Dark Knights of Steel: Allwinter #1 In The Bleak Midwinter

This story continues in the vein of Tom Taylor’s vast and ambitious reimagining of the DCU, but whereas Taylor’s take is one that sprawls, sending off vines and offshoots that bear strange fruit, Kristoff’s take is much more streamlined. If Taylor made a sprawling world, Kristoff fashioned a single, perfect blade. 

This story is a seemingly straightforward quest myth, told with the kind of blunt brutality that is utterly appropriate for a Norse-flavored myth. The characters are brutally straightforward, with simple desires (power, violence, a long-lost wife, gold) but this seeming-simplicity allows for some truly excellent character work. Killer Frost, for example, has hardly ever been this interesting. She’s hungry for nothing but chaos and blood, and I love that for her.

Slade himself has always been a startlingly complex character, and he remains so here, although he comes across, in places, as a mixture of Beowulf and Santa Claus. There’s one scene in particular, in which he allows himself to be swallowed by a leviathan only to hack his way back out through the creature’s own guts, that was taken directly from the Beowulf myth. Luckily for all of us, it was excellently done. 

The twist in this story was appropriately mythic. I cannot reveal anything more about it, save to say that it was both startling and numinous.

The visual tone of this book is, as a whole, strikingly beautiful. This story is told in shades of white, black and gray, and it would be incredibly easy for the art to blend together into an indistinct background middle, but Tirso has managed to infuse every panel with the crisp lines and energy of a medieval woodcut. The sea has never been drawn so beautifully in a comic book, nor have battles ever felt so mythic.

This is an incredibly strong beginning to what promises to be an absolutely fascinating series.