Knight Terrors: Night’s End #1 // Review
They were chasing her. Batman. Superman. Wonder Woman. They were chasing her. Only they didn’t look like themselves. They looked like monsters. Her parents are there to comfort her when she wakes up. They tell her it’s all a bad dream. And then she mentions the man without the eyelids. They turn to ask her a little bit more about him, ushering in the beginning of the end in Knight Terrors: Night’s End #1. The Nightmare Summer DC Comics crossover series draws to a close in an issue written by Joshua Williamson with the art team of Giuseppe Camuncoli, Trevor Hairsine, Howard Porter, and Stefano Nesi. Color comes to the end of the nightmare courtesy of Rain Beredo.
The man without eyelids told the little girl that the heroes must pay for what they’ve done. He’s holding a hell of a grudge and a hell of a lot of power, but they’ve all managed to escape the nightmare prisons that he had trapped them in. Now they’re after him. He’s gained a hell of a lot of power of his own, so it’s not going to be easy for them to simply do away with him. Victory over Insomnia may come at a price.
Williamson places Deadman at the center of the climactic action while sloshing all of the other heroes around in a weird haze in the background. They’re all fighting...things from nightmare, but it’s all more than a little indistinct. Certain heroes occasionally take turns emerging from the inky blackness of the conflict to put-in prominent appearances here and there, but Williamson’s script isn’t distinct enough with much of the action to make it feel all that necessary for all of the assembled heroes to be present. So much of the story feels like it could have been done with Deadman and the Sandman Wesley Dodds.
The. art team does a pretty good job of bringing a spiky, inky horror to the page that is given some spectral ambiance by colorist Rain Beredo. And while Beredo’s colors give the visual a suitably nightmarish resonance, the actual form and force of the heroes look like a bunch of ink that got splashed across the page in weird directions. It’s difficult to feel much of any kind of presence on the page from any of the heroes at all. As a result, there really isn’t much of an action dynamic to the big, final battle with Insomnia. It looks kind of fun and nightmarish, but it’s kind of hard to tell what’s going on in and amidst all of the swirls and slashes of ink.
There HAD been rather a lot of action throughout the crossover featuring quite a few characters who all showed a great deal of promise, but none of them feature all that prominently in the final chapter of the crossover, so their presence earlier on feels kind of empty for the most part. Deadman comes across with some degree of power, but there really isn’t much on the page aside from him and his big, final tussle with Insomnia.
