Knight Terrors: Detective Comics #1 // Review
It’s snowing in July. You’d think someone had opened the Casket of Ancient Winters. This isn’t Marvel Manhattan in 1984, though. This is Gotham City. Jim Gordon is visiting the grave of his son in Knight Terrors: Detective Comics #1. Writer Dan Watters and artist Riccardo Federici tell a story with colorist Brad Anderson. It’s a dark moment that treads further into the darkness in a tale of Jim Gordon as he deals with a nightmare all his own. He is caught within the supernatural darkness of the villain known as Insomnia, who has blanketed the whole world in a nightmare.
He says it’s like tearing fingernails down a chalkboard while chewing a mouthful of tinfoil when he sees them. He’s stumbled into an occult ritual being performed underneath a crescent clock by men in suits wearing red masks and glowing green uni-goggles. They’re asking for strength to protect the city of Gotham, but there’s something far darker here, and it seems to be haunting and hunting Jim Gordon. The monsters that seek to protect are every bit as sinister as the heroes...or are they? Jim Gordon knows that this isn’t life, but he doesn’t necessarily know he’s dreaming, either.
Watters gives Jim Gordon another close-up. And it’s a good one. He’s trying to make sense of life in a city that remains profoundly shrouded in darkness. And he knows that there are a lot of good people who wear dark costumes, and there’s a kind of monstrosity there. And he’s trying to make some sense of it. It’s kind of interesting to see that play out and to see it take the form of a more traditional sort of horror story that feels suitably intriguing. Watters could have gone a more traditional direction with this sort of thing. But instead, he explores the concept of moral ambiguity. The monsters really want to help. And he has allied himself with them. It’s kind of provocative.
Federici and Anderson do GORGEOUS nightmare work on the page. The strangely mutated forms that look almost sort of human and crawl around on the page do, in fact, look like something that would be crawling around in the nightmares of someone who worked in law enforcement in a city populated by masked criminals and crime fighters. Some of the landscapes look strikingly dark. It all hits the page with such grace and poise.
As interesting as it all is, it doesn’t really engage with the deeper themes that it’s presenting. That being said, this issue really does give a very interesting perspective into the psyche of Jim Gordon. If anything, it’s nice to see a deeper connection with a character who tends to be a little bit more marginal. So often, the perspective of those in the shadow of super-humans and their enemies goes largely unnoticed. It’s fascinating to see this sort of character focused on with this kind of detail. And it’s a pity that this sort of thing doesn’t happen more often.
