Another week, another lack of a major historical event, another opportunity for my stress ulcer to heal, and another dive into the backlogged pile that sits in the corner of my room watching me sleep. But then things just watching you sleep is rather mild compared to something creeping out of the dream realm and wreaking havoc on the world. Or those same things drawing you into a dream world where you’re tortured by dreadful visions from the deepest recesses of your mind. That, though, is where we find one of the most recent DC events in Knight Terrors by Joshua Williamson, Howard Porter, Brad Anderson, Giuseppe Camuncoli, Casper Wijngaard, Steffano Nessi, Frank Martin, and Troy Peteri.

Knight Terrors from beginning to end was a building-block event. This wasn’t the state change that something like last week’s Dark Crisis on Infinite Earths was, but it was still something that affects the DC Universe as a whole due to the massive scale of its villain, Insomnia. As this is a villain that works within the dream realm—but somehow outside Sandman Dream’s realm—the entire world must be asleep. And through sheer magical force, this is accomplished as every living, organic being on Earth is thrown into a deep slumber. The only people left to deal with the slowly deteriorating state of the world are the various robots, like Red Tornado and the Metal Men, and those who don’t need sleep—our main heroes, Deadman possessing Batman’s sleeping body and Wesley Dodds, the original Sandman.

Even if this event is mostly here to establish an anti-superhero thread that ties into the current Absolute Power event happening now, there’s still a fun through-line in this as our main characters are Deadman and Wesley Dodds. Outside of one-off stories, this isn’t the kind of pairing that we see in contemporary event comics. And just their presence—Deadman as this ghost inhabiting Batman’s body and The Sandman as a resurrected pulp hero who comes back because he knows how to put people to sleep. As a combination, there’s an absurdity there, but it works well to see the interplay between two characters that don’t get much of a spotlight. The creators here bring a prestige to the pair and who they are that we haven’t seen since Sandman Mystery Theatre ended in 1999. It only makes us want to see more of these kinds of background heroes return to showcase just how much storytelling potential still exists for them.

An event like Night Terrors reminds me of more small-scale events in the past like Convergence or Drowned Earth that take a small concept and expand upon it until a whole event seems to pop up. They’re there to bridge gaps in larger stories or help bring out characters we haven’t been paying attention to, but they’re the kind of story necessary to these longer-running superhero universes. Sometimes you just need a low-stakes story to get some readers interested in the larger universe and Knight Terrors is an easy series to get interested in. 

Get excited. Get spooky.

Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.