Comic review: Rasputin #1- Wife beating unpleasantness

Writer: Alex Grecian
Artist: Riley Rossmo
Publisher: Image Comics
Released: 29th October 2014



I don’t like comic books where fathers are portrayed as absent or violent abusers of their families.

It’s a globalist/socialist/collectivist agenda thing. You know how it goes, right?

You demonise dads, get them out of the family, state gets control, human slavery continues. It’s an old tactic, and used by every authoritarian state. Men are problematic, so they remove them.

Rasputin #1 features a violent father who abuses his son and beats up his wife. Why? No reason is given. I guess he just like to abuse people. I understand. I’ve met people like that, unfortunately.

Did the historical Rasputin have a violent father who beat his mother? I looked it up, and couldn’t find any mention of it. I could be wrong about this. Please correct me if I am, but it appears that writer Alex Grecian has made up the violence in order to tell a better story.  I’m not too happy about that. The life story of Grigori Rasputin is interesting enough without making up some fictional back-story about a non-existent violent father.

The narrative structure in issue #1 of Rasputin is as tight as a duck’s backside. It’s a two-minute read, but it’s a good two minutes, and it looks great. The art is the best thing about the book, telling the story with barely any words used. It’s an example of letting the story tell itself. If you want to know how to do comics, this will be a book you need to study.

The life of Rasputin is old hat when it comes to books, movies and just about everything else that you can think about. It’s been done to death, resuscitated, killed, bought back, and killed off again, again and again. A bit like the guy himself actually before drowning finally did him in.

The question then, why bother doing another Rasputin book? Where’s the need? What’s the point?

I dunno, I guess if it’s good it will all be worthwhile. At the moment it’s very tight, well drawn but the anti- dad stuff leaves me feeling a bit iffy about it all. Again, I dunno. Should I check out issue #2? What’s the point? To see if anything new or interesting happens, because there’s not much hook in this opening issue for me. I admire the technical quality of it, but there’s something lacking for me.

Rating: 7/10