TRAKOVI: THE SLAV WITH NO REMORSE #1 – Review

TRAKOVI: THE SLAV WITH NO REMORSE #1, from 3Press Comics, follows a tracksuit-wearing villain on his quest for revenge against those who harmed his family.

The Details

• Written By: Adriean Koleric
• Art By: Adriean Koleric
• Colors By: Adriean Koleric
• Letters By: Adriean Koleric
• Cover Art By: Dave Thomas (cover A)
• Cover Price: $7.88 USD
• Release Date: January 2022 (estimated)

Wait! Don’t Forget To Sign Up For The Comical Opinions Newsletter.

Was It Good?

TRAKOVI: THE SLAV WITH NO REMORSE #1 is our first exposure to 3Press Comics and indie creator Adriean Koleric, so we’re always pleased as punch to read something new that doesn’t fit into the mainstream. Well, this comic is certainly a “new” idea that wouldn’t fit into the “mainstream” by any stretch. On the whole, this will be a positive review for a comic that has a lot of interesting pieces put together interestingly. Flawed but intriguingly interesting.

We’ll cover the broad strokes of the story here, but read on through to the next section if you want more details with some spoilers.

Koleric creates a slightly bizarre amoral anti-hero in the form of Trakovi, a tracksuit-wearing Slav villain. Trakovi is not a nice person by any measurable definition, but there’s a fascinating quality about his rule-breaking attitude that verges on charming. To be clear, the character’s personality isn’t charming. There’s a fascination with seeing how much he can get away with around people he might loosely refer to as friends. Trakovi doesn’t skirt the rules of polite society. He curb-stomps the rules whenever it suits his needs. In this way, Trakovi is a person free of social norms. It would be too much to envy Trakovi’s freedom because it comes with a fair bit of violence and mayhem, but it is interesting to watch how a character operates on a different level from the rest of the world.

The art is the art. This is an indie creation, so we’ve come to expect the quality will be on a different level as compared to mainstream publishers, and that somewhat holds here. That’s not to say the art is bad. It is to say the art is typical for an indie comic. That said, the coloring is surprisingly good and it helps make the undisciplined linework significantly more palatable. Koleric also displays an impressive eye for panel composition with overlapping caption boxes and sound effects that give each page a dynamic, almost cinematic, feel.

The story is where the issue stumbles. The sequence of events and timing are not clear enough to follow, which significantly hurts the reading experience. The first page is a forward moment in time, then the next page flashes back two days with a horrific scene involving a side character that shows up later the same day(?). If this description sounds hard to follow, it’s because the flow of the story was hard to follow. The moments, when they happen, are infused with Trakovi’s unbound spirit and more than a little bit of black humor, but the plot jumps back and forth through time in a way that doesn’t make sense. With a few tweaks to how the timeline is presented, this would have been a much better read.

Keep scrolling for a closer look at the covers, or Click Here to jump right to the story description with some spoilers.

What’s It About?

[SPOILERS AHEAD – Click here if you just want the score without spoilers]

We begin with Trakovi on the ground, bloody and beaten. Two figures in the room begin to explain why he’s about to die.

Flashback to two days prior. Trakovi squats atop an overturned school bus near the site of a car accident. He tells the children inside their deaths will be an unfortunate twist of fate as he sets the bus on fire in retaliation against a costumed villain laying on top of the wreck. Throughout the rest of the day, Trakovi goes about his daily routine and interacts with acquaintances as the new so the school bus accident is broadcast on the news.

Later, Trakovi attends a Villain Rehab support group where we’re introduced to Trakovi’s sponsor, his cousin, and other villains in attendance, including the villain we saw laying on top of the school bus wreck, Apollo ‘Toykov’ Creed. The support group is not as productive as the priest running it would like and the group disperses.

We conclude the issue the next morning with Trakovi and his sponsor, Singh finding a terrible site on the sidewalk, a terrible phone call, and a more terrible discovery inside a box.

As an Amazon Associate, we earn revenue from qualifying purchases to help fund this site. Links to Blu-Rays, DVDs, Books, Movies, and more contained in this article are affiliate links. Please consider purchasing if you find something interesting, and thank you for your support.