Broken Frontier

Writer Paul Cornell gets medieval on the DCnU in Demon Knights!

The first page of writer Paul Cornell’s Demon Knights #1 is a breathtaking piece of art. Artist Diogenes Neves composes an image so striking that it's almost difficult to focus on the words in the balloons. The image depicts an injured knight, holding himself up by Excalibur, trudging through a marsh as a castle burns to cinders behind him. I thought to myself, this is a solid start and one heck of a prologue. I cannot wait to see how these events reflect on the current DCnU.

We quickly get the origins of both Madame Xanadu and Etrigan/Jason Blood, told succinctly and wonderfully. Now it’s time to see what all this means, right? Yes, but not in the way I thought.

The book skips ahead a couple hundred years…but only to the Dark Ages of the DCnU. Without letting us know, Paul Cornell has sneakily delivered us a sword and sorcery, swashbuckling fantasy tale, using recognizable characters from the funny books. Characters we previously knew were immortal for various reasons, like Etrigan, Xanadu, and the Viking-like Vandal Savage (this predates his Machiavellian super industrialist ways by a couple hundred years, at least). 

Xanadu and Blood (the demon Etrigan’s more unwilling host) are traveling through the town of Little Spring, trying to pass as pilgrims. Their banter with one another suggests so many previous and unwitting adventures, it's fun to hear these two communicate. They enter a saloon for “one quiet pint” with Vandal Savage. After meeting a few familiar characters in the bar, that will no doubt become members of the team at some point, all hell breaks loose and an invading army, fueled by dark magic and sacrifice, begins a path of destruction. Such terrible luck our heroes possess.

Cornell aims for the fences with this wacky approach and ultimately scores a homerun. The setting is fully medieval, but the language and character interactions are modern in a 1930s cinema type of fashion in the way they speak and even the plot machniations. Having your heroes always on the run but always stepping in the way of evil-doers is an old trope, but in this book, it is delivered with a wink and a smile. Neves' art is spectacular, made only stronger with Oclair Albert’s inks and Marcelo Maiolo’s color work. 

This is a very solid and fun first issue, filled with surprises, actions, humor, and originality. Oh, and did I forget to mention the dragons?