Howdy!
As mentioned in my previous post I have been reading A LOT of comics. I've been trying to maneuver through the latest DC Universe Rebirth series and am currently making my way through the New 52 Universe that began back in 2011.
In order to work my way decently through the New 52 Universe I have been using this reading order from Comic Book Reading Orders.com. (New 52 Reading Order) If anyone else is interested in doing the same reading journey, you can also use this guide. This site has a very comprehensive collection of reading orders to my knowledge and has proved very helpful to me thus far.
I just finished getting through the full series of Demon Knights and thought I would put up my thoughts on it, because I have quite a few.
Demon Knights is collected in 3 volumes and is listed as being towards the beginning of the New 52 reading order. The 0 issue seems to claim that this whole thing will eventually be relevant and yet, I'm still waiting to see how.
Volume 1 collects issues #1-7
Volume 2 collects issues #0, #8-12
Volume 3 collects issues #13-23
Issues #0-15 were written by Paul Cornell, with Robert Venditti taking over issues #16-23. The series had a few different illustrators throughout its run (starting with Diogenes Neves, Oclair Albert, Michael Choi, and Robson Rocha, eventually switching to Bernard Chang and Phil Winslade towards the end).
The series was ultimately cancelled and it isn't necessarily hard for me to see why.
Demon Knights is a fantasy comic set in medieval times. It involves big historical literary names and places like Merlin, King Arthur, Avalon, Camelot, Lucifer, and Hell. It takes 7 individuals, including a sorceress, a demon cursed to be magically chained to a human, a few immortals, and another human, and tosses them into a group that ends up being called the Demon Knights. They first come together in order to fight and protect a village from an army and then their adventures broaden to include finding Avalon, searching for the Holy Grail, and towards the end of the series, taking on a vampire army on its way to Themyscira. home of the Amazons.
While it had a decent start, it never felt like anything particularly special to me. It was very basic entertainment and to me it lacked a wide scope of creativity once it hit a certain point in the series. At times I felt really engaged and then in the next few issues I would get kind of bored. The first major plot-line ends at issue #15, and I honestly think the next issues should have just wrapped things up for the series. Issues #16 to #23 had writers gathering the same characters again, to fight a vampire army led by Cain. The overall story also involves one of the characters being on a pretty typical search for the Holy Grail. Given all the religious elements pulled together in this series, that shouldn't be that surprising. Bringing together a demon who has ambitions of becoming higher ranked in Hell who is always at odds with the devil Lucifer, a search for the Holy Grail, and adventures involving searching for King Arthur and restoring Camelot should have been highly interesting, but to me just fell flat after a while despite having a strong start. After a while I was just wondering when they would do it or if they could actually have a worthwhile enemy pop up again to hinder them. I don't really see how this will end up connecting to anything in the overall New 52 universe at this point and maybe there will be some kind of connection in other issues in the universe in the future as I continue reading through it. However, due to the overall execution and cancellation I'm not getting my hopes up too high to have that happen. The beginning half of the series is rather interesting, but the shift at issue #16 and jump in time just killed it for me. It was not nearly as interesting and the stakes didn't feel as high as they did before. Etrigan didn't seem to be of much interest to me in the #0 issue to begin with, but he quickly proved himself to be a highly valuable asset to the team despite being kind of a wild-card/self-serving personality type.He gets the job done when necessary so long as it benefits him, which is to be expected of a demon. I don't know a lot about the history of these characters if any of them had origins before this, but I'm not sure all of them were used to their highest potential. Etrigan wasn't an awful character, just highly predictable, but largely effective. One of the most intriguing elements is the curse placed on Jason Blood and Etrigan and how they have to balance their existences with one another. That was the strongest point of the second half, but still kind of fell flat at the end of the series and it didn't end as strongly as I would've liked.
Some of my biggest problems with this series was just the lack of real hardship that was reached at a certain point. Any enemy the Demon Knights came upon after the first major army were almost instantly defeated within 2 or 3 issues with hardly any suspense, or they were able to get away like nothing happened once their armies were destroyed. I didn't care much for many of the characters which made it hard to want them to succeed beyond wanting evil to be destroyed.
Also, I found the two extremely obvious references to Lord of the Rings pretty darn cheap and not well used. That may seem nit picky of me, but when you do a fantasy story and want to pay homage or toss back to some of the best fantasy that has been written to this day, the way it was done just didn't feel adequate. "One does not simply walk into Hell." Really? Nobody would have known that Hell was hard to get into or out of had you not provided us with that tidbit. "No one shall pass!" Spoken twice. If you're fighting enemies, you aren't SUPPOSED to let them pass. Its an unspoken rule of defending a place while in combat because its the CORE of your mission to protect: let no enemies pass. Unless you are the sole keeper of a gate and you are supposed to say that as you make a lone stand to seem really cool, don't bother saying that in the middle of combat. Just yell with your effort as you smack down enemies. Actions speak louder than words, folks. It was done with epic awesomeness in Lord of the Rings, but felt cheap in the sequences they were used in for Demon Knights. Even if those lines were all unintentionally written to not be references, it is hard to believe they aren't due to their popularity among fantasy fans. It had to trigger in one of the writer's minds as they wrote it down or when the editor read through it.
Overall, the Demon Knights series had some promising elements and a strong start, but ultimately fizzled into nothing more than a barely-meets-my-bar of entertainment, and "is it almost over yet?" kind of title for me. If I had to recommend any of it, I'd say start with issue #0 and read the first two volumes and issues #13-#15. None of the rest feels necessary to me so far. If it ends up being so, I'll add an update to this post, but as far as enjoyment goes, that is the only part that felt like anything worthwhile in my opinion. I give issues #0-#15 a solid ✯✯✯ out of 5 Lone Stars, but issues #16-#23 fall to a ✯✯ star rating. It can be a decent entertaining time, but only to a certain point. I'm really glad it ended when it did, although I think it should've ended sooner. The second major plot didn't really go anywhere that I felt helped the series in the long run. With a different story or better execution for the second half, I feel this title could have done REALLY well, but it was run into the ground. The artwork in the first half is also really solid, but some of the facial expressions illustrated in the second half just looked awkward in some ways and could have been better finessed. The second half lost a lot of the richness that made the first part good at times and largely bearable at others.
As mentioned in my previous post I have been reading A LOT of comics. I've been trying to maneuver through the latest DC Universe Rebirth series and am currently making my way through the New 52 Universe that began back in 2011.
In order to work my way decently through the New 52 Universe I have been using this reading order from Comic Book Reading Orders.com. (New 52 Reading Order) If anyone else is interested in doing the same reading journey, you can also use this guide. This site has a very comprehensive collection of reading orders to my knowledge and has proved very helpful to me thus far.
I just finished getting through the full series of Demon Knights and thought I would put up my thoughts on it, because I have quite a few.
Demon Knights is collected in 3 volumes and is listed as being towards the beginning of the New 52 reading order. The 0 issue seems to claim that this whole thing will eventually be relevant and yet, I'm still waiting to see how.
Volume 1 collects issues #1-7
Volume 3 collects issues #13-23
Issues #0-15 were written by Paul Cornell, with Robert Venditti taking over issues #16-23. The series had a few different illustrators throughout its run (starting with Diogenes Neves, Oclair Albert, Michael Choi, and Robson Rocha, eventually switching to Bernard Chang and Phil Winslade towards the end).
The series was ultimately cancelled and it isn't necessarily hard for me to see why.
Demon Knights is a fantasy comic set in medieval times. It involves big historical literary names and places like Merlin, King Arthur, Avalon, Camelot, Lucifer, and Hell. It takes 7 individuals, including a sorceress, a demon cursed to be magically chained to a human, a few immortals, and another human, and tosses them into a group that ends up being called the Demon Knights. They first come together in order to fight and protect a village from an army and then their adventures broaden to include finding Avalon, searching for the Holy Grail, and towards the end of the series, taking on a vampire army on its way to Themyscira. home of the Amazons.
While it had a decent start, it never felt like anything particularly special to me. It was very basic entertainment and to me it lacked a wide scope of creativity once it hit a certain point in the series. At times I felt really engaged and then in the next few issues I would get kind of bored. The first major plot-line ends at issue #15, and I honestly think the next issues should have just wrapped things up for the series. Issues #16 to #23 had writers gathering the same characters again, to fight a vampire army led by Cain. The overall story also involves one of the characters being on a pretty typical search for the Holy Grail. Given all the religious elements pulled together in this series, that shouldn't be that surprising. Bringing together a demon who has ambitions of becoming higher ranked in Hell who is always at odds with the devil Lucifer, a search for the Holy Grail, and adventures involving searching for King Arthur and restoring Camelot should have been highly interesting, but to me just fell flat after a while despite having a strong start. After a while I was just wondering when they would do it or if they could actually have a worthwhile enemy pop up again to hinder them. I don't really see how this will end up connecting to anything in the overall New 52 universe at this point and maybe there will be some kind of connection in other issues in the universe in the future as I continue reading through it. However, due to the overall execution and cancellation I'm not getting my hopes up too high to have that happen. The beginning half of the series is rather interesting, but the shift at issue #16 and jump in time just killed it for me. It was not nearly as interesting and the stakes didn't feel as high as they did before. Etrigan didn't seem to be of much interest to me in the #0 issue to begin with, but he quickly proved himself to be a highly valuable asset to the team despite being kind of a wild-card/self-serving personality type.He gets the job done when necessary so long as it benefits him, which is to be expected of a demon. I don't know a lot about the history of these characters if any of them had origins before this, but I'm not sure all of them were used to their highest potential. Etrigan wasn't an awful character, just highly predictable, but largely effective. One of the most intriguing elements is the curse placed on Jason Blood and Etrigan and how they have to balance their existences with one another. That was the strongest point of the second half, but still kind of fell flat at the end of the series and it didn't end as strongly as I would've liked.
Some of my biggest problems with this series was just the lack of real hardship that was reached at a certain point. Any enemy the Demon Knights came upon after the first major army were almost instantly defeated within 2 or 3 issues with hardly any suspense, or they were able to get away like nothing happened once their armies were destroyed. I didn't care much for many of the characters which made it hard to want them to succeed beyond wanting evil to be destroyed.
Also, I found the two extremely obvious references to Lord of the Rings pretty darn cheap and not well used. That may seem nit picky of me, but when you do a fantasy story and want to pay homage or toss back to some of the best fantasy that has been written to this day, the way it was done just didn't feel adequate. "One does not simply walk into Hell." Really? Nobody would have known that Hell was hard to get into or out of had you not provided us with that tidbit. "No one shall pass!" Spoken twice. If you're fighting enemies, you aren't SUPPOSED to let them pass. Its an unspoken rule of defending a place while in combat because its the CORE of your mission to protect: let no enemies pass. Unless you are the sole keeper of a gate and you are supposed to say that as you make a lone stand to seem really cool, don't bother saying that in the middle of combat. Just yell with your effort as you smack down enemies. Actions speak louder than words, folks. It was done with epic awesomeness in Lord of the Rings, but felt cheap in the sequences they were used in for Demon Knights. Even if those lines were all unintentionally written to not be references, it is hard to believe they aren't due to their popularity among fantasy fans. It had to trigger in one of the writer's minds as they wrote it down or when the editor read through it.
Overall, the Demon Knights series had some promising elements and a strong start, but ultimately fizzled into nothing more than a barely-meets-my-bar of entertainment, and "is it almost over yet?" kind of title for me. If I had to recommend any of it, I'd say start with issue #0 and read the first two volumes and issues #13-#15. None of the rest feels necessary to me so far. If it ends up being so, I'll add an update to this post, but as far as enjoyment goes, that is the only part that felt like anything worthwhile in my opinion. I give issues #0-#15 a solid ✯✯✯ out of 5 Lone Stars, but issues #16-#23 fall to a ✯✯ star rating. It can be a decent entertaining time, but only to a certain point. I'm really glad it ended when it did, although I think it should've ended sooner. The second major plot didn't really go anywhere that I felt helped the series in the long run. With a different story or better execution for the second half, I feel this title could have done REALLY well, but it was run into the ground. The artwork in the first half is also really solid, but some of the facial expressions illustrated in the second half just looked awkward in some ways and could have been better finessed. The second half lost a lot of the richness that made the first part good at times and largely bearable at others.
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