Between the Dawn of DC crossovers Lazarus Planet and Knight Terrors, I thought the Knight Terrors miniseries itself was better — fun, with an inspired cast of characters, though Lazarus Planet was fine there too; the art was probably better overall in Knight Terrors than Lazarus Planet.
But in terms of the ancillary tie-in stories, I give the edge to Lazarus Planet.1 If Lazarus’s short anthology stories weren’t all perfect, at least they were brief, and the brevity gave more opportunity for winners by volume. I have not been overly impressed by Knight Terrors' two-issue mini-miniseries, whose nightmare premise many creative teams have used to present plotless fever dreams, with large panels vamping for content to fill pages. Lazarus Planet’s shorts were also near-uniformly relevant and future-looking, while many of Knight Terror’s tie-ins have no bearing on their titles or the ongoing DCU.
And so we arrive at the final volume, Knight Terrors: Terror Titans, which embodies many of these criticisms. Here, even, we have stories either not involving a regular title’s creative team or stories involving characters without regular titles, which nudges these issues even farther out of relevance. I appreciate the emphasis on horror over comedy, a failing of Knight Terrors: Knocturnal Creatures, but Terror Titans very often emphasizes action over any sense of plot.
The best of Terror Titans is largely not in what this book is, but what it happens to tease; possibly a little more material might have helped this volume land better.
[Review contains spoilers]
Both the Black Adam and Shazam! stories, by Jeremy Haun and Shazam! writer Mark Waid respectively, end on cliffhangers — weirdly, I’ll add, because I can’t discern those cliffhangers are ever resolved anywhere else. It underscores the downside of a crossover where everything takes place in dreams — none of it’s actually real and the characters are restored as soon as they wake up, so the dramatic tension is low. Sure, we could say that if the character dies in their dream they might die in the “real world,” etc., but that’s largely not how the creators have played it.
[See the latest DC trade solicitations.]
Writer/artist Haun’s art on “Knight Terrors: Black Adam” is attractive in a photorealistic style, but the story is filled with too-large, space-wasting panels — Black Adam sees a monster, then the monster screams, then Black Adam taunts it, and so on. There’s no sense for a casual reader who Black Adam is or what he’s about, just a serial sequence of Black Adam fighting through different nightmarish visions.
“Knight Terrors: Shazam!” is similar; though I like Waid briefly restoring the new Marvel kids' powers, this is mostly Mary Marvel also fighting through different, disconnected fantasy-scapes until the page count is reached. See also Andrew Constant’s “Knight Terrors: Titans,” which should be the book’s showpiece; while Scott Godlewski illustrates it well, there’s little insight into the Titans here to demonstrate why this must be a Titans story and not the Justice League or another. There’s an unfortunate choice to make the mystery character look like Donna Troy, such to confuse things when Donna actually shows up; that character turns out to be the Titans Tower personified, whom the characters learn wants to be called “Joanne,” a fact I’m skeptical we’ll ever hear mentioned again.
What remains then are “Knight Terrors: Ravager,” another story for a character with (I thought) no title, and “Knight Terrors: Angel Breaker,” the most unlikely Knight Terrors tie-in of all, featuring a character who’s mostly been B-list background villain in others' books. That Ravager story by Ed Brisson is much like the rest — Rose Wilson running around a wasteland fighting monsters for 40-odd pages; it’s redeemed only by a couple cut-scenes of Batman: Fear State’s Peacekeeper-01 trying to wake Rose from her dream, and I sure wasn’t expecting to see that character here! A late story note let’s us know Brisson’s writing Stormwatch with Peacekeeper and Ravager over in the Batman: Brave and the Bold anthology; those stories will ultimately be collected, but I rather wish they were here, as Brisson penning a pseudo-sequel to his Batman Incorporated seems more interesting than these proceedings.
Tim Seeley’s Angel Breaker story is also a sequel, hearkening back to Seeley’s Nightwing run from almost a decade ago in both the McGuffin and in Seeley’s character Raptor. If this one also maybe goes on too long, it’s surprisingly effective, with Angel Breaker and Raptor staying awake during the events of Knight Terrors and trying to protect some Kobra acolytes who indeed get killed off one by one with slasher movie efficiency.
Again, Angel Breaker has seemed a flat character, a boilerplate assassin with a barely-there costume, but writers including Joshua Williamson and Seeley have done a lot to build her a history often entwined with DC’s Wildstorm properties that makes her seem more dimensional. Though far from making the whole of Terror Titans worthwhile, Seeley creates a plucky team with Angel Breaker and Raptor, plus there’s some scary visuals among artist Acky Bright’s pop manga style, resulting in a story better than it really ought have been.
But as with much of Knight Terrors: Terror Titans, there’s really no indication we’re likely to see Angel Breaker and Raptor again any time soon, no indication this is anything more than two issues for two issues' sake. That’s not always a bad thing, I grant, nor even unusual in the realm of mainstream comics crossovers. But whereas Lazarus Planet seemed to show us a new way forward for event comics, the Knight Terrors tie-ins are more of the same old thing.
[Includes original and variant covers]
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The best event of Dawn of DC overall is unquestionably Titans: Beast World. ↩︎
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