Alexis Kaye is a bit bored. Whatever it is that’s knocked everyone else into the realm of nightmare hasn’t really hit her. Maybe it’s the chemicals that she’s been working with. Maybe it’s her charming personality. Maybe it’s the fact that she’s already living a nightmare. Whatever it is, it’s not what Alexis is expecting in Knight Terrors: Punchline #1. Writer Danny Lore explores the deepest fears of Gotham City’s newest crime diva with artist Lucas Meyer and colorist Alex Guimarães. Punchline finally gets a spark of her potential after a mini-series that didn’t quite live up to it. With Lore’s momentum, it would be nice to see an ongoing Punchline. 

Everyone’s sleeping, but that’s only part of it. Punchline and her gang still have to get through a lot of security to get out with what they’re looking for. It’s going to be a bit more of a challenge than she might have expected. Is that a pointy-horned cowl shadow sneaking up on her? It can’t be Batman. He’s been taken off to the land of nightmare along with everyone else. There IS more than one person in Gotham City who casts that kind of shadow, though. Punchline may not know who it is, but she knows that there’s something wrong with the world in which she finds herself.

Lore puts Alexis through an enjoyable nightmare. Of the characters taking the plunge into Knight Terror this summer, she might be the one who has taken up the least amount of real estate in page and panel. She’s a relatively fresh face, so HER trip through nightmare has a fresh quality about it as her inner psyche is explored in a weird, multi-layered adventure that places dream on top of reality like a strange overlay. It’s not easy to do that sort of thing in an action story without having everything collide together. Lore makes it look easy.

Meyer has a really clever way of framing basic action. There are deceptively simple-looking panels that are framed with a really sophisticated and almost dizzyingly complex composition that makes for some really fun action and some really clever horror. The issue’s been marketed as some kind of homage to old horror movies. (One of the variant covers is made to look like the slipcase for a 1980s direct-to-VHS home video thing.) Guimarães’s color delivers a much more haunting atmosphere than something plugged into an old Trinitron, and some of Meyer’s framing feels a LOT more casually visually stunning than most cinematic horror.

Lore and Meyer find the right angles for Alexis. She’s still a really charming mystery of a character. She’s still a great deal of fun on the page...a bit of a hybrid between various ends of Gotham City’s underworld, but capable of going a great deal further than any of the rest of them by virtue of the intention of that mutation. Once again, Knight Terrors reveals a little bit more of an appealing character who hasn’t had as much time on the page. 

Grade: A