Noteworthy Issues: Knight Terrors: Batman #2 (August, 2023)

OK, here I am, finally getting to the backhalf of the Knight Terrors summer event.  That means I can maybe start to catch up on the other series I was reviewing before I started reading this one.

Or not.  Anyway, did Batman get over his bad dreams?

Issue:  Knight Terrors: Batman #2, August 2023

Writer:  Joshua Williamson

Artists:  Guillem March and Trevor Hairsine

The Plot:  Batman tells off Insomnia a few times, plus some stuff with Arsenal and Black Canary.

Commentary:  The first part of this two parter had a back-up story with Damien “Robin” Wayne finding a way to stay awake during this whole Insomnia thing because of course that punk would find a way to stay awake since “being a snotty, obnoxious kid who is better at stuff than his father” seems to be Damien’s whole thing.  Anyway, this second part has a back-up with Roy Harper and Dinah Lance, appropriate enough since Joshua Williamson is also currently writing Green Arrow.  It’s negligible in the grand scheme of things as the short story doesn’t really have the space to dig into both characters all that well.  If anything, it focuses more on Roy than Dinah, but they’re both awake for whatever the conclusion of this story is bringing up.

But the majority of this comic does focus on Batman, as it should, as he struggles to get past his own nightmares and wake up.  The first part showed him basically shrugging off all the expected bad dreams, but it ended with one even Batman might have been taken aback by:  putting him into the worst moment of his life, not as the youthful witness to his parents’ murder, but as the man about to pull the trigger instead.

That is actually not a bad twist.

But this is Batman, so he does get out of it as he fights to wake up and take the fight to Insomnia directly.  The only thing blocking him is the fact Deadman is currently using his body.  And…the issue feels rather rote as a result.  Insomnia doesn’t feel like much of a threat to Batman, and Batman can’t really do anything to him directly.  Bruce will theoretically learn something about himself when he reaches that point in his subconscious he’s trying to get to, but it doesn’t feel like something that Batman hasn’t theoretically learned many times before.

Still, not a bad issue or anything.

Grade:  B-