REVIEW: ‘Knight Terrors: Nightwing,’ Issue #1

Knight Terrors: Nightwing #1 from DC casts Dick into a twisted horror. Becky Cloonan and Michael W. Conrad pen this issue, with Daniele Di Nicuolo on pencils, Adriano Lucas on colors, and Wes Abbott on letters. Nightwing. Batman’s first ward and sidekick. The hero of Bludhaven. Current top hero of the world and head of the top superhero team, the Titans.

Now, he’s trapped in a nightmare that feels all too real. Injured. Strapped down. Carted off in the night, Nightwing finds himself taken to the hellhole that is Arkham Asylum. Wait a minute. Arkham is long gone. Welcome, Dick Grayson, to the Knight Terror produced by the villain Insomnia. Okay, I still hate the blandness of the villain’s name, but off we go to look into how the search for a MacGuffin in the subconscious minds of one hero works out as the quest does a deep dive into Grayson’s fears.

Nightwing’s nightmare is being in Arkham. I found this part hard to believe, as he is an inmate for a murder he can’t recall committing. But here he is, in a cell next to Two-Face. Here he is, in a cell with an unseen mate who turns up later to make things very, very creepy (kudos to Di Nicuolo on the artwork there). I think this is where I had the first problem. Overall, this story isn’t bad. I just don’t buy this as Nightwing’s terror. Now, by the end of it, there’s a flip in the script that’s a good jump scare. But the problem with the Batman crowd is they’ve been through so much fear toxin and such that viewing their nightmares is an exercise in watching a boring event. Because, by now, everything would be standard fare.

The next part is that it takes too long for Nightwing to figure this out. World’s second-greatest detective…maybe not so much here. He’s faced godlike beings. Mind control. The Great Darkness tried to corrupt him and failed. But this takes him a while to pin this down. I disagree. Bruce spent an obsessive amount of time on mind control, the subconscious, dreams, etc. I’m sure he passed it on to Dick.

Now, while the story was decent but didn’t manage to truly grab me, the art by Di Nicuolo was stretchy in the character definitions, elastic, then suddenly normal. Panels shifted from straightforward pencils to cartoonish to, later on, eerie. It felt dreamlike and disturbing. Lucas colored things darker, moodier, and there were letters from Abbott to match. The look of the issue is fun and nightmarish. Easy to enjoy.

Knight Terrors: Nightwing #1 operates like other one-shots in this DC storyline. A fairly standard issue that hits you with an admittedly good right hook by its end. However, it succeeds in the feel of a nightmare (being trapped, confusion) while lacking any real potency until the end. The fact that this is happening to the strongest will on Earth (see Dark Crisis) seems off. Perhaps because these are Dick’s personal fears, we should expect him to be unable to get out from under them. Maybe.

I like the issue. I don’t love it. But I like it. The art moved me for its changes and some creep factor. I think fans who obsess over completionism in having every issue of a crossover will snatch this up. Otherwise, it’s not a must to get you through Knight Terrors.

Knight Terrors: Nightwing #1 is available wherever comic books are sold.