Nikolai Dante: Sympathy for the Devil

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Nikolai Dante: Sympathy for the Devil (volume 11, Rebellion, 2012).


A few people, not least a couple of the good people employed by 2000 AD's publisher, Rebellion, have expressed a little disappointment that the conclusion of Nikolai Dante after fifteen years did not attract a little more comment from the comic-book-world media. Rereading his final adventures, collected here in the eleventh and last volume in the series, I can't honestly claim to be surprised myself. The American-led funnybook press is built around the world of endless continuity. The notion of a story ending is not just anathema to most of their writers; they don't quite understand what it means for a "continuing" character to reach the end of his journey.

As finales go, not very many come grander than this. Over the course of the previous installments, compiled in Book Ten, we learned that the Romanov patriarch, Dimitri, was still alive, very active, very powerful, and ideally poised to take advantage of the power vacuum at the heart of far-future Russia. As Book Eleven opens, Nikolai and his allies are ready to strike back, rescue Jena Romanov, and finally bring some conclusion to a war-weary world. But things get off to a terrible start when one of the allies pulls a not-entirely-unexpected betrayal and our hero is captured.

The amazing thing about this book is that by this time, Robbie Morrison's story should by rights have been at least a little patience-exhausting, with two twist endings, if not more, too many. As the series continued, it built up a gigantic cast of recurring players, and while its reputation among fans and readers was almost always a good one, it did get occasional teasing for suggesting that quite a few of these characters were dead only to have them resurface, often switching sides. One of the really great twists comes when one of the principal villains, Vladimir, is shown here to escape captivity. There's a sense of "you have got to be kidding; our heroes have to beat him and his loyal forces again?", but what actually happens is wildly unpredictable.

The entire series is completely terrific, of course, but I really enjoyed the pacing and setup of the final stories. The major climax to all of the action comes about two-thirds of the way through this book, leaving plenty of space to say farewells to the characters who made it so far. Katarina Dante and Viktor Romanov each get just about the best send-offs of anybody in the comic medium, and the final fate of the recurring cowards Flintlock and Spatchcock is terrific fun. I love the balancing act of humor and knife-in-your-heart tragedy in these stories, with moments that are completely unforgettable.

Dante was co-created by Morrison and artist Simon Fraser, who handles most of the artwork in this collection. John Burns, who became a principal artistic collaborator as the series continued, got to make his farewells in the six episodes that precede the six-part finale. Both artists are on the top of their game and their work is wonderful throughout. Nikolai Dante has been one of my favorite comic characters since his debut in 1997, and while I will certainly miss the guy, I am very pleased that this epic can honestly be said to have a beginning, middle, and, that rarest of things in the comic world, an end. Highest recommendation.

Nikolai Dante's final adventure

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Nikolai Dante (Rebellion, 2012).


The fifteen-year saga of Nikolai Dante finally came to a conclusion this summer. I'm really going to miss having that rogue, that thief, that devil-may-care adventurer with a heart of gold around.

Created by Robbie Morrison and Simon Fraser, Dante starred in a wonderful and imaginative swashbuckling series set in the far-flung future of 27th Century Imperial Russia. Here, two warring dynasties struggled for control of an impoverished population. Dante learned early on that he was the bastard son of one of these powerful warlords, and fell in love with the daughter of the other. Politics, love and dysfunctional families drove the narrative just as much as Dante's love of adventure, gorgeous ladies, and, occasionally, spectacular crime.

Wrapping up his adventures meant tying up lots of subplots, and giving several beloved supporting characters one last chance to say goodbye before Dante finally got to walk down the aisle with his beloved Jena and take his place as the tsar of all the Russias. The final six week story, "Sympathy for the Devil," saw the bulk of the first episode letting half-brother Viktor leave the stage, and the second saw out his half-sister Lulu. With most of the other cast members dead or already wrapped up, that just left Nikolai and his best friend Elena left to deal with Jena's father, Vlad the Conqueror, who escaped from his prison earlier in the year, and to get that villain out of the picture and get Nikolai to the church on time.

But before Vladimir is ready to go, he wants to talk to Nikolai, man-to-man, about the corruption of power and how Vlad's once-noble intentions turned him into such a monster. And he figures that they should pass a gun back and forth and give the audience one last little familiar trope of Russian-themed fiction, with one bullet in the chamber. That too, of course. When the final collected edition of this series is released later this year - the eleventh, and apparently due in October - it will never equal the breathless, nail-biting thrill of the two cliffhangers set at that table with the game of roulette. Week five was unbearable; I've never wanted to pop ahead in time so badly, ever.

The conclusion to the saga proved to be instantly controversial. Not quite as many plot points were resolved as perhaps people were hoping (he said, saying as little as possible, unlike whoever typed up the character's page at Wikipedia!), although I think the most important and nagging ones were handled. For my part, I'd like so much to think that Nikolai would never let Vlad win by allowing those doubts to destroy his happiness, nor run, hiding, from the massive political challenge. I think the biggest clue comes from all of the narrative captions through the series that are written as excerpts from histories and biographies. Certainly Nikolai would deserve some attention as a major player during this time of huge upheaval, conflict and war, but I believe that it's what comes next that makes the man a critical focus for the historians and biographers of centuries to come. I'm also taken by the story that Vladimir tells Nikolai about having to execute his three closest friends, believing that one was a spy but never knowing which. I think that if anything were to motivate our hero into being an even better and greater man than Vlad, it's that right there.

For subjective and personal reasons, I've been attached to Dante since his April 1997 debut, and I will miss him a lot now that he's gone. I think that it has been a complete and roaring success from start to finish, and, now that it is complete, anybody who loves adventure comics should start getting the books. The current configuration is eleven titles (The Romanov Dynasty [Simon & Schuster's US edition entitled Too Cool to Kill], The Great Game, The Courtship of Jena Makarov, Tsar Wars Volumes 1 and 2, Hell and High Water, Sword of the Tsar, The Beast of Rudinshtein, Amerika and Hero of the Revolution all preceding the forthcoming final book), and your library does not need any other book from anybody else until you've begun these. Highest recommendation.

Nikolai Dante: Hero of the Revolution

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Nikolai Dante: Hero of the Revolution (volume 10) (Rebellion, 2011).

I'm sitting down to write this little feature about seven days before Robbie Morrison's final Nikolai Dante story, believed to be an eight-parter, begins in 2000 AD. It has been a blast. There has not been any other comic adventure, at all, to provide such an incredibly fun and long roller coaster of a ride in the last fifteen years.

With the tenth and penultimate collection of the series here, I can't think of a better example of a roller coaster. This book starts with the story of Dante leading his army of thieves and whores against Tsar Vladimir, and this epic, painted by John Burns, takes up about half the book. There are fatalities and losses along the way. Lauren's death is one of the few in the series that's really telegraphed ahead of time, as I don't believe that there was room for both her and Jena in the same narrative. Nevertheless, it's still a kick in the head when it happens.

When these episodes were originally published across 2010, everybody reading them believed that they were the last great war story, and that all that would be left, after the surrender of Vladimir, were loose ends and final farewells. "Heroes Be Damned," the next story, begins with the wedding of Dante's brother Viktor and the promise of a happily-ever-after ending for Dante and Jena. There's a school of thought that the series could have ended right there, sort of like Phoebe from Friends reporting how her mother would turn off Old Yeller before he tries to bite the younger brother. Because that episode is beautiful and upbeat, but just a few pages later, one of those weird loose ends turns out to be a genuinely stunning game-changer. Nikolai Dante had never shied away from killing off its supporting cast - some of us still raise a glass to Andreas - but what happens to Dante and his allies at the trial of Vladimir is just thunderous. You remember how, last year in Doctor Who, Alex Kingston was talking about how the Doctor would rise higher than ever before and then fall so far, and then we scratched our heads as he neither rose particularly high nor fell all that far either? That's not what happens in "Heroes Be Damned."

This is capped by the hallucinogenic masterpiece "A Farewell to Arms," drawn by Simon Fraser, in which a valued supporting character gives Dante a last goodbye, and it is right up there with all the very best "remember when" moments of great deaths in comics. It probably has very nearly the same impact as Tonantzín Villaseñor's end in Human Diastrophism, or at least I think that it might. An acquaintance of mine, who's really a lovely person, is still due something of a brutal ass-kicking for spoiling it for me, should I ever make it to England again, so I'll never know.

The sense of desperation and resolve at the end of this book is just amazing. It's like Morrison and his artists asked, "You know all the hell that Dante went through in this series to beat Vladimir? Well, now he has to go through all that hell again, but worse, and with far fewer resources." The last chunk of the book, featuring 2010's final episodes, puts the pieces in place for the grand finale. 2011 saw only a single short, six-week run of the series - that's how The Love Bunglers was able to walk away with everybody's vote for best comic of last year, 'cause there wasn't enough Dante - but the first four months of 2012 were just a wild and amazing seat-of-your-pants / depths-of-despair triumph.

Only six or eight more weeks of this to go. I am going to miss this series when it ends like you just don't know. Hot damn alive, is this ever recommended; what in creation are you waiting for?

I'll write again about the final run of Dante episodes later in the summer, after the next batch of Thrillpowered Thursday blogs wraps up. That'll give everybody time to buy some vodka and join me for a celebratory toast, okay?

Nikolai Dante: Amerika

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Nikolai Dante: Amerika (volume nine) (Rebellion, 2009).



When you publish as many fantastic comics as the 2000 AD group of titles have, it must be a real bear figuring out reprint plans. Just balancing the budget of keeping proven classics in print while collecting the new hits of the comic's current platinum age for new readers must be a bear on its own, and I'm sure the constant demands of yokels like me and the rest of the fans for personal favorites to make it to bookshelves is a considerable distraction. But I'll tell you, the best decision that anybody in charge of collected editions at 2000 AD ever made was to keep up with Nikolai Dante, the best comic of the last decade.

"Amerika," the ninth book in the soon-to-be-concluding series, collects the 27 episodes that appeared in 2008 and 2009. It was published just about a year ago and very neatly formed a nice recap before the series resumed this past January. Since then, a couple of dozen further episodes have run, and presumably these will all either be collected in a tenth book next spring before the final run of episodes, or else the tenth book will be a final, oversized volume wrapping up the series? The smart money's on Nikolai Dante concluding in 2011; it's just a question of how many episodes it will take to get to the end.

So around half of this book is taken up with the titular story, in which Dante, still working as "the sword of the tsar," is sent to New York to put down the smack on some uprising among the populace there. It turns out that our planet's alien enemy, the often-overlooked White Army, has been using the region as a bridgehead in their plans for conquest. Without giving too much away, the story ends with Dante leaving Vladimir the Conqueror and raising up that army of thieves and whores that he spent the eighth book secretly assembling, setting the stage for his big guerrilla war to begin.

Everything in here is just flatly amazing. The story is by Robbie Morrison, and he's just got this story twisting and turning into surprising and wild directions every time you blink. Artwork duties are shared between Simon Fraser and John Burns, with a special four-part contribution by Paul Marshall focusing on Nikolai's dangerous half-sister Lulu. Excellent work all around, especially by Fraser, who turns the climax of the main story from a stunner into something unforgettable, but everybody is bringing their best in these stories. If you've not read Dante before, then your library is nowhere close to complete. All nine books are highly recommended.

Nikolai Dante: The Beast of Rudinshtein

Here's how this works. I read a book or two and tell you about them and try not to get too long-winded. This time, a review of Nikolai Dante: The Beast of Rudinshtein (volume 8) (Rebellion, 2009).



The eighth Nikolai Dante collection was released a few months ago. This compiles all of the episodes that originally appeared in 2000 AD # 1518-1580 - 31 in total, all written by Robbie Morrison, with art by Simon Fraser and John Burns.

Maybe the old reviewing circuits are needing a little juice, because I can't come up with much better of a reason for anyone to own this other than "it's freaking Nikolai Dante, people, come on!" By this stage of the series, Dante is working as Tsar Vladimir's principal envoy and blunt instrument. We catch up with several cast members from previous installments, seeing what terrorism Dante's half-sister Lulu has been committing in the name of the Romanovs, crossing paths with his old criminal sparring partner the Countessa de Winter, and making a swath of new enemies while quietly working out some scheme of his own to get back at the tsar.

This set of episodes from what I term the fourth phase of the Dante epic (it is entering its fifth and probably final stage in current installments) is completely terrific. I think there are a few episodes where John Burns' painting is not as detailed as would be preferred, but his work on "The Tsar's Daughter," which looks into the strange death of Jena Makarov's mother many years previously, is truly remarkable. Simon Fraser is as fantastic as ever. He's teamed with colorist Gary Caldwell and the "Thieves' World" story, in particular, is vibrant and exciting. With the expected excellent reproduction from Rebellion, nice binding, gorgeous paper and matte cover, it's a far better-looking collection than practically anybody else in the industry. One of the best comics of the last decade in a package this gorgeous? Surely everybody is reading this, right?

(Excerpted from Thrillpowered Thursday.)

New 2000 AD Books

Here's how this works: I finish reading something, and I tell you about it, and I try not to bore you to death. This time, reviews, of sorts, of Button Man: The Confession of Harry Exton, Nikolai Dante: Sword of the Tsar and Stickleback: England's Glory (all Rebellion, 2008).



Rebellion's been continuing a program of about two reprint collections a month. I buy almost all of them, and these are some of the latest ones. The second Button Man book reprints the second lengthy story of this sporadically-published tale by John Wagner and Arthur Ranson. It first appeared over four months in 1994, and the third wouldn't appear until 2001. In it, the mercenary Harry Exton, whom we thought dead at the end of his first adventure, wakes up in upstate New York, having been rescued and conscripted by a wealthy benefactor to serve as his new hired gun. Genuinely thrilling and full of sharp, unexpected plot twists, I still think the first two Button Man stories will make one hell of a great movie one day.

The seventh Nikolai Dante book features several shorter adventures, 26 episodes in all, published sporadically over an eighteen month run from 2005-06. It wraps up the long run which had Dante, the most wanted man on Earth, hiding out with his mother, the most notorious pirate queen of the Pacific, but there, as always, working both sides of a con. The downside to this book is that almost all of it features John Burns on art chores. Burns is a superb artist, but I simply don't enjoy his work on Dante. The character's co-creator Simon Fraser returns for the final storyline, which sees Dante pulled out of what looks certain to be the worst scrape he's ever been in and dumped in one that's even worse - a new job in the tsar's employ - and sets up a pile of new subplots and problems that are driving the strip in its current run in 2000 AD. It's very good, but Dante is at his best when he's dealing with ugly politics in the Russian court, and there's not quite as much of that in this book as I'd prefer.

I think most American readers have not yet heard of Stickleback, and, good Lord, are you ever missing out. The brainchild of Ian Edginton and D'Israeli, this misshapen, vulgar gentleman with the hunchback, hideously deformed and visible spine and long nose is the Pope of Crime in Victorian London, a place beset by Lovecraftian nightmares, secret societies, ancient evils, Chinese dragons and undead cowboys. He's appeared so far in two series, starting in 2007. These are compiled here along with supplemental material from D'Israeli's sketchbook, and if there was any justice in the world, I could take myself an apple to work in a Stickleback lunchbox. To be fair, I was pleased but not blown away by the first series when it initially ran; the creators made the unusual decision to frame Stickleback and his world through the eyes of his antagonist, Detective Inspector Valentine Bey, and several episodes passed with only the briefest glimpse of the villain. But it gels perfectly in the end, and the second series is just thunderously weird and wonderful, with a new, left-field jawdropper every five pages or so, as Stickleback and his crew match wits with Wild Bill Hickock and his travelling freakshow. Absolutely essential stuff - now when the heck do we get a third series, Tharg?

(Originally posted November 10, 2008 at hipsterdad's LJ.)