Demon Knights #0 – Review

By: Paul Cornell (story), Bernard Chang (art), Marcelo Maiolo (colors)

The Story: Give Jason a break, Merlin—the devil made him do it.

The Review: In Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next novels, the titular character observes that in real life, things happen in our lives on a constant basis without any significance at all.  She points out, shortly after nearly getting steamrollered by a, well, steamroller, that had such a thing happened in a book, after some one hundred pages she’d discover the event was part of a crafted series of interrelated acts that would affect her profoundly.  And of course, a hundred pages in, she would.

Once you’ve experienced a lot of fiction, you realize that there’s no shortage of examples where things happen without much reason or impact—as much because of poor writing as anything else—but by and large, everything in a story happens for a reason.  Bringing this back to Demon Knights, the question then becomes: why Etrigan and why Jason Blood?  Why did Merlin call upon that particular demon and bind him to this particular individual?