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.

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.

Red Sonja #1 Variants Covers K to T

A new series of Red Sonja requires a load of variant covers to collect (as long as you live in America... I'm English, so hard luck)

 Cover K AOD Collectables

Cover L AOD Collectables 

 Cover M AOD Collectables

 Cover N Dynamic Forces

 Cover O In Your Dreams

 Cover P Jesse James

 Cover Q Midtown Comics

Cover R Midtown Comics

 Cover S Midtown Comics

Cover T Nerd Block

That's an awful lot of covers, and it doesn't even cover (ugh puns) the subscriber or retailer incentive covers....Well at least I can get the Nerd Block cover easy enough...Good hunting.

RED SONJA / CONAN #1 (Dynamite/Dark Horse, 2015)

Red Sonja has gained such popularity and wide recognition as one of the iconic female comics character, that one almost tends to forget that she was created by Roy Thomas (based on a character by Howard from a completely different timeline from the Hyborean Age) as a worthy female rival for Conan, the Barbarian (Conan the Barbarian #23). Since their first encounter in the besieged city of Makkalet , and the first hints of erotic attraction in “Song of Red Sonja” (Conan the Barbarian #24), each time the two hyborean legends meet is an event that truly merits celebration, as it usually adds to both character’s personality.

Dynamite/Dark Horse’s crossover Red / Sonja Conan is the second time such meeting that happens in 2015 after the mini-series Conan / Red Sonja, by scribes Gail Simone and Jim Zub, and superlative art and covers by Dan Panosian. Despite the Simone byline, Conan / Red Sonja was the best Sonja comic book I’ve read in a long time, with good writing, excellent storytelling, compelling visuals and a coherent plot, although I would bet Simone’s writing input was greater on issues #3-4 than in the first two, as those were the ones where shaky writing was more in evidence (I could be proved wrong). Those failings were most obvious in the erotic relationship between the two heroes, as the newly liberated and retconned Sonja, deprived of her ‘problematic’ origin story that filled any advance towards a relationship with a darkly erotic tension, left no room for any kind of tension or uncertainty as to any carnal relation, cheapening it. This also makes painfully obvious the infantile way intercourse was denied twice, something that had some meaning when Sonja couldn’t mate unless defeated in combat, but cannot be accepted in a book that (one would hope) is no longer targeted at children.  (By the way, another such instance occurs in this first issue of the second mini-series.) Despite such shortcomings, it was a gripping story, chronicling the feud between Conan, Sonja and the wizard Toth-Amon and his cancerous blood-root, at several (canonic) stages of their lives.

Red Sonja / Conan picks up some time after the events narrated in the previous series, and once more introduces the blood-root which one was led to believe to have been extirpated from the world. As a way to circumvent that small obstacle, writer Victor Gischler (X-Men; Deadpool; Conan: The Phantoms of the Black Coast) takes us through a nine-years flashback to the Kothian city of Enshophur, there to meet Kal’ang, “a mage of middling powers, commanding little respect” but about to get his hands on some of the genocidal blood-root seeds. Behind this far from awe-inspiring mage is an enigmatic blind seer, clearly a creature of greater power, cunning and, above all, intelligent dissimulation.

Then we’re brought back to the present, when Kush and Stygia are about to go to war, mainly because Kush’s king fears an attack from Stygia. It is no surprise then, to find that Kal’ang is now a small Stygian king, still as little deserving of respect as he was before. In fact, maybe less than before, as Conan at one time refers to him as “some hedge wizard. You know how it is with these Stygians… every upstart mage thinks he can conquer the world”. What may come as more of a surprise, is that Kal’ang doesn’t want that war… at least for the moment, a fact that subtly and cleverly draws the reader attention to the same blind seer that continues to counsel the mage king, hinting at a true puppeteer running the show unseen. 

It is at Kush’s king’s camp that Conan and Sonja meet again, both captaining a company of mercenaries, both pushed to fight each other for general command unaware of the identity of their opponent (not a very convincing premise logic-wise, but military logic is not a strong-point of this book, as is shown by the simplest way Sonja and Conan debate strategy over beers, and how Gischler seems to believe you can prime an army for battle with a few minutes warning time). Obviously, they don’t get to fight one another, instead teaming against some discontent mercenaries, in an impressive demonstration of Roberto Castro’s ability to portray fluidity of movement. 

Although I’ve enjoyed Castro’s (Lords of Mars; Lord of the Jungle) art, I still found it to unequal in this book, ranging from the mediocre (a panel where Sonja seems to have but one leg) to the excellent (as is the case in the referred fight). He is particularly inspired when drawing Kal’ang, transmitting visually the suave malfeasance and self-importance of the mage. And I particularly enjoy the way he draws Conan, which makes me think of a mix of the better parts of Windsor-Smith and Buscema. And he clearly knows how to draw feminine anatomy, which is always a plus when working on a Sonja book.

Obviously, for the fans of the original Red Sonja (such as myself), the insurmountable moment of estrangement comes when Conan, about to engage in a deserved threesome with two buxom wenches, is surprised by Sonja waiting in his bed. “You’re more woman than an entire harem of those wenches”, he tells her.

Obviously, before they can consummate their sensual yearning, they are attacked by two demon-warriors sent by Kal’ang to kill Conan and Sonja in an attempt to stay the imminent attack by the Kushian forces. The monster’s attack, repelled by the lovers-to-be, prompt them to anticipate the attack on Stygia, setting the cliffhanger for issue #2. And yet, one is left to wonder:

What would happen if Conan and Sonja really did it? If they really ever got to make love? I guess one will never know, for the entire Universe seems to be conspiring against such an event. In commercial terms, it would really be unwise, as we’ve learned from countless examples in the past: Superman and Lois Lane, John Steed and Mrs. Peel… the endless teasing, the eternal will-they-won’t-they? is a lot more rewarding than the one-time-only emotional peak of fulfillment. However, when Sonja had her vow never to fuck anyone who haven’t bested her in a fair fight, there was a meta-diegetic rationale that helped suspend the reader’s disbelief as to all the extraneous circumstances that went to prevent the carnal union. But now, in this pasteurized version of Sonja (or Horny Sandra, like our friend TheMightyFlip so appropriately termed her), one is ever aware of how ridiculous it is that every event of relevance to the plot would happen precisely when Conan and Sonja are about to engage in lovemaking, and even before they remove a single piece of clothing (or armor). It’s as if one is thrown back to the times of the Hollywood Hays code.

It feels a cheat, and lazy writing. Sonja now can fuck (and in Simone’s version, fucks) anyone she chooses, and it has been shown (at least in Conan / Red Sonja, repeatedly) that Sonja has no trouble beating Conan with a sword, and yet… not with Conan. It seems contrived, infantile and demeaning to the reader, who, one hopes, is long over the uproar of seeing Dick Grayson and Starfire in bed in The New Titans #1 (1988). It may be slim pickings, but it mars a little what otherwise is a promising start to a potentially interesting mini-series.

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.