Knight Terrors: Wonder Woman #2 // Review
Diana is falling into herself. Or maybe she’s falling into herself under her gravity. She’s going to try to reverse course. She’ll punch the villain in the face and find out that a part of her is far more critical of her than anyone else could ever be. Diana of Themyscira meets her greatest fear: herself in Knight Terrors: Wonder Woman #2. Writer Josie Campbell continues an encounter with darkness with artist Juan Ferreyra. Campbell’s story plays on themes that have been echoing around the periphery of Wonder Woman for years...themes which will be explored in greater detail as Tom King takes over Wonder Woman’s main title next month.
Diana was trained as a warrior, but she’d been trained as so much more than that. She could quickly work for an arguably greater good beyond the tiara, bracers, and lasso. Is a warrior for peace not more happy in war than she is in harmony? Diana confronts the depths of this in a nightmare battle against that part of herself that loves combat. She knows that it’s not all her, though. She knows that a force is using her guilt against her. If she can confront that force, she must first face herself.
Heroes have been forced to look within themselves for as long as there have been heroes. By framing her central inner conflict with remarkable precision, Campbell makes Diana’s inner journey strikingly clear. Rarely has the complex dichotomy of Wonder Woman been placed on the page with such stark simplicity. The sentiment that Campbell places at the center of the conflict would feel painfully cliched were it not for the fact that she builds a graceful fortress of simple, brutal poetry around it that delivers a powerful sense of heroism to the page. Wonder Woman rarely gets to look this good in a single adventure.
Ferreyra isn’t called upon to bring a lot of action to the page, but when he does, it creates an impact powerful enough to be felt on both sides. The emotional drama of the horror is breathtakingly vivid--quite often in places not often attempted on the comics page. Diana is shown an aspect of the all-powerful Goddess that she is...pristine, divine, and perfect. In the next panel, she’s looking on in utter terror at the perfection. It’s one of the more original and distinctive visions of horror to come out of the entire Knight Terrors crossover.
Wonder Woman has occasionally appeared on wanted posters in comics for decades back to the early Silver Age and beyond. Campbell and Ferreyra place a Wonder Woman wanted poster in the first few issues of the current comic as a bit of foreshadowing to the Tom King series that’s coming next month. Diana may have overcome her inner struggle here, but there’s more next month as Amazons become fugitives in the U.S.
