Knight Terrors: Shazam! #1 // Review
Mary Bromfield’s house is burning. She needs to find water to put out the fire, but the house has wound up in the middle of a desert that stretches across both horizons. It’s a nightmare situation...but that’s because this IS a nightmare as Mary finds herself in Knight Terrors: Shazam! #1. Writer Mark Waid tells a compelling story that is offered to page and panel by penciler Roger Cruz, inker Wellington Dias, and colorist Arif Prianto. Waid and company throw Mary Marvel into a deliciously creepy horror that creeps in around the edges of her psyche. Like this week’s Zatanna feature, it’s one of the best of the Knight Terrors crossover issue thus far.
Billy shows up looking like Black Adam. He tells Mary that she can’t save her family. The reason? She’s in a dream. The catch is: she knows she’s in a dream. That doesn’t mean that she shouldn’t try to save her family, though. She tries. And then wakes up from the nightmare only to find herself waking up in the next one. And the next one. And so on. Her parents have decided to take her to a sleep specialist, which is actually kind of weird considering they don’t exist. Neither does the specialist. She knows all this. She does bear the wisdom of Minerva, after all.
Waid’s narrative is subtly trippy on a number of different levels. Mary is put through a series of events that wouldn’t seem entirely out of place in her regular life: personal stuff with the family. Saving lives. Entering danger, and so on. It’s all there, but rather than ending the traditional way those sorts of scenes end for a superhero...they deviate rather suddenly and horrifyingly into the next scene. Mary knows that none of it’s real, but she’s acting like it is...and not for any specific reason, either. It’s all lost in weird dream logic that makes it all a great deal of fun.
Cruz and Dias harness the horror with very simple visuals that occasionally drift over into the darker end of things. She’s offered a rather large insect for breakfast. Her mother and father seem perfectly okay with it. Rather than present it in a way that amplifies the horror, the huge insects are casually presented with the rest of the kitchen like a perfectly normal thing to be found on a plate. The drama is brought across with serious gravity, but the horror is casually treated as a perfectly normal part of the surroundings, which is beautifully surreal.
Mary may be more or less oblivious about the situation that she’s in, but she remains an admirably heroic figure throughout the issue, which ends up being really, really impressive in its own right. She knows that she’s caught in a dream, but she refuses to acknowledge it until she has to. There are things to be done regardless of the situation with the world around her. It’s an interestingly skewed look at superheroism that ends up being really, really fascinating on closer inspection, even though...ostensibly, it’s just another superhero horror story.
