The prog is back to its mighty five band gang of stories with Rain dogs and Nikolai Dante joining Dredd, Deadlock and Vanguard. Rain dogs will be covered in a later slog so for now let's turn our gaze towards the cover boy himself...
In battleship Potemkin the war takes a slightly darker turn though you wouldn’t know it by reading its first chapter. In a light-hearted (well for the current war arc anyway) Prelude Nikolai and the Irregulars battle in Britannia to save mad king George from being executed as a Romanov ally. Aside from Gorgous work from series creator Simon Fraser it really is just a light hearted filler episode before the darkness which hung over the rest of this story....
The war and the story took a darker turn after this fun interlude but that’s for another entry entirely….
This chapter of the Tsar wars was hit by a rather unfortunate continuity cock-up which I have to admit I never noticed until it was brought up in the 2000ad lovers holy book known as Thrill power overload. The initial plan of the Tsar was had been to tell the storyline in five series of eight episodes. John Burns was to paint the first, third and fifth series and Simon Fraser was to handle the second and fourth. However, Fraser was in the process of relocating to Africa when the deadlines for his first story came up, and as a result, this adventure, "Battleship Potemkin," had to be postponed and War and Love (the previous story) had to be made the second chapter. Also chapters four and five were meshed together to form one final book four. Due to the switching of books two and three this unfortunately has Nikolai renouncing his old name and referring to himself as “Nikolai Romanov” as a cliff-hanger for the final book. But in this story Nikolai and his group of irregulars always refer to him as “Nikolai Dante” It’s so obvious in hindsight (and with the knowledge from TPO) but I genuinely did not notice on my original reading.
I now await the comments saying “You thicko!” but I genuinely did not know…
Next slog: Deadlock ties up some loose ends from a fallen warlock series…
Actually I think 'Nikolai Romanov' is fudgeable - so far he's not used it in public. Only Jena has heard him call himself this.
ReplyDeleteThe pacing's also slightly better this way round. Jocasta's backstory feels more natural placed here than it would have been straight after 'The Rudinshtein Irregulars'. And there's something satisfying about Dante [SPOILERS] skewering Konstantin *after* identifying with the family.
The really big continuity problem is that in 'Love and War', the Tsar and Jena mark the first anniversary of Juliana's death. Then at the start of 'Battleship Potemkin' the war has only been going on for nine months. It didn't take three months to go from the casus belli to the outbreak of hostilities!