Knight and Squire #1

The initial reading of the first issue of Knight and Squire can be a bit frustrating. Very little in happens in the issue, and the titular characters themselves seem especially secondary to the goings on. Add to this the fact that the majority of the book is written in thick British and Cockney slang, and you have something that feels completely impenetrable. (A glossary of puzzling references for "Colonists" is offered at the end of the book, showing at least some effort to clarify for those who might find themselves lost.)

But with each additional flip through of the book, I've slowly come to an appreciation of what is going on here. Just as in the most recent appearance of Knight and Squire over in Batman and Robin, the interest is less on the characters themselves so much as offering a strictly British approach to the superhero genre, with a fair amount of emphasis on mysticism, oddity and (of course) misplaced civility. The end result is something resembling Nextwave as written by Monty Python or Douglas Adams, where the absurdity of spandex-and-capes stories is given a real world context. It is the sort of thing that people like Busiek and Bendis have done before, but while both of them ultimately presented superheroes as flawed, failed human beings, Cornell and Broxton seem hell-bent on still having a good time.

The story here is centered on The Time in a Bottle, a pub in London that is the favorite hang out for both heroes and villains, specifically because a ward set within a statue of Merlin keeps them from scuffling. This particular night, a new visitor calling himself Shrike (not the Nightwing villain) is introduced to the clientele of the bar by Squire. About two-thirds of the way through, something disturbs the peace of the establishment, and the various heroes and villains of London (along with a visiting Wildcat) must figure out how to stop it before the one place where baddies and good guys can drink in peace is in ruins.

And that's about it, as far as a story goes. But this issue isn't about story, persay, so much as establishing the sorts of characters that fill in the Britain of the DC Universe. And while some are very specific pop culture and political references that, even once the helpful appendix explains them, don't come off as particularly funny, others are hilarious. There is the First Eleven, a crime syndicate that dresses like a Cricket team and has branches across the majority of the former Empire ("They've never caught on in America, for some reason" Squire explains,) the Milkman and his Milk of Human Kindness, and Jarvis Poker the British Joker, who dresses in a fashion familiar to the Clown Prince of Gotham despite finding actually committing crime "too dreary." Even throw away gags like Death Dinosaur, a poshly dressed version Killer Croc, are simultaneously amusing and begging to be expanded upon in future issues.

This issue, as well as future issues based on what the solicitations have suggested, is self-contained, which gives the whole thing a feeling of being very "a day in the life of DC Britain." The light touch and generally cheeky, dry humor is a nice departure from a wealth of comics that take themselves very seriously. Paul Cornell previous proved himself to be an avid fan of the absurder aspects of British history and culture in his MI: 13 books, and Knight and Squire takes that concept and fully expands it. Hopefully the sells of this limited series allows him the oppurtunity to tell more stories in DC's Britain. As Jarvis Poker describes it, it is "the funny and the serious, the horrific and the whimsical, all pushed together." And it is a locale that I am very much interested in spending more time in.