Greg Hildebrandt's Red Sonja

 

Another Kickstarter, though this one actually tempts me. A rerelease of Red Sonja #1 (the Frank Thorne series) with a Star Wars homage cover, just a shame Kulan Gath is in the background...

New Series

 Oh wow, oh joy, oh man, dimension hopping, we haven't seen that before, eeeee!

Kill me now...please...

Oh dear...

 So yeah, this is a thing...

Finch's Cover Revealed

And almost with no time left to breathe in between posts, Dynamite has revealed the final version of this first official incursion of Finch into the Hyrkanian world. The title to be graced by this wonderful Sonja as slayer of Giants was also announced as being issue #1 of the upcoming RED SONJA: THE PRICE OF BLOOD, “an early chapter of the She-Devil's adventures, featuring a less refined and more bloodthirsty Hyrkanian heroine”. 

As fr the cover, it stands for itself in each of the four versions on offer. As does this regal, yet melancholy Sonja featured on it.

RED IN B&W: David Finch Cover

 

Meanwhile, I found out Finch has posted a bigger reveal of his Red Sonja upcoming cover in his own blog... almost two monthes ago (shame on me!). The picture looks just as good in simple B&W. Let's wait and see what D'Armata will add to it.

RED ON RED: David Finch Cover

In keeping up with the Indiegogo theme, Dynamite is announcing the launch of an upcoming campaign related to a new comic featuring our beloved Red. As is always the case with Dynamite’s self-congratulatory hype, this “new exclusive Red Sonja collectible comic ” will feature a “never before seen take on the She-Devil With a Sword”, but it is not forthcoming any details. More interesting, however, is the glimpse of the gorgeous cover by David Finch. This is a gloriously pretty Red Sonja, at the same time imperious and delicate, and I hope once it’s finalized with colors by Frank D’Armata, the cover won’t loose any of the raw impact it has in simple black ink over red. This is the first cover by Finch for Red Sonja. By the look of it, it was worth the wait.

Jim Balent Indiegogo Cover

 While Im on about Frank Cho's cover, I suppose I should mention Jim Balent's special $40 cover (if you live in the UK). I dunno...something feels off about the art.

Frank Cho Red Sonja Sketch Covers

 Recently Frank Cho did a Kickstarted and a Indiegogo for a special cover of Red Sonja #13, while I'm not a fan of established companies using crowdfunding for special comic covers, one of the options was to get an original sketch cover which can be seen above. The wheatcakes outrage cover was made available on eBay and the price as of typing is at $720. 

The actual cover from the Kickstarter, it would have set you back $20, and if like me you live in the Uk, and further $20 for shipping....

Red Sonja The Superpowers

 Another reality hopping, time traveling series....At this point is it really worth continuing to support Ole Red?

The Price of Blood

 A new mini series by Luke Leiberman (president of Red Sonja LLC)  and Walter Geovani, featuring Sonja facing an execution and the story focuses on how she got there. Sounds interesting. 

Sexy Sonja Sunday

Red Sonja is one of the sexiest comic book characters of all time, even as she's fast approaching the half-century mark. As such, she is frequent fodder for artists and fans alike, from fan-art to porn fanfiction. "Arion" is one of the most talented digital artists whose work can be found on Deviant Art and other sites. This wonderful rendering of an intimate Sonja and Vampirella may very well sum up everything Sonja fans feel summarizes any of the Dynamite crappy crossovers currently featuring these two characters.

Now, with a new cross-over recently announced, MARS ATTACKS RED SONJA (how silly can you get, really?) - it all seems to fall into place: all these phantasmagorias of comic book worlds, all these insipid and uninspired money-milking plots, all these irredeemable incongruences, are mere editorial porn. Whoring Sonja over and over again.

The image above can also be construed as porn (if you're so inclined, you can check the x-rated versions on the author's Patreon), as are many of the puerile sex fantasies Sonja inspires in many of its readers, and, I'm sure, many would expect as the only single positive thing that could come out of such cross-overs as VAMPIRELLA/RED SONJA, or RED SONJA & VAMPIRELLA MEET BETTY & VERONICA, not to mention the dreadful SWORDS OF SORROW, that even as pure porn woul be boring. But I digress. Yes, even the image above can be construed as porn. But it is honest porn. Kudos for that.

Another crossover.

I have nothing...

Those were the days

I was perusing the Conan issues from MARVEL TREASURY EDITION when I came across this ad in the interior backcover for MTE #19 (1978). And it took me back a few wonderful years. Although I only started reading Marvel comic books in the early 80s through the Brasilian translations from Editora Abril (before that I'd read the DC Comics that were published by EBAL, also a Brasilian publisher), these were the exact three titles I was reading when I first discovered Sword & Sorcery, Conan and Sonja. At the time, Abril’s superhero comic books  were made up of collections of several stories that in American comics had been published in single issues. They were a little over the traditional digest size (being 19x13cm) and ran for 82 pages. They had titles like Superaventuras Marvel or Heróis da TV. Conan and Sonja were usually featured in the pages of the former, alongside Daredevil, Doctor Strange, the X-Men or Kull. As they didn’t print the entire series run for each character, but only selected stories, a typical issue would be extremely varied; take for instance issue #5 from Supervanturas Marvel (one of my favourites, cover dated November 1982, which means I would have read it about six months later – that was the time it took before they could be sold across the Atlantic): you would have the two stories from CONAN THE BARBARIAN #8 and #10 (1971), the Doctor Strange story from MARVEL PREMIERE #8 (1972), and the Daredevil story from DAREDEVIL #166 (1980).  The Portuguese language editions were coming out with over two years delay relative to the original American publication and sometimes, as was the case with SAM#5, with over ten years delay, which meant they had all this wonderful backlog of issues to choose from, something from which they took full advantage. Athough I guess some great stories went unpublished, I don’t recall many duds that were. Then, in 1984, Abril started publishing A Espada Selvagem de Conan (THE SAVAGE SWORD OF CONAN) in all its glorious black-and-white grandeur (although with some extra inking to hide some undully exposed breasts, if I recall faithfully). Be as it may, those were the three titles I was reading at the time I was fourteen, in a hapilly serendipitous way in the mid-eighties. And so it was a nostalgic rush I got from this advert with the unmistakable art of John Buscema. Those were the days, all right.

Red Sonja: Birth of the She Devil: Lucio Parrillo

Keeping with the covers theme, and particularly with the covers for RED SONJA: BIRTH OF THE SHE-DEVIL (2019), here is the set by Lucio Parrillo that comprised the main covers for that title.

They’re strangely (and almost certainly involuntarily) complementary to the Parel variants. Where those covers were peacefull, almost restfull, with only traces of blood telling about violent combat, this set by Parrillo is full of violent action, battlelust, blood and gore. Parrillo’s Sonja is the full-bodied buxom warrior we all know and love, and his style perfectly evokes the classic Marvel covers by Joe Jusko and Boris Vallejo. By looking at them one never doubts that Sonja could fight an army on that metal bikini, and the sword cuts on her body fully attest to it. Parrillo also chose to emphasize the barbarian nature of Sonja (particularly in the cover for #4), what with all the skull necklace, heavy earrings and tribal face-paint.  It is a magnificent set, marred only by Sonja’s pin-up expression on the cover for #3.

Dynamite offered another set of variant covers by Sergio Dávila that, at least to me, look perfectly indifferent, and yet another (again, to my taste) perfectly irrelevant set of cosplay covers.

Red Sonja: Birth of the She Devil, SubaComic Exclusive (Gerald Parel)

Well, it surely must be old news by now, but SubaComic also offered variant covers for issues #2, #3, and #4 of last year’s mini-series RED SONJA: BIRTH OF THE SHE-DEVIL; however, for completism sake, here they are.

Just as it was the case with issue #1, these variants are by French artist Gerald Parel, whose covers are pretty well known by Marvel readers. His take on Red Sonja is quite interesting, presenting us a more elfin she-devil, not as well-endowed or muscular as one would expect, but lithe and elegant as a feline. The use of color and light is quite striking, particularly in issue #2. As a set, the four covers present a quite bucolic, almost pastoral, interpretation of Sonja, as if Parel is more interested in the inner-state of the warrior right before or after moments of violence, than in the fight itself, thus relegating violence to a necessity, rather than a taste, in Sonja’s life. Be as it may, these covers make for interesting comparison to the main covers for the series by Lucio Parrillo.

KILLING WHO, THAT IS NOT YET DEAD?

 

I should be the one to talk, dragging behind me a host of perpetualy moribund blogs, but…truth is, it pains me to see this blog of ours being quiescent for so long. So, taking advantage of the recent publication of issue one of KILLING RED SONJA (written by Mark Russell and Bryce Ingman, with pencils by Craig Rousseau), I felt tempted to share this very short rant that was inspired by my perusing of said title, as a way to try to bring myself to contribute a little more to this blog from now on. Though time for me has been in very short supply for this past few years, it pains me to leave so much of my pleasure projects unfinished. And the Red Sonja Chronological Retrospective is one of them, one I’ll try to come back to, soon. Anyhow, here we go:

KILLING RED SONJA was advertised, just like SWORDS OF SORROW (2016) before it, as being a series “that will affect the Sonja series for years to come!”, and, just like SWORDS OF SORROW before it, it probably will do no such thing. But this kind of recurring editorial hype made me think of the recent iterations of Red Sonja. Now, I have yet to read KILLING RED SONJA #1, as per the book’s own introduction we learn that “the events of this series take place directly after Red Sonja #12”, an issue (and a series – volume 5 of Dynamite’s run) that I also have not yet read (although I know Sonja is – again – Queen and apparently facing some demanding ethical choices). So, I intend to read the fourteen issues published until now before tackling this latest series; but one thing that struck me by merely browsing the book, was that Red Sonja appears only in its title. There’s nothing wrong with that – quite the contrary as, if well written, a story that revolves around Sonja, without she figuring in it but by influence – and a central motivational influence at that – can do much to illuminate and redefine the absent character. Redefine it in the reader’s mind, leading one to evaluate one’s personal connection and reaction to it.

But, alas, that, at least to me, is the main problem with the concept: who is Red Sonja? Who is she really, for today’s reader? During her period at Marvel in the seventies and up to the mid-eighties of last century, and despite its highs and lows, Sonja was a recognizable character, thanks in large part to Roy Thomas’s writing. However, since being delt a cleansing ideological washover by Gail Simone, one can’t seem to fix a single identitary mark on our beloved Hyrkanian. Worse than that, Red Sonja seems nowadays to be just a trademark to be prostituted to any prospective market (that is, as long as such market conforms its trade to a prefixed normative ideological trench – and, remember, art in service to ideology is mere propaganda). And the first victim to this was any semblance of chronological timeframe. Sonja is all over time and all over space; she goes from mercenary to queen, to drunkard, to truck driver in New York, vampire hunter in Riverdale, turist in Drakulon, again queen, again mercenary, a prospective mate for Tarzan in Africa, a fugitive on Mars, without any of her experiences ever reflecting on her character.

When Roy Thomas, by reader demand, casted Conan into the 20th Century in WHAT IF…? #13 (1978), the whole story was told through the eyes of an out-of-place, out-of-time barbarian, that saw all the modern contrivances (cars, buildings, even people) with his own time’s mindframe. A mantle of what we would think of as superstitious thought covered our reality when seen with Conan’s eyes. It was nothing new, utopian writers had been doing it since Antiquity, and modern writers at least since Tomas Morus, but it was done right. Conan wasn’t even capable of comunication, as his language was long dead and he knew no English, and the idea of setting the climax at the inverted zigurath shape of the Guggenheim was true storytelling gold.

Being a kind of alternate tale, Thomas didn’t have to deal with how Conan woud have coped once back to his own Hyborean Age. But he didn’t need to. His story was so soundly logic, its treatment so right, that we readers could intelectually antecipate how Conan would frame that experience along those he had had before dealing with wizardry and magic. He wouldn’t have to mentally cope with concepts like future societies, democracy, technological advance, ecology, etc…

That is not an escape Sonja’s recent scribes can count on. Sonja always appears immersed on alien societies (sometimes literallly alien): she shares the language, she shares the uses, she shares the mores; she’s as adroit riding a horse as a Harley and, one would think, as adroit fighting street-gangs as doing cheerleading routines. She goes to outer space without ever grasping the meaning and import of that apparently simple feat, so familiar to SF readers before 1961 and Gagarin, but so epic and glorious for all others. And, an even worse offense, she has no trouble integrating her worldview into modern times or alien places. Above all, she seems untouched by any of her experiences. When she finds herself back on her own time, all of that has disappeared from her personal experience. As if her mind has been swiped clean with a magical sponge, the reverts back to an ersatz barbarian immediately after she has returned from a long stint on New York, Riverdale, or whatever Fantasyland or Planet she happens to have been transported to.

Nothing seems to have touched her. She learned nothing. She doesn’t even think of adding something to her world, to her time. Sonja seems to be imutable, and that is a sad thing in any character, but a fatal flaw when said character is no more than an empty shell from the start. Gone is the determined, fierce, scathing Sonja of Thomas and Thorne. What remains is a fanfiction creation, with such a lack of character density that she fits any and every story one cares to think up. Hey, one can imagine someone say in creative meetings on Dynamite’s offices, what if somehow Sonja was transported to Tatoine by some evil wizard – why not Kulan Gath, we haven’t seen him for...what?, two, three issues?.. – and she ends up on the Death Star fighting with her sword against Vader’s lightsaber? Or better yet…with her own lightsaber? And what about she and Leia ending up on the clutches of Jabba? Wow, man, great idea. Is Amy Chu around? And, if Disney is okay with that, it will be done, without caring for the nature of Red Sonja herself, or the demands of her character.

Ironically, in devoiding Sonja of a full personality (distinct from that of her successive writers), one subject only to the concerns of the story, and reducing her to a maleable form, capable of adapting into any kind of narrative story, it becomes impossible to write a story that will “affect the Sonja series for year to come”. For Sonja has nothing that can be affected. She is just a shape, just a form. She is now paradoxically reduced to what she was always derided for apparently being: a pair of tits in a metal bikini.