotham before, mixing the worst parts of “No Man’s Land” and Batman #666. In “No Man’s Land,” Gotham was hit by a devastating earthquake that left it mostly destroyed and cut off from the rest of the world. The city’s villains, most of them newly freed from Arkham, carved up the city into their fiefdoms. Meanwhile, Batman #666 had Gotham as the only safe haven from a world consumed by war and climate collapse because Damian Wayne’s Batman sold his soul to Satan to keep the city safe. But the deal came with a twist, supernatural threats constantly assaulted the city. The Gotham depicted in this issue, fuses the lawless wasteland of No Man’s Land with the supernatural dystopia of Batman #666, leading to a Gotham that’s become hell on Earth.
Ultimately, it makes sense that the combined terror Gotham experienced from “Future State” and “Fear State” was too much for the city and its heroes to bear. Given that Gotham’s last heroes were seemingly killed as Black Lightning was sent to the past, it’s easy to say that Gotham thirty years after “Future State” is the worst it’s ever been.
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