Publisher: Image Comics
Writer: Alex Grecian
Artist: Riley Rossmo, Ivan Plascencia
Release Date: 26th August, 2015

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Time again to check in with our favourite mad monk, political player and tortured hero. Issue #8 picks up where we left off last month, with Rasputin being grilled by Shanae over his supernaturally extended life. Weirdly she seems to lack her generation’s hard-earned cynicism about the veracity of photographs and wholeheartedly believes in the Rasputin myth. However, the wonderfully matter-of-fact Governor Harrison steps in to field her questions, interrupting our usual narrator to tell the story of Rasputin’s murder. She also nicely sidesteps Shanae’s pointed query about her relationship with Rasputin, with the arch, ‘I’m sure you have friends of your own, don’t you?’ There’s also a nice dig about our man’s predilection for powerful women. It’s interesting having a different voice from Rasputin’s telling his story, it makes the story of his betrayal seem all the more poignant, as well as more mythical, like the folk tale it is.

One of my favourite things about Riley Rossmo’s art throughout is his beautifully effective panelling, and this issue is no exception. The way he structures his pages just works so well to hammer home the beats of the narrative, the art really pulling its weight so that the dialogue can stay un-laboured. For instance, while Harrison and Shanae discuss how much Rasputin has to hide, we have a panel showing him from the chest up, poised and successful with drink in hand, and just bellow this a larger panel of his past self, bloodied and struggling desperately beneath the ice. It really stresses the sense of everything that’s going on under the calm exterior, the awful experiences that have shaped the man. Like how you only ever see a fraction of an iceberg. Rossmo’s panels really help with the pacing of the issue as well, breaking up the tense moments as his traitorous friends wait to see if their plot has succeeded, as well as fracturing into a number of panels to painfully draw out the interminable process of drowning.

This issue plays cleverly with the Rasputin mythology, making its own narrative interlock pleasingly with the accepted story of his death, but I won’t spoil things by going into too many details. Again, we get a sense of the catch 22, ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ nature of his abilities. The Rasputin we see at the end of the issue is an entirely different man from the one we saw go under the water. Grecian really underlines the heavy toll his powers take on him, and it’s so interesting to watch the character become transformed by the cosmic transactions of his regenerations.

As much as I’ve enjoyed these past couple of issues, I’m really excited to see the focus expand a little to explore Rasputin’s rule in the contemporary politics of the comic. Especially as we know he has a serious amount of influence with the Governor, and an inherited need for notoriety and power. I can’t wait to see what his agenda is beyond managing the secrecy of his complicated past. Rasputin is definitely one of my favourite ongoing series and always on the top of my reading pile. It takes it’s mad premise and runs with it in a way that is smart and gorgeously executed. This was a slightly slower and more retrospective episode of the story, but completely central to Grigori’s character and well worth picking up.

Rating: 4/5.

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The writer of this piece was: Kirsty Hunter

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