Knight Terrors: Black Adam #1 // Review
He is one of the most prominent magical wielders on the face of the planet. He's been through quite a few stresses over the course of thousands of years. There is presumably very little that he hasn't seen or done. And yet, he is being plunged into his own nightmares. What could they possibly be? And how is it that someone of such power could be whisked away into his own nightmare realm? There are so many questions that must be answered in Knight Terrors: Black Adam #1. Writer/artist Jeremy Haun treads into the darkness with the aid of colorist Nick Filardi.
It’s just a perfectly normal border assault on Kahndaq. It’s nothing that Black Adam can’t take care of, really. He’s dealt with MUCH bigger problems in the past. He’ll deal with something a little bit more substantial when the nightmare wave plunges everyone into their darkest nightmares. One villain has managed to plunge all of the earth’s greatest heroes and villains into realms of their own worst fears. Black Adam has the kind of psyche and intellect to know what it is that’s going on. Will he fare any better than any of the others who have fallen into the darkness this summer?
Haun’s story might lack a little in vision. The deepest and darkest nightmares of someone who is thousands of years old are likely to be more or less indecipherable to anyone in the modern era. Certainly, someone of Black Adam’s power would have access to knowledge that would rest well beyond human comprehension. Haun has Black Adam against...a black house cat. (It sounds a lot more pleasantly weird than it actually is.) And it would be a lot of fun to explore that under the right circumstances. Haun goes for a much more traditional approach. It is compelling in its own way. And a lot of its power is drawn from Haun’s visual delivery of the premise.
There’s a gorgeous sense of pacing about the issue. Haun allows it to play out in a very slow and deliberate fashion that creeps in and around the title character. It comes to immerse him in a way that leans much more heavily on the visual than it does on the verbal. There's a grand sense of darkness about Black Adam’s nightmares that sinks in around the corners of everything. There's nothing out of the ordinary about this particular superhuman’s nightmares, but there is depth and substance beyond the surface. Haun renders enough to suggest some complexity in his reactions and his facial expressions. What appears to the reader to be a perfectly normal creepy ancient temple straight out of a B-grade horror movie clearly appears to have a WHOLE lot more weight to one of the most powerful characters in the DC Universe.
The Knight Terrors crossover event has been an interesting exercise in its opening week. Everything has hit the page with a particularly memorable impact. Haun finds some level of intensity in what he's putting to the page. So much of it seems to rest on the surface, but Haun is subtly placing deeper horrors in and around the edges of everything, which makes the Black Adam entry into the crossover well worth a look.
