45 and counting: Happy Birthday, Red!

Red Sonja has turned 45 this last February, a date that went sadly unnoticed in this our blog for all things Sonja. I guess partly the reason for this neglect has been Red Sonja’s recent run on Dynamite Comics, mainly after Gail Simone’s tenure on the title. Not only that, but her recent adventures have sent the she-devil with a sword carousing all over time and space, diluting the essence of the character until the final holistic distillation has little of the Hyrkanian warrior left. Truth is, she is not Red Sonja anymore. Surely not our Red Sonja.

When Sonja was presented to the readers in that historical issue of CONAN THE BARBARIAN #23, cover-dated February 1973, the world was watching with a mixture of enthusiasm, bemusement and contempt the rise of the furious second wave of feminism. Against that cultural background, Red Sonja, a fierce woman warrior, inferior to no man, was a welcome novelty for both female and male readers, the latter comprising the traditional comic-book readership. More than a novelty, the fierce mercenary captain and cunning spy/thief from “The Shadow of the Vulture” and “The Song of Red Sonja” was the pure embodiment of the new woman brought about by celebrities like Jane Fonda (able to embody the roles of  both political activist as Hanoi Jane and sexy space kitten as Barbarella). Red Sonja thus became the comics feminist icon par excellence.

When Spanish artist extraordinaire Esteban Maroto depicted Red Sonja in a metal-bikini some months later, it caught the fancy of millions of readers and gained the attention of none other than Red Sonja’s creator himself, Roy Thomas, who didn’t feel too enthusiastic about the chain-mail shirt and hot-pants with which Barry Windsor-Smith (another genius artist) had garbed Sonja. Penned by Thomas, “Red Sonja” appeared in the pages of THE SAVAGE SWORD OF CONAN #1 in 1974. The art was by Esteban Maroto, Neal Adams and Ernie Chua (a sacred pantheon of comics artists) and in it Sonja wore her metal bikini for the first time in a story (or two, as she also starred in the main feature of the book, the Conan adventure “Curse of the Undead-Man”, where both Hyborian Age giants were reunited for the first time since “Song of Red Sonja” the year before).

“Red Sonja” was destined to become a classic in Red Sonja’s canon of early stories; when it saw print Sonja was yet to be granted the mandatory comic-book-character origin story, however one throwaway line in it would prove crucial for her future development: ‘Red Sonja made a vow that no man ever shall touch her, save one who’s defeated her in battle’. Thomas was trying to add a little more resonance to a growingly fonder character when he borrowed the quote from Yeats’s “On Baile’s Strand” (1903) and Queen Aoife defeat at the hands of Celtic hero Cuchulain there depicted, but in doing so he invested her with the first inkling of true mythical resonance. A power that would spring full-fledged a year later (in KULL AND THE BARBARIANS #3, September 1975) in her long awaited origin story that set as the reason for such a vow the massacre of Sonja’s family and her vicious (gang)rape at the hands of the perpetrators. The tragic and mythical potential of such a traumatic genesis went widely unnoticed by rabid feminists that simply saw in it the setting of Sonja as a walking add for rape. By the time third-wave feminism got to corrupt modern thought with the tenets of political correction, Sonja was a major no-no: after all, one should come out of such a life-changing event turned into a zombified eternal victim, not as a powerful warrior.

This post is neither the place to set them straight or to expand on a theme of such complexity and polemic value, and if I mention it at all is because it seems to be de rigueur, and because such an incredibly obtuse gut-reaction goes a long way in explaining the recent ill-fate of the character. However, one must recognize that, if treated wrongly, Red Sonja could easily turn into a mere porn-fantasy romp. But then came along Frank Thorne… Wait a minute? What? Yes, I know what you’re thinking: but didn’t Frank Thorne turn Sonja precisely into a “male-ego-oriented cartoon sex cipher”, and her adventures into “tit-slinging, butt-posing soft porn” in the words of Windsor-Smith himself? Well, Thorne’s Sonja may be seen as an abrupt change from Windsor-Smith’s more restrainedly sexy warrior, but to see his work as mere soft porn is myopic. Thorne is a sensualist by nature, someone whith a keen knack and sensibility for the subterranean eroticism of the id as a major creative source throughout the centuries. One can indeed think of Sonja as a feminist icon, but one would be better served reading her as a timeless erotic icon. And that’s exactly what Thorne set out to do, and to do it excellently. In Thorne’s most lavish pages, the world turns into a moist organic growth of living swamps and swollen lumps of clotted earth. Demons, men and animals are bloated carcasses ready to burst in riotous explosions of fetid bodily fluids. It’s a sensory and sensual universe from which metal-bikini-clad Sonja appears to emerge as a shining jewel from a mildewed and rotting purse or, better yet, from the wet shining entrails of a slain impish devil. One can’t fully recall all the times that Thorne’s Sonja had to crawl through swamp bilge, ride under unrelenting rain, fight in cesspools or even inside the rotting carcass of gigantic beasts.  One can’t help but to associate all of that disgusting fleshy fluidness with Sonja’s barely concealed body, building in one’s mind a permanent subtext of aliveness, of organic matter trying to overflow, to reproduce in a torrent of uncontrolled, subliminal eroticism. Of course, Thorne would take the erotic aspect of Sonja’s character even further in his ersatz-Sonja Ghita of Alizarr, where he could tackle the more obviously uncomfortable implications of Sonja’s legend that Marvel wouldn’t allow in its hallowed pages.

Thorne would become forever associated to Red Sonja, his run on Marvel Comics usually held as the fan-favorite summit of perfection. I am one of those. Thorne’s tenure on Marvel’s Red Sonja ended in 1979 and although the character would have a vivid career throughout the ninety-eighties, including a polemic change of costume that substituted a new blue fur-gown more in tune with the conservative eighties for the metal bikini, but never again reached the visceral mythic levels of Thorne’s run.

Alas, Red Sonja would subtly flicker away from center stage during the nineties, and when she returned in the new millennium, under a different imprint, it was to suffer a major conceptual overhaul and a significant downgrade in quality, mostly after she was substituted, body-snatchers-like, by ersatz Horny Sandra (again, a tip of the hat to our colleague TheMightyFlip for this fortunate moniker) after a somewhat decent run before Gail Simone threw her into the pudgy little priggish and small-minded fingers of her merry band of quota girls who promptly set to depower, diminish and demythologize her. Anyway, adding insult to injury (or vice-versa, as it seems more appropriate to the case in point), Red Sonja was killed in issue 34 of Dynamite’s run, her looks and name usurped by some aristocratic floozy relative whose mere existence betrays everything established in Sonja’s canon until then. Not a happy ending, no siree. However, that must not distract us from what really matters: Red Sonja – the real Red Sonja – has just completed her 45th anniversary, and that's surely a reason to rejoice. In the current PC-infected cultural milieu Marvel probably wouldn’t treat Red Sonja any better than Dynamite has done. Let us then celebrate this greatest of comic characters, the unsurpassed sword queen of the Hyborian Age, every teenager’s wet dream, every feminist’s nightmare, the one and only Red Sonja of Hirkanya. Here’s looking at you, Red. Happy Birthday!

The Red Sonja Chronological Retrospective 01: CONAN THE BARBARIAN #23 (Marvel, 1973)

Contrary to common opinion, the Red Sonja we all know and love was not created by Conan scribe Robert E. Howard. She was born out of the imagination of writer Roy Thomas and artist Barry Windsor Smith in search of a strong female supporting character to enrich the Conan series of comic books being published by Marvel in the early seventies. In Thomas own words, he “had been casting about already for a female equivalent of Conan – not an absolute doppelganger, mind you, but a character similar in skills and attitudes in certain ways, yet with a somewhat different point of view” (from the introduction to The Ring of Ikribu, 1981). That’s when he stumbled upon an article by Allan Howard on Amra magazine dealing with the Crusader stories that Howard had published in several adventure pulp magazines of the 1930s. Among them, there was a reference to a short story published in The Magic Carpet Magazine of January 1934, entitled The Shadow of the Vulture. Although the leading character of that story, taking place at the time the Turkish siege of Vienna in 1529, was one German knight by the name of Gottfried von Kalmbach, the hard-drinking hero spent half the story being rescued by a Polish-Ukrainian red-headed girl , named Red Sonya of Rogatino. With his curiosity piqued by Allan Howard’s assertion that had Conan and Red Sonya met, “she might have been a bit too much for him”, Thomas proceeded to adapt REH’s short story into the Conan timeline: the siege of Vienna became the siege of Makkalet, the Turks became the Turanians, von Kalbach became Conan and Red Sonya became the she-devil with a sword from Hirkanya. And so it was that in page 15 of CONAN THE BARBARIAN #23, in February 1973, Red Sonja appeared for the first time.

As depicted by British artist Barry Windsor-Smith (for me, the best all-time Conan artist), Red Sonja is a fiery, lithe red-head, donning a long-sleeved mesh-shirt and wearing leather shorts that bare her thighs, adorned with daggers. It’s a Sonja very distant of the more rubenesque iconic warrior that fan-favorite (and my all-time favorite Sonja artist) Frank Thorne would popularize later on, but a close one to the Red Sonya described by Howard on the seminal short-story: “It was a woman, dressed as von Kalmbach had not seen even the dandies of France dressed. She was tall, splendidly shaped, but lithe. From under a steel cap escaped rebellious tresses that rippled red gold in the sun over her compact shoulders. High boots of Cordovan leather came to her mid-thighs, which were cased in baggy breeches. She wore a shirt of fine Turkish mesh-mail tucked into her breeches. Her supple waist was confined by a flowing sash of green silk, into which were thrust a brace of pistols and a dagger, and from which depended a long Hungarian saber. Over all was carelessly thrown a scarlet cloak.” Windsor-Smith adds some ear-rings for good measure.

When the story begins, Conan has been sent from Makkalet with a message to the king of Pah-Dishah begging for reinforcements to the besieged city. Once the message is delivered, Conan turns south, not wanting to return to Makkalet whose young queen had tried to kill him, back in CONAN THE BARBARIAN #21. However, hunted down by the sinister Mikhal Oglu, the titular Vulture, unleashed on him by the vengeful Prince Yezdigerd of Turan, whom Conan had disfigured, the Cimmerian is soon running back to Makkalet, driving his horse to death trying to escape the pursuing soldiers. He falls within sight of the city gates, only to be aided by the mercenary troops from Pah-Dishah, commanded by none-other than Red Sonja, that spew out of the besieged city. It is obvious from this first meeting of giants that Thomas wanted Sonja to create a durable impression. So, it is fitting that the first time Conan met the Hirkanyan warrior he should be prostrate on the ground, looking up Sonja’s leg, while the red-headed seems to barely acknowledge his presence there.

Sonja fights like a she-devil. In Howard’s words, “her onslaught was no less terrible than that of a she-panther. Her strokes followed each other too quickly for the eye to follow; her blade was a blur of white fire, and men went down like ripe grain before the reaper. (…) Oaths flowed in a steady stream from Sonya's red lips and she laughed wildly as her saber sang home and blood spurted along the edge.” Following closely the original short-story, when Conan tries to thank her for her help, she rebuts him saying that she had only done what she was being handsomely paid to do. I trust some original readers must surely have started right then counting the pages until she would die a miserable death. But that was not to happen.

Sonja – Conan keeps repeating her name, “Son-ya”, both to familiarize the reader with the correct pronunciation, and to allow Thomas to distance her from her original namesake – is described (in another close echo of the original story) as “all-men’s delight – and no-man’s love”, although in this first story no mention is made of her vow, or of her back-ground.

Before the issue is over, Conan is ambushed by traitors within Makkalet and sequestered into an isolated outpost, there to wait for the arrival of The Vulture. There he is once more rescued by Sonja, who fights alongside him. That Sonja should have come to the rescue when she didn’t seem to care the least about Conan was a clever way to imply the sparkling of a first flame between the two characters. The ending is appropriately gruesome and memorable for such a story, and wisely, Thomas refrains from centering the denouement on Conan and Sonja, whom we see for the last time preparing to face their respective adversaries. Through this simple expedient, Thomas leaves an open ending as to the possible relation to be established between Conan and Sonja. Would she be just one more of the fleeting flames that so often filled the pages of Conan’s adventures? A first, tentative answer would come the following month in The Song of Red Sonja, on the pages of CONAN THE BARBARIAN #24. That will be our next stop.

Final Note: The Shadow of the Vulture, by Thomas and Windsor-Smith, should have been published in CONAN THE BARBARIAN #22 (January, 1973). However, some 13 pages of the story were lost in the mail, prompting Marvel to issue a reprint of Conan’s first story, from CONAN THE BARBARIAN #1 (October, 1970) as a filler for that issue. As the mishap was near the deadline for publication, Marvel was not able to substitute the cover for issue 22, sporting the title “The Shadow of the Vulture”. That’s why issue 23’s cover announces “Swords in the Night” instead of the correct title for the story. So, for the sake of completism, here it is, the original cover for “The Shadow of the Vulture”: