As the summer season gets closer, there are two things to be true: 1) it’ll get hotter and 2) summer superhero events are coming soon. That includes DC Comics’ much-anticipated Knight Terrors, which launches July 4 (with an FOC of Sunday, June 11). The horrific spectacle begins with Knight Terrors: First Blood #1 from series showrunner Joshua Williamson and artist Howard Porter.
In Knight Terrors: First Blood #1, Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman find the body of one of their earliest enemies inside the Hall of Justice. With the aid of Deadman, they start to investigate something that takes them past the lands of both the living and the dead and directly into the clutches of an all-new villain called Insomnia. In a superhero event that’s all about nightmares taking the minds of heroes’ and villains’ alike, this one’s sure to be one deeply terrifying start.
Thus far, fans have gotten a fun-sized Halloween candy taste of Knight Terrors via DC’s own Free Comic Book Day comic as well as the glorious variant cover art. Today, however, AIPT can dig a little deeper in a new interview with Williamson, who touches on working with Porter, criticisms of the event, and what horrors lie ahead, among many other topics.
For an extended edition of this interview, be sure to listen to the AIPT Comics podcast with the episode airing this Sunday!
Courtesy of DC Comics.
AIPT: With Knight Terrors, are you building out some dream/nightmare corner in the DC universe even further than what it was before?
Joshua Williamson: We do wanna play around with that world and sort of put some new pieces on the table that we’ll explore next year. We definitely wanted to change things up a little bit in a couple of places. We’re not trying to build necessarily a whole new corner, but I definitely wanted to use this space to build some new toys.
That is one of the goals of this year, and as part of Dawn in DC is that so much of DC comics always comes down to the Justice League, you know? This is actually a point that Dennis Culver has said, working on Doom Patrol. We need more pillars in the DCU. We need more like corners, as you say. He’s doing the Doom Patrol corner, and with this, I think DC has a really strong horror corner, but all the horror stuff has been out of continuity, you know? Awesome things like DCeased and DC vs. Vampires, but those take place out of the cannon.
So with this, we need to do more horror stuff that takes place in the core and build out that world a little bit more. Because DC Horror has been so fleshed out, but not in the core line as much. Not since James [Tynion IV] and Justice League Dark was really the last time that that corner was really explored.
Courtesy of DC Comics.
AIPT: The Trinity shows up in this issue, and they get a lot of focus. How important are the Trinity in your mind to the DCU? Are they a must-have in any event like this?
JW: No. I mean, here’s the thing. I’ll be really candid with you. I did Dark Crisis. Our crisis focused so much on the new characters, right? And this is actually one of the points of Dark Crisis, when you go back and you look at some of these major events that DC has done, they always involve the Trinity in some form or another, right? Both Metal and Death Metal were really about the Trinity. Doomsday Clock was Superman. Infinite Crisis is about Superman. Final Crisis is Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. With Dark Crisis, I wanna see an event from somebody else’s point of view, you know?
And so that’s where it was like Jon and Nightwing, bringing Black Adam. Let’s tell the biggest kind of event you could do, which is a crisis event, but let’s not involve the characters that you normally see.
But after doing that, we came to this, and I also wanted the story to be smaller. I still want to have really big stakes, but I wanted there to be a more intimate focus. And that sort of played into the role of nightmares. Nightmares are not really intended to be taken literally. Right? Like sometimes they can be, but it’s supposed to be about something internal that is trying to tell you something.
I started talking about Deadman and wanting it to be like one person’s point of view, that being Deadman. But as I started looking at it, we started talking about the art and the characters, and we kept coming back around to Superman, Badman, and Wonder Woman in the conversations. If you’re doing a big story with the DCU, I feel like you should have their point of view on it as well. It was interesting cuz at first, it was like almost a mercenary reason to have them where it was like, we’re doing a big story we should use them. But then as I started working on it, I was like, oh, this actually makes sense. There’s story reasons why this is happening. There’s story reasons why they’re here. It isn’t just because we wanna put them on a cover. It actually became logistical. To answer your question, like, no, I don’t think you have to, but I think once you started developing the story, in this case, it actually worked out.
At one point, I was like, oh, it’s only going to be Batman and Deadman. There was a conversation of this as a Batman/Deadman story. Then it’s funny because I wrote myself into a box, right? Because there is no Justice League right now. And because this is a big piece of like, the Dawn of DC narrative, to have it be where it’s like the three of them are involved. It just, it just made sense. The entire event actually takes place in one night. It allowed us to really spend a little bit more time with the characters themselves.
It’s almost like this event is almost like a check-in for what is going on with these characters in Dawn of DC.
Courtesy of DC Comics.
AIPT: I’ve seen the criticism from readers that this is a two-month pause to the ongoing series, but it sounds like you’ll be exploring these characters thoroughly?
JW: Yeah. I wouldn’t say it’s a pause. It’s continuing those stories, like the elements that they’re having before they continue afterward. If you decide to take the two months off and you get to the other side, there are going to be things you’re like, “wait what happened?” I think you do have to carry through with it. We wanted the stories to feel self-contained at the same time. That was one of the biggest tricks, and this is something with First Blood particularly, where if you look at First Blood, I kind of have Wonder Woman, Batman, and Superman, I kind of say what’s been happening with him.
There’s stuff that’s going to happen in the fall and winter, and that is 100% connected to this. And that’ll become really apparent once you get to the ending. Certain people take advantage of the situation that will impact stuff later in the years.
Courtesy of DC Comics.
AIPT: Howard Porters’ art once again. Fabulous. In this issue, though, I got the sense that it was a little rougher, compared to his previous work. Was that a direction by you, or is it a decision by him?
JW: Yeah. It is rougher. Howard is a big horror fan. And actually, if you go and look at the times that Howard has done horror stuff, like he has done a couple of horror shorts. A story with Keith Giffen at DC, in eight pagers and 10 pagers. And he would always do them a little rougher. With this, we were talking about it. We were like, listen, “We’re going to try to get away with some stuff.” Like, we’re going to try to push the age rating, you know, we’re going to try and push that teen plus PG-13 realm a little bit, but that’s going to mean some comic trickery. It’s going to involve what you don’t see, but at the same time, we’re like, we still want you to see it.
We wanted to have a different feel from things that have come before. We wanted to have a little bit of a rough-around-the-edges kind of horror vibe to it that I think you can get away with horror. It was definitely a conscious thought of making it a little rougher and a little dirtier to kind of play with the theme of it and the tone of the horror that we were going for.
It’s still a horror, but like my favorite kind of horror always has dark humor in it. I’m a big Sam Raimi fan, like with Drag Me to Hell it’s really horrific, but it’s also just gross. It’s a gross movie, and it’s really funny. I feel like that is some of the best kinds of horror where it’s that tension and release.
AIPT: The sweet and salty at once. A bit of a spoiler, but I have to ask, there’s a line of dialogue in Knight Terror’s: First Blood. “No Sleep till Gotham.” Is this a Beastie Boy reference? <laugh>
JW: 100% yes, of course. Yes.
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