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!
