I appreciate the lack of multiversal shenanigans in DC Comics' Dawn of DC crossovers, first with Lazarus Planet and now with Knight Terrors. It’s “just” a heroes vs. villains story without going back to the well of revamping DC’s continuity, which is refreshing; that the story taps into writer Joshua Williamson’s horror-writing chops is even better.
The predictable event miniseries foibles are here — a lot of Knight Terrors is the gathered heroes going to one place, fighting some bad guys, going to another place, fighting some other bad guys, and so on. That’s not wholly unusual for a book also serving as a framing story for its tie-in titles, though I did wonder if what’s told in this collection’s six chapters could have been told in four. But Williamson writes the main trio of heroes well, and they’re fun to hang out with across these pages.
[Review contains spoilers]
Knight Terrors contains the short Free Comic Book Day special, the four-issue Knight Terrors miniseries, and the bookend specials Knight Terrors: First Blood and Knight Terrors: Night’s End (listed out of order in the book’s table of contents). The use of bookends reminds of the “Alpha” and “Omega” books DC’s done recently for Fear State, Shadow War, and Lazarus Planet, though in each of those cases, the “Alpha/Omega” was the whole of the self-titled event (“Fear State” and “Shadow War” had regular series titles in the middle; Lazarus Planet had specials). But here, curiously, Knight Terrors is a series in and of itself, and then we still get bookend issues “outside” the main series with a different art team.
[See the latest DC trade solicitations.]
I’m trying to figure DC’s sales strategy — the bookends are more DCU-focused than the miniseries proper, so the specials could be a natural break if all you want some sense of the event going into or out of Green Lantern or Action Comics. That’s not seamless, though — “Night” has elements from Knight Terrors that it doesn’t explain, especially the presence of a zombie Sandman Wesley Dodds. Maybe it’s that “First” and “Night” were oversized and more expensive; it’s not as though DC’s never charged more for an oversized issue within a series, but could be instead of bumping up the first and sixth issues of the crossover, they moved them over into specials instead.
The bookends and the miniseries are different creatures — again, the bookends are more DCU-focused, and it’s only in the miniseries that Williamson starts each issue with Deadman narrating like a horror movie matinee host, with shades of Vincent Price and Elvira. In that genre, I thought Williamson balanced well horror and camp; there’s stabbings and exploding bodies and things jumping out at the heroes in the dark, but also the Deadman narrator’s self-deprecating humor and some appealingly absurdist bits (“We were worried about ya, kid!”).
In the miniseries, we follow Deadman riding along in Batman’s body, the aforementioned Wesley Dodds that Deadman resurrects, and Robin Damian Wayne. This is a fun group, wholly unfazed by the horrors they encounter, and between the zombie in a gas mask, the possessed dark knight, and the equally dark Robin, they’re a visual feast for artists Giuseppe Camuncoli, Steffano Nesi, and Caspar Wijngaard against the horror backgrounds. Williamson writes a wonderfully no-nonsense Wesley Dodds, as content to be resurrected to solve a mystery as he is to return to his slumber, without a hint of angst (I did wish we’d seen Wes briefly reunite with his Justice Society buddies, who seem largely absent from Knight Terrors).
I did wonder about Damian’s inclusion — essentially we have here Deadman and the Sandman, and then Williamson could have included any third character but made that Damian, recent star too of Lazarus Planet. Moreover, whereas even Batman has to inject himself full of adrenaline to stay awake and battle the effects of villain Insomnia, Damian has managed to train himself in enough meditation to stay awake — not to mention that Damian has so much “experience … with death” that he can see Deadman unassisted when no one else can. Williamson’s been stewarding Damian of late, from the Robin title to Batman and Robin, so I guess he’s got a vested interest, but I do begin to wonder if we’re pushing Damian’s ability past the point of believability.
When Howard Porter teamed with Williamson for Batman: One Bad Day: Bane, I noted I hadn’t seen Porter do gore like that before, a style more “adult” than his often-sunny JLA. Here’s more, from a twisted version of Porter’s iconic Justice League portrait to John Dee’s imagined family spitting up maggots, and on and on. It would appear Porter is inking himself here, and his spooky work especially in “First Blood” favorably reminds of Kelley Jones.
I happened to read the Arrowverse tie-in miniseries Earth-Prime the other day, and following a comics trope, the conflict is similar — villain wants revenge because the heroes didn’t save his family, the tough moral being that heroes can’t save everyone. In this, Joshua Williamson’s Knight Terrors is not particularly ground-breaking, nor do I expect antagonist Insomnia to have much staying power — verily his conflict with Doctor Destiny shows not much difference between them.
But I’ll be darned if Williamson doesn’t cameo Dove here in a callback to her relationship with Deadman in Brightest Day almost 15 years ago, and if that’s not some deep thinking about the characters and their history, I don’t know what is. Overall a nice effort by Williamson different than DC’s everyday.
[Includes original covers, gallery of 31 variant covers]
One of the main reasons why I enjoyed Knight Terrors so much, quite frankly, was how unexpected it felt. By that I mean I never really expected to like it to begin with. Part of the reason for this was that it came on the heels of Dark Crisis, an event series that ended up being both disappointing and uninteresting (IMO). Another reason it caught me by surprise probably had to do with the fact that DC did a poor job marketing this series (IMO).
ReplyDeleteGreat review as always!