Knight Terrors: Action Comics #1 // Review
Power Girl is having a nightmare. (There’s a lot of that going around. It’s a whole thing. A crossover that ends next month.) Anyway... Knight Terrors: Action Comics #1 opens with Power Girl’s nightmare. She’s back home on Krypton. She’s powerless. Her parents are leaving her. Her boyfriend is attacking her. Things are NOT going well in the first part of a story written by Leah Williams with art by Vasco Georgiev. Elsewhere, Cyborg Superman takes on a Nightmare on Elm Street vibe in a story by writer Phillip Kennedy Johnson with art by Mico Suayan and Fico Ossio. The super-cyborg Freddy pretty much runs its course in a single issue, but Williams’s Power Girl nightmare is a great deal of fun.
Cyborg Superman is his own kind of nightmare. He’s a melted-faced Robert Englund on steroids--a cross between Freddy and James Cameron’s original T-800. Power Girl wakes up from a dream to find herself...in a dream. Of course...she doesn’t know that until Superman presses the button just above her collarbone, forcing her to become the inanimate robot that she’d always been...only to wake up in a totally different situation to a totally different nightmare. She’s being thrust onstage.
To make matters worse, she’s being thrust on stage during a monologue. There’s a scruffy-looking Hamlet on stage who is contemplating death. She doesn’t even know the play well enough to know that she’s not supposed to be there. What is she supposed to be? The dagger? Williams does an interesting job of exploring the psyche of Power Girl. She’s been so many different things over the years. A Kryptonian. An Atlantean. She’s had a number of different names. Kara, Karen...now Paige. Years ago, on her way into her own series, there was some dissection of her past. Williams plays on that lack of identity a little bit in a really interesting lead-in to her next series. The Cyborg Superman story is, by contrast, just a simple horror story that plays out well in the visual.
Suayan and Ossio do a good job of selling the idea of an Arnold Schwarzenegger-style, Terminator-Freddy nightmare of Cyborg Superman. There are some very well-rendered nightmare images that manage to do a pretty good job of bringing across the horror. The nightmare scenario for Power Girl comes across with a great deal of pleasant disorientation. It’s the type of story that’s been done so many times before that it is hard to make it feel original. The artist does a pretty good job of that. Above all else, Power Girl comes across as being very relatable and emotionally engaging as she is thrust into a situation that she doesn’t want to be in.
The Knight Terrors crossover continues to be very successful. The simple narrative device of throwing everybody into their own nightmares actually manages to find quite a few different ways of being novel. And all of the writers involved are doing a pretty good job of making them feel like something other than cliché. It’s pretty rare that a big summer crossover like this comes across as being anything other than an attempt to make more money. There’s actually a narrative weight to this particular crossover, and it’s kind of refreshing.
