INTO DC’S NIGHTMARE REALM

Writer Joshua Williamson offers a tour of the Knight Terrors comic-book event.

BY AARON SAGERS

DC COMICS’ KNIGHT TERRORS is the next Dawn of DC event, which kicked off in early July with Joshua Williamson and Howard Porter’s oversized special Knight Terrors: First Blood #1. The story continues over four additional Knight Terrors issues with art by Giuseppe Camuncoli. It revolves around a new villain named Insomnia who has plunged the entire world into a realm of their own deeply personal nightmares.

Can you break down the origins of Knight Terrors? What were the inspirations behind it?

The easiest way to explain it is Freddy Krueger vs. DC Comics. It’s Nightmare on DC Street. I’ve always been really fascinated by nightmares, and I’m a big fan of A Nightmare on Elm Street. Last year, I started talking with DC about some ideas, and one of them was saying that DC Comics is haunted.

Who is Insomnia?

He puts every single person on the planet into the Nightmare Realm, and he’s searching for something called a Nightmare Stone, which allows you to pull things from your nightmares into the real world. Doctor Destiny has been a Justice League villain since the Silver Age, and he hid it in somebody’s nightmares. But what it does is it allows us to tell a bunch of fun, short horror stories within the DCU.

Why is Deadman the supernatural tour guide of this story?

He loved having an audience. He was this death-defying daredevil. This is a person who used to love having an audience, and now he is forever the audience. He is forever trapped. He’s a ghost. And in this situation, when it’s the DCU’s back against the wall, he ends up being its one hero, but it forces him to step out of that audience for a moment. He’s being the showman again.

We spend a lot of time with Batman as well. Is this a Batman able to navigate this realm? Or is this a Batman out of his league? When you read the Batman twoparter, you’ll see that Batman thinks he’s prepared for everything. But he didn’t prepare for everything; he prepared for everything from his point of view. Because he prepared for everything, his nightmares are also prepared for him.

What are the rules of nightmares in Knight Terrors?

They’re basically the same thing as the rules you would see in A Nightmare On Elm Street. If somebody dies in the dream world, they die in the real world. The entire story takes place in one day and one night.

You also bring Wesley Dodds —a.k.a. Sandman—back in an unexpected way.

Deadman is running around in Batman’s body to save Batman, but also to combat Insomnia. So he needs help with all of this. At one point, he has a vision. He sees a bit of what Insomnia is doing, then realizes the connections between the Nightmare Realm and Wesley Dodds. So he goes, and he resurrects him and turns him into a zombie.