KNIGHT TERRORS #4

 

    Knight Terrors is DC's big summer event this year. I don't think Marvel has a big event this year, which is strange. Marvel does do a lot of smaller event books, like the Sins of Sinister X-Men event they did earlier this year. That was only 11 issues, though. Last year they did A.X.E.: Judgment Day which was 35 issues. I vaguely remember either of those. Not that I'm clamoring for a missing Marvel event book this summer, as none of them are any good and ultimately meaningless. Knight Terrors is an odd one. Most of the regular titles just did tie-ins for July and August, but the tie-ins have absolutely nothing to do with what's going on in the regular books. Like if you were reading Batman, the two issues for July and August just had Batman in some nightmare. It had nothing to do with the current storyline in Batman, which means you could easily just skip them. I do wonder how sales have been, since it's pretty hard to figure out comic book sales these days. Months later there is a top selling books list, so maybe someday we'll figure it out. The actual basic idea behind Knight Terrors is at least somewhat fresh, although it does ultimately just have the superheroes battling an evil villain hell bent on destroying the world, which is the basic plot of most event books. The big bad, Insomnia, has put everyone on Earth to sleep, and everyone is trapped inside their own nightmares. In this issue, Batman, Damian, Deadman, and The Sandman (the 1940's noir Sandman version), head to Arkham to use a mystical dream stone thing to wake Insomnia from his coma. It is revealed that Insomnia was once a family man but his family died and the Justice League wasn't there to save them...so he now seeks revenge. When they wake up Insomnia, all of the nightmares are now in the real world. At least the issue is a brisk read. I really enjoy writer Joshua Williamson's Image books (Ghosted and Nailbiter were good and his new book, Dark Ride, is one of the better books being published), but I've never cared for his DC books. He seems to be writing a million DC books every month these days, so that probably tells you how much I dislike DC currently. Guiseppe Camuncoli did most of the art in this issue, and I've loved his stuff since his Hellblazer and Greek Street days. One of my favorite comic book runs ever is his Hellblazer run with writer Peter Milligan, the one with all of those awesome Simon Bisley covers. Fuck was that an entertaining run. That was memorable. Knight Terrors? It's like a typical, forgotten dream. **