Violator #6 // Review
Berlin. 1938. A Nazi is being shown entry into a club by a host who refers to himself as Max Verletzer. The Nazi isn’t the one he’s expecting. There’s a devil of an altogether more literal variet on his way in Violator #5. Writer Marc Andreyko does an impressive job of telling a fresh story from some skewed vision of Hell with the aid of artist Kevin Maguire. Colorist Rosemary Cheetham renders gore and fear onto the page in and amongst the heavy inks in Maguire’s art. It’s a compellingly devilish mutation of a familiar sort of thing that had been explored in the beloved musical Cabaret. This is followed by a bit of a tour through hell with its ruler. Fun stuff.
It’s Lucifer. Literally. He’s shown-up in Nazi Germany to say hello to the Violator, who has chosen to appear in this particular instance as the host of the Club Absinthe--a suitably depraved place in which dead uniformed Nazis can be seen wearing their heads in their laps. The Violator has been quite active over the years...so why is it Lucifer has decided to pay him a visit on THIS particular occasion? Time will tell as the lord of lies has a quaint, little conversation with a beloved demon from Image Comics’ Spawn Universe.
Andreyko comes dangerously close to making a point. The author manages to avoid anything too terribly serious, though. AnY insight into the nature of the devil is solIdly avoided in favor of a fun, little conversation between the devil and a demon who seems to be nearly as powerful as he is. The one is in charge of Hell. The other has been slouching around the human...most recently in the form of a host of an illicit Berlin nightclub.
Maguire has been tasked with doing some kind of obvious bits of horror and making them look captivating on the page. Use of near perfect symmetry in some of the panel composition along with the occasional bit of eye contact directly with the reader does the trick in places. Lucifer is looking particularly dapper in places, though the hell that Maguire is rendering isn’t detailed enough to come across as being anything other than nebulous. The title character looks pretty impressive on the page.Cheetham’s colors look particularly good on him in an issue that manages to strike a few impressive poses in and amidst all of the silliness.
And it IS silly. Quite. It’s actually kind of refreshing to see Lucifer as being something lesser than omnipotent evil. The fact that he actually kind of needs The Violator also elevates the power of the title villain quite a bit, making for an interesting sort of power dynamic that feels pretty cool in its own way, but there isn’t a whole lot being explored on the page that adds a whole lot to the nature of good, evil, gods and demons that hasn’t already been explored a million different places before.
