Some thoughts about Knight Terrors: First Blood #1

What is terrifying the universe now?

The Justice League is still recovering after the last Crisis and this is the perfect time for one of their enemies to hurt them when they are at their weakest but they won't be the only ones suffering since a nightmare is occurring for all the heroes around the planet.

Yeah, Dark Crisis wasn't very good was it?

The event itself was probably one of the most unremarkable crossovers that DC had in quite a while (although at least it had some solid character moments which is more than I can say for Scott Snyder's Metal events) so I can understand why people are a bit apprehensive about yet another event handled by Joshua Williamson and I include myself right there. That being said, there are a few things that Knight Terrors does better than Dark Crisis so far.

First of all, it doesn't try to sell itself as "The Next Big Story" that made Dark Crisis look so ultimately generic, instead it opens with a more clear purpose of simply telling a horror story that is affecting the heroes of the DCU. Second, it offers many strong character segments that depict the most recent incidents in their lives and create logical developments for all of them, I appreciate that this was Williamson's course of action here since is one of his strengths (although it does require you to have knowledge of a lot of things that are currently happening in their books). Third, there's a big focus on Deadman of all characters and it seems like he's going to play an important role in this story which is unique in and of itself (although there's also a focus on Batman but at least Williamson does interesting things with their interactions).

This is not perfect though since the "big threat" here is a villain that was recently introduced by Williamson himself and while his power is imposing, his personality and motivations leave a bit to be desired (and this is also a Williamson problem as we saw with Dark Crisis' antagonists). Fortunately, his abilities bring compelling moments for everyone else and the story moves at a fast pace.

Howard Porter's artwork is pretty good since he's able to follow every horror scene with a lot of detail.

Decent beginning overall, let's see how it continues though.