“Knight Terrors: Nightwing” – Chapter Two
Artist: Daniele Di Nicuolo
Color Artist: Adriano Lucas
Letterer: Wes Abbott
Review by James Attias
Knight Terrors: Nightwing #2 brings us back into the Arkham Asylum of Nightwing’s mind, but is he in the madhouse or is the madhouse in him? (I’ll tone down the puns/clichés as we advance… I have a problem).
GoodNight Wing
We left off last issue with Dick trapped in a horrible nightmare version of Arkham run by the monsters and criminals who have been thrown in there by Gotham’s heroes.
One of the elements of this entire Knight Terrors event that has fans (me) scratching their heads… but what are the parameters to these nightmares? If you die in the dream, you die in real life, I’ve heard mentioned here and there. However, I’ve also seen people sprout three heads or turn into a nightmare version of themselves, which leaves me wondering what the consequences of this global rough night actually are.
This book shows us on the last page. Sadly, I can’t talk about it. Spoiler… also appears in this issue with the team of Batgirls; Steph, Cass, and Robo-Babs, who we saw at the end of issue one. Many characters, including a very helpful Jonathan Crane, seem to be very present in Dick’s unconscious mind. What I want to know is, are they also dreaming and it’s a shared dream? Or are they all figments of Dick’s imagination? We’ll have to find out in one of the other Knight Terrors books…
BatManga
The art in this twisted tale reminded me of the early 2000’s Teen Titans cartoon, which was heavily influenced by anime, which is inspired by Manga, which is Japanese for comic book… OK, I’ve gone off topic here… back to the point. Elements of the art were really interesting and scary, but then other pages felt like scary cartoons. I don’t know if this was intentional or just something that happened, but it did pull me out of the story on more than one occasion. I just wish it had been more consistent.
So, for the sake of Nightwing, I will imagine that it was intentional and that some parts of his imagination sometimes get a bit cartoony. I mean we’ve all been terrified by Courage the Cowardly Dog, right? Now that we’re done with Knight Terrors for Nightwing I’m excited to get back to reading the hottest author/artist team in comics right now, Tom Taylor and Bruno Redondo.
Conclusion
Knight Terrors: Nightwing #2 was a middle-of-the-road book compared to all of the other titles for the mega-crossover at the moment. It wasn’t the worst, but it wasn’t the best (for me, that was Knight Terrors: Green Lantern #2)