The protagonist in Image Comics' new One-shot, Dante, is sort of a hybrid between the leads in Stephen King's Thinner and John Woo's The Killer. He's a murderous assassin who, by accidentally shooting an innocent Chinese boy, becomes cursed by the child's grandmother to carry all his sins tattooed permanently throughout his body, as a reminder for all the ways he's interfered with people's lifelines. Little does he know just how difficult it's going to be to remove all those blue-and-black skin stains from his once unmarked flesh.
Illustrated by Darick Robertson and written by (creator) Jason Ning and Matt Hawkins, Dante does indeed grab the reader's attention at once, even though its plot is hardly revolutionary or groundbreaking from an originality standpoint. As Dante tries to leave his murdering life behind, he finds that abandoning his sinful past isn't as easy as he initially believed, because the syndicate that employed him has other plans for his wife and daughter, both of whom go mysteriously missing. Soon bodies of gangsters and pimps and Dante's old adversaries begin to pile up, all the while he tries to right the wrongs of his past.
Dante delivers what its intriguing cover promises: plenty of shoot-outs, a blaze of blown-up brains, and a newly inked "hero" whose new plight is to kill out of anger and a new sense of self-redemption, instead of for monetary gain. He's kind of like a Punisher re-born, but with a much sweeter set of tattoos.
B-
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