DC's upcoming Knight Terrors event features the publisher's best-known characters confronting their worst nightmares -- among them, The Joker. And one of the event's writers explains just what The Clown Prince is afraid of. And it's unlike that of another DC character, hero or villain.
The Joker's darkest fear? Living the life of an office drone. "I don't really know what he's afraid of other than no one paying attention to him and no one caring about him and him being boring," writer Matthew Rosenberg told Comicbook.com. "So I came back to [Editor] Ben [Abernathy], I said, 'What if he just had a boring life and was boring to everyone around him?'"
Rosenberg is the writer of the two-issue event tie-in, Knight Terrors: The Joker, drawn by Stefano Raffaele. The mini-series is one of 20 such titles supplementing DC's Knight Terrors event. The titles will take over the DC Universe throughout July and August. The main four-issue Knight Terrors series is written by Joshua Williamson and drawn by Giuseppe Camuncoli, Stefano Nesi and Caspar Wijngaard.
"Ben and I talked about it on the phone, and we talked about it with Joshua Williamson and all of us, I think, were really excited about that idea, but couldn't quite wrap our heads around what that meant as a book," Rosenberg said. "It took a little work to get there. But I think once we saw how excited everyone was about the idea of bored, day-job Joker, we knew that it was going to be something fun and weird and different."
"When you’re the Clown Prince of Crime, what kind of nightmare do you have?" posits DC's solicitation for Knight Terrors: The Joker. "Working a nine-to-five office job! How will the Joker handle meetings that could have been emails?! Why did management cancel bring-your-child-to-work day?! Who will want to make small talk at the coffee machine?! What is Alexis going to pick for lunch?! And who is the masked madman terrorizing Gotham at night?!"
Knight Terrors is ushered in by the death of a longtime DC villain. Those events give way to the rise of a new foe called Insomnia. The new villain's machinations affect heroes and villains alike. Both are forced to confront their darkest fears in a nightmare dimension.
The summer event kicks off with Williamson and Howard Porter's one-shot Knight Terrors: First Blood #1, on sale July 4. The same creative team wraps up the storyline with the bookend one-shot Knight Terrors: Night's End #1, on sale in August.
Source: Comicbook.com