Can you believe that some comics AREN'T about the funeral of Kamala Khan?
And more horrifying thoughts to be found reading KNIGHT TERRORS
Seasoned observers of the art and commerce of comic books, and its accompanying pomp and circumstance, are struggling to make sense of Knight Terrors, a two-month Summer Comic Book event taking over the bulk of DC Comics' weekly outings, interrupting recently launched series, except when they aren't, with stories that don't need the context of what happened in the issues of the main ongoing to be understood and appreciated, except when they do, with little to no consequence, except for all the consequences. This is a comic book event with two first issues. One of them being an introduction, setting in motion events leading into ANOTHER introduction, which covers similar, but not identical, ground. And you kinda need to have read both. In short, this is the comic book industry in the year two thousand and twenty-three, and like so many things about our current hellscape, it is so resistant to being thought through that the best way of understanding it is to not think about it at all.
Why is it there? Because it's summertime, and in the summertime, we read the biggest, shockingest, and most all-encompassing comic book mega-events. We crave the big swings, and the even bigger spectacle. The bet that DC Comics is making, then, is that we crave that excitement more than we crave the regular business of comics. Will that work? There is literally no way of knowing, we will never again have access to complete and accurate sales data for the direct market, and therefore it's pointless to ask. Was the question worth asking in the first place? Boy is that a question that everyone in the trade of talking about comics is asking themselves every day. Is it good? Well, it's fun; I don't know what that's worth, so let's talk about these comics some more, and only stop when either elucidation or word count is reached.
Before he genuinely got too good for this, the all-time great David Brothers gave us what is, for my money, the most operant metaphor to understand Summer Comic Book Events: they are corporate comics' posse cuts, that rare occasion when different artists start from the same basic setup and show off their most dazzling acrobatics. Looked at through this prism, then, I will say that Knight Terrors is the most reminiscent of a posse cut one of those big events has been in a good long while, which immediately makes it interesting as an object of study.
Let's begin with statements that are self-evident, then: is it absurd that Knight Terrors: First Blood #1 was not called "Knight Terrors #1"? Yes, obviously. Does it feature the art of Howard Porter at his most untamed, scratching and sketching the kind of definitive superhero imagery that made him a name to follow a quarter of a century ago, alongside graphic horror imagery so unhinged it feels of a piece with the greats of EC, which, when put in color by Brad Anderson, looks and feels perfect in every single way? Also yes, and even more obviously. This is obviously not new information, but at their best, this is what Joshua Williamson's comics do: they provide watertight excuses to get some of the coolest artists working in comics to push themselves further and further beyond the spectrum of eye candy flavors. This one goes like this: there's a spooky guy, and he's torturing all of the DC Universe with nightmares in order to find a magic rock that allows him to torture the universe with nightmares, but more. That's it, that's the whole thing.
And you don't really need any more than that to have yourself a full-on romp, as Knight Terrors #1, which should have been "Knight Terrors #2", demonstrates; it's a fast and loose Deadman showcase, masterfully taking advantage of the experience Caspar Wijngaard had drawing Home Sick Pilots to deliver a bold and colorful take on a ghost story, while Stefano Nesi gets to impress with dynamic action, bold compositions and a solid grasp on the gross. Giuseppe Camuncoli bringing the house down with the issue's big cliffhanger is just a formality at that point; you've made a fun comic, in a series that I want to see through to the end. This is a rock-solid back beat, the perfect base from which to launch tie-ins that are absolutely ready to soar.
Admittedly, the game being played across the tie-ins is pretty simple: you take one or two characters, you remix their imagery and their history into something with a little bit more creepshow factor and a dash of dream logic, and you go nuts with it. To no one's surprise, the Batman books, which have always been steeped in the horror and the history of themselves, have had an easier go at it than the others. That is not to diminish their achievements; in Knight Terrors: The Joker #1, Matthew Rosenberg gets to be his joyfully insolent self, pulling from the playbook of "cartoon violence with live rounds" he developed in many backups of the main series with Francesco Francavilla, and adding in some formalist fun, while Stefano Raffaele does his level best Neal Adams impression. Meanwhile, Knight Terrors: Poison Ivy #1 pulls from a powerful well of Wrong Americana, reinterpreting Gotham as the twisted suburbia of the video for Soundgarden's Black Hole Sun, in a tale practically designed to throw you in for a loop, with a serious helping of camp to make it all go down.
Inevitably, there is also Knight Terrors: Batman, which, you know what? Might actually be my favorite thing Guillem March has ever done not set on Palma de Mallorca. It's just so graceful, so agile in how it deploys its melodrama in the layouts and in the panel compositions, and, it does such cool things with the iconography it's been tasked with leveraging. Williamson, fully aware he's playing on well-trod ground, finds a unique take on the raw materials of Batman's fears that is completely inspired (and sure, some of it comes from a very good, very sick Dan Mora assist on the creature design, but March does the particulars in such a cool way), and asks itself the right question to ask when dealing with a situation so familiar: "Okay, but what next?". It's absolutely cool and if you like comics you owe it to yourself to check it out.
But as ever, when talking about DC Comics, I have to then go, "and the non-Batman books are good too, I swear". Knight Terrors: Shazam! #1 is a neat little brain-bender, which still finds a way to hit way harder than a Mary Marvel comic has any right to. Its natural counterpart, Knight Terrors: Black Adam #1, is a very cool showcase of what Jeremy Haun can do, putting together a lot of extremely cool pictures on the way to a very well-curated callback taken to its nightmarish extreme. And yeah, obviously, Knight Terrors: Zatanna #1 rules; David Baldeon is always a treat, and Dennis Culver mines the history present in Zatanna and the Doom Patrol for all it's worth, which as a fan of both, I'm always gonna go gaga for. But there's plenty of cleverness to go around, and I will say there is something worth liking about all the issues released so far.
So, it's good, and, also, it's fun. At a time when corporate synergies, stunts, and bait for the speculators seems to rule the world of Big Time Comics, a major comic existing for its own sake, for the beauty of putting something ludicrous and cool in your eye? It's a purpose worth pursuing. Obviously, Knight Terrors isn't exactly that, it couldn't be when pig-brained idiot David Zaslav is the one at the very top of the chain. But it's the closest we're going to get. It's not enough, but it's there.
Okay! Let's try and see if I can do one of these without driving myself insane with shame and regret! Leaving Twitter was a great help, but then it turned out that most of the alternatives are also fucked in some way. Ah well! Follow me on the one good website (Cohost), or on the website that's just one massive ongoing policy failure (Bluesky). OR, even better, tell your friends about me IN PERSON, AT A GOOD RESTAURANT, and when they say "friend, what the fuck are you talking about?", look down at your meal, dejected. It is inevitable that your friends will fail you. The only thing you can do is HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS.