Review: Knight Terrors: Dark Knightmares hardcover/paperback (DC Comics)

I had certain expectations regarding the Knight Terrors tie-in miniseries that, here at the beginning with Knight Terrors: Dark Knightmares, have largely borne out.

I figured among the ones that would resonate with me would be ones that related to the ongoing events of the individual titles, or ones that at least fulfilled Knight Terrors' implicit mission by actually being downright scary. In contrast — particularly since Knight Terrors tie-ins are by nature “dream sequences” — I worried about ones not written by books' regular creative teams, ones that might devolve into fanciful “anything goes” unreality, as forgettable as a passing dream itself.

Dark Knightmares has all of that — stories good, bad, and worse, and then, thankfully, one that unexpectedly arrives as the best of them all. All the writers here are known quantities; this volume does a lot to suggest to me who has their series under control and who might not, and also singles out a writer whose work I might follow more closely.

[Review contains spoilers]

Very top honors for Dark Knightmares goes to writer Dan Watters and artist Riccardo Federici and company for Knight Terrors: Detective Comics. As is often the case, Detective is the also-ran title — Joshua Williamson’s Knight Terrors: Batman gets the Dark Knight himself, while Watters focuses on Jim Gordon, but we’ve seen time and again how that can end in good results.

[See the latest DC trade solicitations.]

Here, Watters is picking up directly from his own back-up stories in Ram V’s Detective and using the same characters, so relevance, or at least some coinciding with the present. The story turns on Gordon’s Superheavy tenure as Batman, a fun era that’s not so often mentioned in the New 52 giving way to Rebirth. Watters involves some extra-dimensional entities on top of Knight Terrors' threat of Insomnia, making the story broader than its tie-in premise; that might seem a lot of supernatural for a Jim Gordon story, but Watters effectively keeps the whole thing grounded in police procedural.

What really makes “Good People of Gotham,” however, is Federici. I have enjoyed his painterly work, though — as in Lazarus Planet — sometimes found sketchily-rendered characters against dark backgrounds hard to follow. But even as the team here is the same as the earlier crossover, Federici and colorist Brad Anderson, I found Detective’s art much more crisp. That helps to illuminate such terrifying images as the demonic entities, a burning skeleton, a woman vomiting diamonds, Gordon’s body crumbling like glass, and most of all the constantly-mutating “Rookie” Batman nightmare, like something out of a H. R. Giger design. Thus, Knight Terrors: Detective Comics achieves two for two, a story with ties to Detective that’s also genuinely disturbing, and it makes me eager to catch up with Watters both in Detective and his Azrael miniseries, as well as his upcoming Batman mini.

On the other end of the spectrum is Kenny Porter’s Knight Terrors: Robin, teaming Tim Drake and Jason Todd without any tie to a specific title. Porter’s story is therefore unmoored, pitting the two Robins against their apparent worst nightmares as Tim tries fruitlessly to prevent his father’s death in Identity Crisis while Jason fights Red Hoods with crowbars (not, curiously, the Joker).

The heroes try and fail and try and fail at the same tasks, which is dream-like but gets repetitive quickly, especially since we know Tim saving his father won’t have any real-world effect. The conflicts speak to the characters' most well-known (and now decades old) traumas; the resolution comes, as is often the case, in Jason recognizing he doesn’t always have to do things alone. It all feels surface-level, what might appeal to casual fans but not someone reading these characters regularly, nor does Porter dig into anything uniquely interesting like how Tim was the Robin who replaced Jason after he died.

The rest of the stories are somewhere in between. Williamson’s Batman is a headliner considering Williamson is writing Knight Terrors proper. If the story is nothing special, at least it flits in and out of Knight Terrors and includes a reference to Chip Zdarsky’s ongoing series. I more appreciated Williamson’s Robin Damian Wayne short, which fills in a plot hole I complained about in Knight Terrors, and his Green Arrow eight-pager. That story is equally bland, but takes place between the pages of Williamson’s Green Arrow Vol. 1.

I give Catwoman writer Tini Howard credit for a deep cut with “Sister Zero,” and equally Knight Terrors: Catwoman reflects the status quo of the book going into the “Gotham War” crossover. But Howard’s story has some leaps in logic (characteristic of her Catwoman, too), and for my tastes the art by Leila Leiz looked hurried and unfinished, and too animated for the book’s supposed horror tone. Becky Cloonan and Michael Conrad’s Knight Terrors: Nightwing has some nice nods to the writers' Batgirl series, but this is precisely the kind of “hero runs around in a fantasy” story I was dreading, with no meaning or resonance beyond these pages.

In all, Knight Terrors: Dark Knightmares met but did not wholly exceed my initial expectations. Horror comics have had a resurgence that DC is right to try to capitalize on, but I figured it would be hard for some writers to bring that anesthetic to DC’s four-color heroes. I’m most excited to try to slot Knight Terrors among the regular series on my DC TPB Timeline, but the majority of this book doesn’t seem essential.

[Includes original covers, more than 43 variant covers]

Rating 2.25