Violator #4 // Review
Russia. 1903. A certain demon has been moving around the edges of another brutal winter. It’s cold. Not as cold as what happened right after the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, but...y’know...cold. The demon in question is walking the Earth in a particularly unfortunate person, but that’s about to change in Violator #4. Writer Marc Andreyko approaches a particularly fun angle on the demon-through-history premise in an issue that is brought to page and panel by artist Gianerico Bonacorsi with colorist D.C. Alonso. It’s a fun, little glance at ancient history through the eyes of horror drama.
The Violator finds his way to a sexual ritual being executed by a bearded monk and a few young women. The monk in question is one Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin. THe man clearly has some power. And he’s going tobe able to have that much more power when he becomes possessed by a certain Violator who has been waiting for the opportunity to get into a more comfortable situation. It isn’t g oing to be easy for Violator to take the center seat of one of the more influential figures in early 20th century Russian history, though. There are some rather important people who want him dead.
Andreyko had a great deal of potential with this issue given the basic premise and the length of the issue. 50-plus pages would have allowed him a lot of opportunity to get into some of the truly biazarre drama at the heart of Girogi Rasputin. Andreyko only gets into a bit of the reality of history in an issue that simply uses the early 20th century Russian atmosphere to serve as the background for another demonic Spawn Universe slash and slugfest. It’s actually executed pretty well, so it’s not THAT much of a let-down. It’s just too bad that Andreyko go for a bit more.
A good portion of the success of the issue lies pretty heavily in the art team. Bonacorsi does a good job of shoving, shooting and pounding the action across the page with the occasional look over in the direction of particularly sinister-looking drama. The sudden appearance of a powerful evil is kind of lost in the motion of the action without any truly original design work, but the action is more than enough to overcome some of the shortcomings of the Spawn Universe to create something genuinely enjoyable...if only on a surface level.
So it’s a bit of a disappointment given what Andreyko could have gone for in a much more sophisticated dramatic sense. The superficial engagement with history is kind of fun, but it would have been a lot more interesting to see the Violator in the body of Rasputin casually working his way through in-depth dialogues that get into the nature of morality, mortality and so much more from the perspective of some ancient monster. Too bad it was just a lot of action instead. It could have been a lot more intersting.
