Review: Knight Terrors: Knightmare League hardcover/paperback (DC Comics)

Among the eight two-part stories in Knight Terrors: Knightmare League, you will find four of them also collected in regular series books proper. That’s good in the sense that at least these stories are so tied in as to warrant inclusion in their own books as well as here; it’s unfortunate, of course, in that you’ll have to double dip to get half of this book’s original content.

Would that I could tell you that you can skip Knightmare League, that the best of this book you could read elsewhere, but that’s not the case. This book’s “original” tie-ins aren’t likely essential to the ongoing DCU, but they did present some of Knightmare League’s finest material.

[Review contains spoilers]

To wit, Josie Campbell and Juan Ferreyra’s “Knight Terrors: Wonder Woman” gives us a Justice League Dark reunion — or, for the most part at least, Wonder Woman, Detective Chimp, and John Constantine. I’m reminded indeed that James Tynion and Ram V’s tenure on Justice League Dark was a lot of fun — magic heroes with an air of legitimacy with Diana in charge — and surely “Dark” will be back sooner or later. Josie Campbell continues to impress and I’m eager to read her Amazons Attack series. I’m not sure if the story is “nightmarish,” but Campbell certainly drills down on the contradictions of Diana as a “peaceful warrior”; the criticisms Campbell has the characters level are impressively insightful and impressively biting. Ferreyra does well bringing his painterly style to the freakish, distorted monsters.

[See the latest DC trade solicitations.]

Joshua Williamson’s “Knight Terrors: Superman” has art by Tom Reilly, who’s done a lot with Marvel and others but not so much at DC; but often here, you might look at Reilly’s Superman and think it was Jon Bogdanove, and that’s a treat. Williamson’s story is more self-referential than scary, using the dreamscape to flip through different, sometimes wacky, iterations of Superman’s supporting cast. But the story also picks up from and ends up in Williamson’s Knight Terrors as only the main writer can do, nods at a few different storylines in Williamson’s Superman, and is the site of Aquaman’s involvement in Knight Terrors. So nothing particularly small happening there, either.

You can find the two stories from “Knight Terrors: Action Comics” in Power Girl Returns and Action Comics Vol. 2: To Hell and Back respectively. Leah Williams' Power Girl story felt too abstract to me — it’s a dream, so Power Girl becomes a robot, then she has to act in a stage show, and so on — and also the repetitive illusion of waking from the dream becomes itself repetitive; I’ll acknowledge, however, a gory sequence with Power Girl’s leg. In the other, Phillip Kennedy Johnson channels slasher films well, pitting the junior Super-family against an impressively monstrous Cyborg Superman. Among other things, I like that this actually seems to be the Cyborg Superman, that Knight Terrors traps both heroes and villains such that everyone’s stuck in a nightmare together.

Most notable to me in Alex Paknadel’s “Knight Terrors: The Flash” is artist Daniel Bayliss and colorist Igor Monti evoking also a semi-painterly style that reminds of Francis Manapul on Flash. There is something convincingly tragic about Barry Allen’s repeated, doomed attempts to save a faux Wally West from death within this nightmare illusion, but the story becomes predictable after a while, particularly (and this plagues many Knight Terrors tie-ins) since we know Barry won’t ultimately be successful and also that it’s all imaginary and won’t matter anyway. Too, I’m surprised no one was concerned with the similarity between the identity of this story’s mystery monster and the resolution of the recent Flash movie.

Jeremy Adams' “Knight Terrors: Green Lantern” is among the most tied-in of the tie-ins so far, picking up from a cliffhanger in the new Green Lantern book’s second issue. Artist Eduardo Pansica delivers a distinctly gross zombified corpse, as well as rendering well the Parallax beast; Adams is clearly channeling some Army of Darkness here as well. But the presence of Parallax ought clue you in; if you made a list of the personal nightmares Hal Jordan would face here, you’d probably name them all, such that this story doesn’t rise to the level of introducing anything new about the hero. Add to that, when Hal’s not swinging a chainsaw, he’s firing guns, a decision that felt crass to me on Adams' part. There’s a Sinestro backup, also well tied to the Green Lantern series, but that I also found fantastical and repetitive.

Knight Terrors: Knightmare League ends with the Nubia backup from “Knight Terrors: Wonder Woman” by Stephanie Williams, one of the writers of the recent Nubia miniseries. Much like Gene Luen Yang writing New Super-Man again in Action Comics, there’s no better use of backups I can think of than reuniting writers and their characters, and the story’s first chapter and its inherent mystery feels right on target. But as with many of these, maybe the Knight Terrors tie-ins didn’t need to be two issues; the second part is just banter and fight scenes filling up the pages. What would a crossover be without tie-ins, but with Knightmare League I continue to think the tie-in anthology format might be a better idea than miniseries.

[Includes original and variant covers]

Rating 2.25