Review by Frank Plowright
Bob’s night’s not going well. On leaving the restaurant after his girlfriend dumps him he witnesses an assault, after which he’s mugged and the police don’t care because eventually the city’s resident superhero will deal with the muggers. Just when Bob thought his night couldn’t get any worse, in trying to prevent an accident he instead kills said superhero. That, however, turns out to be the turning point for Bob’s luck changing.
The set-up occupies 20% of the graphic novel, but it’s needed for Gregg Hurwitz to establish the type of person Bob is. His girlfriend all but accuses him of being dull and never taking a chance, and later events prove him a bystander rather than a man of action. What will happen, then, when he’s forced into action? The means to making him more than he’s been is the Knight’s costume, designed to literally take on much of the heavy lifting. Protective and offensive, it’s a case of the clothes making the man.
A reluctant Bob is well characterised, but Knighted never has the chance to flourish due to Mark Texeira’s art. It settles down, but starts as extremely stylised with distorted figures that keep attracting attention for the wrong reasons. That works fine when it comes to cybernetically altered criminals as you’d expect them to look wonky, but given the premise, the Knight should be a suitably awe-inspiring figure, even with Bob in the suit, and when the civilians look better than the hero there’s a problem.
Knighted also carries a fair streak of sadism, both in the graphic violence overall and the extremely disturbing back story of the primary villain, an abused crippled child to begin with. As it continues Hurwitz always seems to be treating Bob as a joke, even when he’s changing his life, plotting a continuing series of misunderstandings from the type of improbable situations that perpetuate soap operas. In what never greatly departs from satirising Batman it’s exaggerated and obvious.
Set in the same world as The Resistance, there are brief references to other events, but never to the point of muddying the waters, but overall Knighted is a poor relation.
