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.