By Robbie Morrison, John Burns and Simon Fraser

What to expect: The Russian Rogue finishes his life at sea and gets back into politics...

Buy Nikolai Dante - Sword of the Tsar

Review by Martin Charlton 

Ever been asked where you were when you heard about the Twin Towers, or when Diana died?

Those are big cultural milestones, I’m not disputing that for a second. But within individual sub-cultures there are events of the same importance. Things like ‘When did you first read Watchmen?’, or ‘What inspired you to first read Maus?’ in the realm of comics.

Within 2000AD, even more specifically, I’d like to ask you, where were you when you heard Simon Fraser was retuning to Nikolai Dante? I’d just started a new job and had bought a house with my then fiancée (now wife). Times were hard, both in terms of money and in terms of Nikolai Dante. I had no money, and while I had Dante, it wasn’t the Dante I wanted, made only worse by DC’s reprinting of Dante’s early adventures in the trades ‘The Romanov Dynasty’ and ‘The Great Game’. Those books were full of swashbuckling, high adventure and a sense of rebellion and drama that defined not only 2000AD at their time of publication but also the DC/Rebellion deal.

As much as Robbie Morrison is the heart of Dante, Simon Fraser was the strip’s soul in its early days, capturing the classic moments expertly. And then he left us, to do other things.

Oh, we were left in the capable hands of John Burns, but something was missing. It was always Morrison’s aim to develop Dante as time went on, as he said in Thrill Power Overload: “most 2000AD characters remain set in stone… I decided Dante would age and be marked by his experiences”, and this was the case up till the beginning of 2003. Then Dante appeared to slip into some temporal nexus of sorts, stuck on a Scooby Doo background of immaculately painted waves being reminded of his ‘mission’ every four months while not actually going any way to completing it. Nikolai Dante had become a six page ‘Previously on Nikolai Dante’ strip and fans were not happy.

The ‘Pirate’ story arc, while commencing in book 6 of Rebellion’s Dante trade series, takes up the vast majority of this seventh book, collecting stories from 2005 – 2008. This takes into account that Dante was actually absent for over a year - for a strip that moves in real time and requires significant momentum to propel it forwards, this could have been potentially fatal.

The basic plot sees Dante agree to betray his mother, requiring a lengthy set up that much like the Star Wars prequels could have been done in about a third of the time taken to tell the story.

That’s not to say any of it is bad as such, rather that it simply falls way, way below the lofty standards Morrison (and Fraser) had set for Dante. Classic Dante stories like The Great Game or The Courtship of Jena Makarov stick in the mind of the reader. Here, when I first flicked through this book I was reminded of such memorable tales as "that one with the talking animals", or "that one on the beach that is a lengthy recap not only to apologise for the strip’s absence but to warn of another lengthy sabbatical".

True classics. Or not. You decide.

So what could save Dante from the purgatory he entered after the Tsar Wars? Enter Simon Fraser, the returning hero, back for the third act of the story. When all is lost, cometh the hour cometh the co-creator, as the saying goes. I remember the palpable excitement on 2000AD message boards upon the announcement of Fraser’s return. I remember lying in bed on a Saturday morning, ripping open my subscriber’s envelope to be confronted with the most exciting Dante image in years, the image used on the cover of this volume. It wasn’t that Fraser was back, it was Nikolai Dante who was back, back where he belonged – following the words ‘best story’ in the weekly reviews on this very site.

Rebellion have cunningly disguised this book as the book that contains the return of Fraser, despite it only really happening towards the end of the book itself, but I can’t blame them. While the stories here read well in trade form, and read quickly, the memory of having them drip fed to us over a seemingly interminable amount of time remains fresh in my memory, and Dante really had a lot of good faith to make up to fans. Fortunately, not only is the title story itself a classic, it quickly resets the pieces so that everyone is where they need to be to start the next proper Dante arc, leading into the extraordinarily good Dante stories we’ve been getting of late.

So there you have it – Nikolai Dante volume 7: Sword of the Tsar. It's quite possibly the weakest of the Nikolai Dante trades, but the stories contained within show a writer struggling to get to grips with a character who’d survived a massive, life changing event and emerged defeated. Dante and Morrison both seem to retreat to safe ground (in Dante’s case, what could traditionally be safer for a man than a mother?) and regroup.

It’s no secret that the comparatively slow publishing pace compared to what had gone before hurt the strip's reputation. However, while I wouldn’t have admitted it at the time, this allowed them some time to collect their thoughts and plot the way ahead, which was exactly what the character needed.

And by god, volume eight is going to rock your world come next Spring.

Buy Nikolai Dante - Sword of the Tsar