When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.
WRITTEN BY: Alex Grecian
ART BY: Riley Rossmo
PUBLISHER: Image Comics
PRICE: $2.99
RELEASE: October 29, 2014
Reviewed By: Katy Rex
Rasputin is one of those public figures, legends, that has held prolonged public fascination. He’s on a short list of historical figures whose inexplicable life story is more interesting than most fiction; Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth Bathory, Lizzie Borden. There are rumors of dark magic and witchcraft, and those possibilities seem as believable as any other explanation. Where Grigori Rasputin benefits is his connection to another favorite historical mystery, that of Anastasia Nikolaevna.
Alex Grecian and Riley Rossimo seem to know exactly how much fact and how much truth of the legend to include. This is definitely a first issue, and it’s setting up the rest of the arc with backstory and development. The art is a beautiful combination of vintage and otherworldly touches. The story engages even as it explicates. The palette (colored by Ivan Plascencia) plays with the era and adds dashes of the supernatural throughout the book.
This is a really enjoyable read. It would have been significantly more enjoyable, however, with different lettering choices. There’s text-in-panel narration in a scrawling, difficult-to-read font that takes away from the overall story, forcing the reader to spend as much time focusing on the letters as the words. Further, there were opportunities for creative fonts, and with a Russian subject, it was ripe for stylized text.
This is a very good series, and one I will continue to read. It’s what I like about historical fiction, that slight bent toward the speculative, keeping close enough to the facts to create intrigue. This story has all the potential to contain all the elements that I like in a good series. Insanity, supernatural, death-defying mysteries, political turmoil, royalty—there’s so much more to come, and It’ll absolutely stay on my pull list.
—
Katy Rex writes comics analysis at endoftheuniversecomics.com, comicsbulletin.com, and bloody-disgusting.com. She also writes scholarly articles for various academic journals. She really likes butt jokes, dinosaurs, and killing psychos and midgets in Borderlands 2. She has a great sense of humor if you’re not an asshole.