RED SONJA #1 (Dynamite, 2016)

Let us pretend we never heard of Red Sonja before. Let us pretend this is really the number one issue, the introduction of a new (anti)heroine to unsuspecting readers used to have their sword-and-sorcery warriors and thieves brawny, manly, and savage. Let us open the book in front of us as if we didn’t know what had gone on in this last forty years and try to answer the question: who is this Red Sonja, of the flaming red hair, chainmail shirt, and savage sword?

The book opens up somewhat enticingly. Over a familiar map, crossed by the shadow of what I want to believe is a candle about to be snuffed, the text situates us in “The latter days of the Hyborian Age”, and tells us of a message sweeping “Through the plains of Hyrkania…” Successive text-boxes tells us of Hyrkania as “that once great nation” whose king is dying, and asking “Who will save him?” It is an effective beginning, with a layout dominated by inklings of an ominous storm approaching, not only in the gathering clouds, dry lightning and strong winds, but in the dagger that is thrown at the map, straight at the heart of the kingdom. 

And then, a double-spread page introduces us to Sonja – although we don’t know it’s Sonja, not yet anyhow – fighting a giant bull that seems to have been spit from hell itself, in a storm-swept plain. It is a nice introduction to our heroine. As the text asks “who will save him”, we see Sonja fighting a monster that seems to be unconnected from the king’s plight, either a way of telling us that Sonja will be the one saving the king, or that the only one that could save him was at the time far away, incapable of help.  An idea reinforced by Sonja passing by the king’s castle in the next panel, under the caption “No one. No one.”  The kink is dying, and that is final.

But then, in the immediate panel, with the king prostrated in bed, the pained queen tells us all we need to know, by telling the king that “Red Sonja comes. All the elixirs, the ancient texts, the enchanted jewells… all failures! Sonja will not let you perish, not with the wolves of Khitai and Turan at the door”.

Let us stop here a moment, before proceeding with the story, as I find this to be an important point to be made. In a swift moment, we're told about a series of important facts that will shape the way we’ll read coming events, not only in this issue, but in future ones as well. After all, it is as if we’re reading about a new Hyborian Age, one where wizards have no power, ancient texts lost their magic capabilities and the elixirs are just sugary placebos. This Hyborian age seems to have been touched by the rotting influence of Westeros, and its re-centering of Ur-fantasylands as recycled Middle-Ages loci. An idea reinforced by the remaining pages, that strive to shape the story as a political intrigue one – albeit simplistic in the extreme (but lets not spring ahead of ourselves at this point) – instead of a typical sword-and-sorcery narrative. And so we learn that Sonja was sent to bring back the heart of the Thunder Bull of the Steppes (a rather small one, I figure, for such a big beast!), because the Mages assured the King that it would prevent death for another thirty years. Allas, that is not so, as the king is dying of mere old age. And, in his dying bed, the King confides in Sonja his troubles and aspirations.

So, by now, Sonja is already established as a capable fighter, an intimate of the royal family and close to the King himself. So close that, as a dying wish, he asks her to take the throne. Wait a minute? WTF!? He asks her to take the throne!?

I know I mentioned above this was a way too simplistic political intrigue, but hey, shouldn’t one stop and think a little before writing this kind of things? It’s true we’ve been told Hyrkania is (apparently) at its waning days, but what kind of decadent autocratic regime is this where there’s no dynastic line to be upheld, no rival aspirants to the throne, no bloodlines fighting each other for the destinies of the nation?  A queen made by diktat of a dying king, in the face of the king’s own wife?

This logical stumbling block, however, serves another narrative purpose: until now, we’ve seen Sonja in action fighting the giant bull (the objective view), we’ve heard about how others see her (third party perception) and now, with the offer of the throne, we get Sonja’s subjective perception of herself:  an haughty, opulent, and decadent queen, given to parties and (one suspects) orgies, “the doom of Hyrkania”, as Sonja describes herself.

And so, she refuses the throne and, though pledging to “defend and protect our people, as Sonja the She-Devil, not Sonja the Queen”, with the king’s corpse still warm in his dying bed she leaves Hirkanya and spends a full year traveling abroad, bludgeoning beasts, tying tyrants, vanquishing villains and undistressing damsels in distress…  all of it told, not shown.

As one progresses in the book, it becomes transparent the reason for such an absence. The new King (apparently selected by the dying king) has made an utopian paradise out of Hyrkania, with free schools, jobs for everybody and security within and beyond the kingdom’s frontiers. Returning after one year away, we’re expected to believe that Sonja hasn’t even heard the name of the new king (talk about straining the reader’s suspension of disbelief). More than that, in what is the most irksome section of this first issue, the reader is made privy to the thoughts, dreams and aspirations of Sonja as she seemingly finds herself out of a role to play in Hyrkania, the new king having taken care of all the needs of its people. But Sonja’s interior life, however, is made out of fantasizing about an endless stream of lovers, of sex with high born and peasant. Looking back now, and thinking that maybe she should have become Queen, she sees her regal duties as “hunting and fighting and lovers every day… quince and mince and enough cimmeran beer to float a navy…  And a royal consort. Or two. Or ten.”

In a totally inappropriate comedic tone, the utopianism of Hyrkania’s new rule is played against Sonja’s mounting boredom and itching for a fight. Any fight. Searching for the smallest chance to use her sword, Sonja feels like a swagger and a brigand, not far removed from any common lout on a drinking hole. In any other book not bearing her name on the title, she would be the villain. And not a very impressive one. When, by the end of the book, some dark aspects of the seemingly benign rule of the new King tear through Sonja’s dreams, prompting her to fight the so called Black Talons of the king, one is led far more to believe that she unsheathes her sword out of boredom, than out of a sense of justice. And that she does it with extreme prejudice, not asking for explanation or confirmation of what is told to her by the escaping peasant family, just stresses an impression of Sonja as incapable of thought.

There would be a lot more to say about the three final pages: of how incredible it seems for Hirkanya to be able to wage an expansionist war without anyone being aware of it; of how simplistic it is to equate the new ruler of Hyrkania with a Hyborean Hitler; or of how predictable the all dreg was since Hyrkania was first presented as a paradise on Earth after Sonja’s return.

But the question we set out to answer was: who is this new Red Sonja? Frankly, she’s not very bright. Not very wise either. Maybe she’s just the feminine ideal of some middle-aged teenage girl that never grew out of her padded bra. The first impression we get of her, of a courageous and loyal warrior, is quickly dispelled by posterior events: her fight against the Giant Bull of the Steppes turns out to be an empty effort, casting Sonja as a superstitious and gullible woman, that naively trusts the sayings of powerless wizards; and her loyalty turns out to be to a dying king, not to a country, a nation or an ideal, as she quickly leaves Hyrkania on the hands of what seems to be an anachronistic Nazi-regime after the king’s death. Then, after the swift killing of the Giant Bull, we see her do nothing but bragging (of how she killed a king who tried to possess her – more trite pseudo-feminist cant) and aching for a brawl, all of which makes her less than warrior, less than woman and more of a lout. And not a very bright one, as she spends several days in Hyrkania – perhaps even more, as the captain of the Black Talons knows her by name – without learning the name of the new king. By the last pages of this first installment, when she apparently sees the evil that has taken hold of the land (note that said evil is nothing more than an act of forced conscription, something that is legitimate even today in many modern countries like Switzerland or Israel, and in this last case, for man and woman alike), but her eye-opening feels contrived and precipitated, leading us to believe, as I mentioned above, that it was her brawl-aching and not any sense of Justice that prompts her to sudden, excessive and (by story logic) inexplicable action. Inevitably, before we get to this, we have a couple instances of the Drunken and Horny Sandra character so beloved of Gail Simone and her female minions. Instead of the fiery match for Conan, once envisaged by Thomas, she’s just Conan with tits, bereft of his natural cunning.

It is thus a brutish, boring and stupid woman that we get from this “rebirth” of the once she-devil with a sword.

Marguerite Bennett’s writing is lazy, unoriginal and totally uninspiring. From the few books by her that I’ve read, she strikes me as a terrible writer, a product of the Diktat for affirmative action that komissar Simone imposed on all comics publishers in order to provide job opportunities for untalented female writers. And in this first issue of what is Dynamite’s third volume of ersatz-Sonja adventures , she adds insult to injury by including some irritating anachronistic colloquialisms and gestures that help in sinking the last flimsy efforts at suspension of disbelief.

I’ve voiced before my discontent for the ubiquitous Medieval look that marks almost all Fantasy works after Martin’s GAME OF THRONES mammoth success. One thing I enjoy the most in Sword-and-Sorcery stories, from Howard to Leiber, from Gaskel to Carter, is the distancing/displacing amalgamation of oriental and exotic motifs in the Fantasy world. Here we get the Medieval European look once more, without a sparkle of novelty. Unless we count as novelty the apparent use of cowboy sleeveless denim shirt and hat by men, and thigh-high stockings with garter-belt by women. It is a single panel, but it occurs in the very first page of the story, making it difficult for the reader not to be perusing the art for more ill-advised and incongruent elements from there on. 

 

Which is somehow unfortunate, for the most part Aneke’s art  is the only good thing in the book, displaying a nice handling of perspective, adding immensely to the cinematic feel of some pages and underscoring the emotional impact and mood of some moments. Aneke’s Sonja is a beautiful, sexy woman, and it’s good to have once more an unapologetically buxom Sonja. But where the artist excels herself is in the portrayal of Sonja’s facial expressions, that goes smoothly from loutish to concerned, from mischievous to surprised. And it helps that colorist Jorge Sutil was able to expertly draw out Sonja’s vivid green eyes and sexy freckles.

 There’s only one instance where Aneke’s art is not up to her own standards, with wrong perspective and crass symbolism (see below), but looking at it, I choose to believe that it is Aneke’s way to give the finger to Bennett’s writing. 

That’s the feeling one closes the book with.

SWORDS OF SORROW #4 (Dynamite, 2015)

Alea jacta est. With Swords of Sorrow #4 we reach 2/3 of the planned run of the series, and the point of no return for whatever story Gail Simone had in mind. Issue four is, indeed, the most momentous up to this moment, not least of all, because it’s the only issue thus far where something happens. Which, with fifteen books published, is a feat of abject proportions. It’s as if we’ve been watching the piano player cracking his fingers for almost two hours before flipping his coattails back and finally sitting down on his bench.  However, what happens, and above all, how it happens, underscore the fragile structure of the story and the poor talent of the musician.

I never saw Simone as a good storyteller, but her performance on Swords of Sorrow is way beneath amateurish: everything that happens, every slow step of story building, happens by omniscient fiat of a deus ex machina narrator. And the most baffling result of this is how passive all the main characters are.

Case in point: Swords of Sorrow #4. After three books of banter and fighting each other, our women warriors finally find the generals they were looking for (Dejah Thoris, Red Sonja and Vampirella, as established in issue #3). How do they do this? They ask Dracula, who knows “where the portals are”. That simple. Obviously, it begs the question: if what’s in stake is the existence of the Universe itself, and if Dracula has that kind of knowledge, why isn’t he doing something? Why will he leave the destiny of all existence in the hands of a bunch of girls that, as the story thus far has shown us, are utterly incapable of doing anything by themselves? 

It may seem as a harsh appreciation of the series up till now, but really, Simone and her cronies haven’t shown us a single instance of relevant action by any of their heroines. Truth be told, the case is almost the same towards her villains: both the Traveller and The Prince do little else then sit and grumble and bemoan their respective minions lack of results. This reduces all the action on the previously published fourteen books to an unrewarding movement for movement’s sake.

And that, to me, is quite jarring, for I still don’t understand what’s the point of all this frenetic red queen(s) racing all over the place. According to the series’s one-shot prequel, The Prince’s minions should prevent the Traveller’s minions of perturbing the former’s ritual, a ritual that would hand him supreme power over all of reality. However, the Prince does little more than sit in his throne room “nowhen”, and one fails to see what kind of menace our girls may constitute towards his plans. In reality if Purgatory, Mistress Hell, et al.  weren’t constantly goading them on, or trying to bribe them with promises of absolute power, Sonja, Thoris, Vampirella, etc… wouldn’t have a fucking clue to what was going on, or where, or when. All the heroines have done so far is being handled gifts and pushed through one portal or another without reason or rhyme.

And with the revelations operated on issues #3 and #4, where we learn the true identity of The Traveler (the only genuine efficient moment in the series so far), it becomes patently obvious how absurd the whole enterprise is. If The Traveler knows the identity and whereabouts of The Prince, and despite being an entity of extraordinary power, still needs generals and soldiers, why didn’t she tell them who the adversary was, where he is, and what they had to do? Doesn’t seem to me the brightest idea, on a countdown to annihilation (or “the end of days” as is put on the current issue), to let the foot-soldiers to figure out for themselves what’s going on.

And that – what’s going on – brings me to what I believe is the most incredible of plot contrivances: the identity of the Prince himself. That he was Prince Charming was not a red-herring, alas. And this attempt by Gail Simone to build up such an innocuous fairy-tale character to the stature of Myth is the most ridiculous bid for relevance I’ve read in recent times (maybe only the coup by J. Michael Straczinski to make Wonder Woman his own in The New 52 comes close to it in the 21^st Century).

In a publicity interview for the series, Gail Simone referred to Prince Charming as “a character of legend (…) of massive power”, an idea that is hinted at at several instances all through the books already published, infusing the reader with the notion that Prince Charming is a being with the grandeur beyond that of a Galactus. But how to support such a proposition? Former reporter Lucy Freeman and psychotherapist Kerstin Kupfermann (who has worked of famous Freudian fairy-tales specialist Bruno Bettelheim, much in at the time of writing) write in their book The Power of Fantasy (Continuum, New York, 1988), that what they call the “Prince Charming” Fantasy is, in essence, the fantasy if idealized perfect love, a fantasy that cannot stand the quotidian reality of a longstanding relationship.  Being a book of Freudian bent, the authors cannot free themselves from the centrality of oedipal interpretations, and thus, the Prince Charming fantasy is one of longing for maternal love. However, its nuclear tenet is very close to Simone’s view: “Seeing a wife of several weeks in hair curlers or brushing her teeth may fill a husband with disgust. Watching her husband clip his toenails or hearing him pass gas in the bathroom may bring feelings of revulsion to a bride” (p.62). Snow White was not repulsed by Prince Charming passing gas, but by him deriving joy on revenge for what was done to her. For “Snow White was of kind heart, and could not bear to see his cruelty, even to the witch”, Simone tells us, through The Traveller. In this, if the extrapolation is allowed, we can see a mirror-image of Simone retconning  Sonja’s origin, so as to wipe out rape. In both instances, Snow White’s and Simone’s, there seems to be a disgust in dealing with reality, an attempt to stay in an idealized infant state. For a rabid feminist writer, it must be close to anathema the thought that a raped woman could gain power, strength and wisdom from her ordeal. That she could transcend such an ordeal. That she wouldn’t be forever defined by it as a victim.

So now consider the motivation of the character. Disgusted by Prince Charming’s revenge (to burn the witch’s feet with molten lead shoes, as in Grimm’s original telling of the story), Snow White leaves him, and, in return, he intends to destroy the Universe. For want of a good fuck, all the universe was lost… But then again, consider: if Prince Charming has the power to open rips in Time, of manipulating the Universe at a quantical level, couldn’t he just travel back in Time and undo his revenge? Could he not seek redemption through other means and so regain his lost love (although I bet something like that will happen in the end)? And really, what kind of immature man cannot abide to lose a loved one and go on with his life?

Anyhow, back to Prince Charming as figure of Myth. Feminist scholar Catherine Orenstein has this to say about him in her book Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked: Sex, Morality, and the Evolution of a Fairy Tale (Basic Books, New York, 2002): “It’s no secret that today’s best-known fairy-tale protagonists are female: Cinderella, Snow White, Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty, and Red Riding Hood, to name just a few. These heroines act amongst a cast of banal male foils. The men are simply fathers, beasts, dwarfs or princes, all interchangeable and usually illustrated as one and the same from tale to tale. In Stephen Sondheim’s Broadway musical Into the Woods, the Prince Charmings of two interwoven fairy tales swap places without so much as a ripple in the plot” (p.121).  That’s because Prince Charming has no relevant role to play in these tales, whose center belong entirely to women. “In these fairy tales, the heroines make decisions that illustrate the expectations of women in real life, while the male figures are simply metaphors for punishment (misbehave and you’ll meet a wolf) and reward (a prince in the end – if you’re good!)” (idem).

So what Simone is doing here, is creating a big paper tiger that her female heroines can disintegrate with their magic swords, as if in a pajama party for women that refuse to grow up (and how apt it suddenly feels to have Sonja revert once more to the Simone-simpleton that refers to herself in the third person and looks as dim as a burnt bulb). I was enveloped on the above musings (I admit, a little collateral to the review at hand) when in the double spread by the end of the book, where all the heroines are amassed against Mistress Hel, I got a sad glimpse of how Simone and her readers may see the world (or may fantasize the world as it should be).

This kind of setup is recurrent in comic-books, and frequent in comics featuring teams of Superheroes, be they The Avengers vs The Masters of Evil, The X-Men vs The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants or The Superman Family vs The Marvel Family, but never that I recall had I seen before such a setup comprised of men only. But here, in the dark tones of a cold night, sixteen women face a rival woman for the destiny of the Universe menaced by one of only four men in the entire story-arc (Dracula, the Courier, the savage boy Jana and Sonja meet, and Prince Charming himself). For a moment I saw this image encapsulated the entire agenda of Swords of Sorrow; that Simone was sex-reversing what she saw in comics: a male medium, populated by male characters, aimed at male readers. Perhaps an apt comment on the industry, as she is fond to refer to comic book publishers. But then it hit me: this could not be, as comics have always been a brewing pot for strong women characters, from Wonder Woman and Red Sonja, to Jean Grey and the White Queen. Nor forgetting Supergirl, Catwoman, Black Cat, Batgirl, Mary Marvel, and so many more that made my delight as a boy. So it is not the sad way they see the world. It’s the way their feminist agenda wants the world to be: a place that excludes man, that sees no place for man but as tyrants and world-killers. And if the first was a grey perspective indeed, this one made me realize how really really SAD their world is.

SWORDS OF SORROW: RED SONJA & JUNGLE GIRL #1 (Dynamite, 2015)

 So, last time we saw Red Sonja and Dejah Thoris (Swords of Sorrow #2), they were about to embark on a quest to find the part responsible for the puffing out of entire constellations and the sudden creation of rips across time and dimensions. It was a rousing moment, with a determined Sonja challenging the Universe and Thoris: “You said it wasn’t natural. Someone planned this. Fine. So, god or demon, man or beast… I’m going to find it and cut its god-cursed head off. You coming?”

However one takes such a scene – whooping gung-ho enthusiasm or with a grain of salt as to how will she find said planner across time and space, having not a clue to who or what it is, nor the resources it can amass – one thing you’re sure  not expecting: that the challenge won’t be accepted. After all, it was Dejah Thoris who spotted the problem, was she not? 

And so, it came as a complete surprise to me, on opening issue #1 of Swords of Sorrow: Red Sonja & Jungle Girl, to find Sonja, alone, wandering the dry deserts of Barsoom, in search of the portal Dejah Thoris had seen from afar.  I had been so certain that both Sonja and Thoris had plunged together into the portal, there to become somehow separated in time and space, that the complete absurdness of it all took some time to register. “The princess had to return to her city and her people, but I was made for a business messier than Martian politics”, Sonja tells us, as written by Marguerite Bennett. I could not believe my eyes, so I reached for Swords of Sorrow: Dejah Thoris & Irene Adler #1 (written by Leah Moore, with art by Francesco Manna), as yet unread, and, lo and behold, there she is, Dejah Thoris, in her luxurious bed in the Royal Palace of Helium, admiring the strange dark blade given to her by the Courier and musing to her dog Woola about how such a blade “surely brings only suffering”.

The most jarring thing to me was not the return of Thoris to Helium per se, as it is a lot more logic than the gung ho attitude of Sonja as portrayed by Gail Simone in issue #2 (a clichéd comic book moment, but an expedient one story-wise). However, with four issues of Swords of Sorrow out now (three by the time Red Sonja & Jungle Girl #1 came out), the ancillary titles almost complete, the story is going nowhere. There’s nothing of significance happening, only an event after another that add to nothing, and add nothing to the story, flimsy as it is. One cannot shake off the impression I mentioned before of reading snapshots of story instead of a coherent narrative.

And so it is with Swords of Sorrow: Red Sonja & Jungle Girl #1. Three entire pages are needed to take Sonja from Mars to Jana’s pre-historic Island, than another seven to go through the motions (already seen when Sonja first met with Dejah Thoris) of meeting Jana, the Jungle Girl, and fighting her, before both realize they are really allies. (Just a brief side note here to muse on how Sonja, the fiercest warrior out of Hyrkania and a true she-devil with a sword – soldier, thief, mercenary – can’t quickly dispatch a Barsoomian noblewoman or a primitive jungle girl in a fight. Oh, well….) And then, two more pages are needed to introduce the first element of possible relevance to the plot: the strange freeze affecting portions of the lush tropical jungle.

On the margins we lose track of the orluk that attacked Sonja on Mars and crossed with her to Jana’s island (never mind how the two got separated on the trip), and are deprived of any sense of suspense by a glimpse of Mistress Hel peeping through the vegetation at Sonja and Jana, like the biblical serpent in the Garden of Eden, although she waits six more pages before revealing herself. In those six pages, Sonja and Jana see a deer being slaughtered by three winged demons, find an injured savage boy that is apparently responsible by the freeze and becomes their ally, and are attacked by said demons who then are shattered to ice crystals by the boy.

One thing the readers immediately notices is the weird banter between the two main protagonists, as if they’ve just came out of a Winx cartoon TV marathon. Although I, for once, find it refreshing to read once more some Sonja interjections of the kind “Mitra’s Balls!” or “Derketo’s Tits!” that bring a very welcome Roy Thomas & Frank Thorne vibe. However, there’s no way in hell that one would ever swallow Sonja answering on being called a witch by Jana: “‘Witch’, really? She-devil, sword mistress, queen of malice and scourge of maleficence, you could’ve said…” and then adding with a schoolyard degree of rhetoric, “and I could call you a sneaking vicious slat-ribbed giglet!” When Jana retorts “Heh, joke’s on you… I don’t know what that word means!” one’s left to ponder how infantile can you go before the joke’s on you.

And it sure is a minor quibble, but does it make any sense, when it was established that the swords allow them to “understand each other’s languages” (Swords of Sorrow #2)? That is not the only instance in this book when the issue of language is referred to, for on the immediate page Sonja has similar musings on how can a tatterdemalion like Jana speak good honest Hyrkanian, to which Jungle Girl responds with “I don’t know what either of those words mean, either”.  Minor quibble it sure is, although it squanders practically a full page that could be put to good use advancing the story. If there really is a story to be told, as at this point, one is not assured of it.

Another not so minor quibble has to do with another instance of poor coordination between Simone and her hand-picked female writers. I’ve already mentioned the by-the-numbers encounter between Sonja and Jana, with both attacking each-other. But then, after a double spread of sexy catfighting, Jana says “I was warned against your coming, trusted with a sacred spear…” It needn’t be said that when the Courier offered Jana her double-bladed weapon (Swords of Sorrow #1) we heard no such warning; but if she was warned, why, oh why, would she attack Sonja? And why was Sonja not given a similar warning? (The situation is once more repeated, almost verbatim, in the Swords of Sorrow: Black Sparrow & Lady Zorro one-shot). This kind of lazy writing (and lazier plotting) is almost mandatory by the lack of capable overall storytelling that should have been secured by Simone.

 However, despite all these shortcomings, it is not as big a pain to read as the main books of the series (penned by Simone). Bennett’s writing, episodic structure not-withstanding, is brisk and clean, and the art and colors by Mirka Andolfo bring the book two or three notches above Dávila’s inks in Swords of Sorrow. The colors are pale (I would enjoy a little more vibrancy in the depiction of the tropical jungle and sea) yet adequate, and the drawings are strangely enticing, despite its juvenile lines. The characters are drawn with somewhat disproportionate eyes (a clear neotenic indication of juvenilia) and under-proportioned noses, which brews a heady mix with the full grown breasts and lithe bodies of both girls. The pages flow with elegant action in the fight scenes, and the small panels cramped by the above the shoulders views from both girls add nice introspective nuances to the emotional flux. 

It would be nice to see this young Italian artist secure at leat a six-issues run on Red Sonja: She-Devil with a Sword after Simone has left the title. Or, at least, a couple of one-shots. For me, at least, Andolfo’s art will be the main attraction for Swords of Sorrow: Red Sonja & Jungle Girl #2.