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 #1-3 (Dynamite, 2015)

Swords of Sorrow is a Marvel/DC-wannabe crossover event from Dynamite Comics, involving some of the most recognizable and franchisable female characters from the print’s pool. However, lacking the vast coherent universes of both those rival labels from which to draw, and faced with half-a-dozen characters from such irreconcilable milieus as an impossible Mars, a lost pre-historic Jungle in an unknown island, nineteenth-century London, or a twenty-first century alien vampire from planet Drakulon among others, you can only try for a convoluted and contrived styoryline. This hard task is made even more complicated if – because all your characters are female – you think it may be a good idea to make the creative team all-female as well. One would think it difficult to find a dozen good writers and as many good artists without further consideration but for quality, but to narrow it down to a dozen good female writers and artists… Well, the mind boggles. Moreover if those female writers and artists have not as their goal to write a good story, but only to press a certain agenda…  

Obviously, if you want politically engaged and contrived writing (although more inept than convoluted), who you gonna call? Yes, you guessed it: Gail Simone. And you’ll defer to her the choosing of said team of female followers – sorry, creators – in a process that strangely mirrors the storyline-to-be. Weird, eh? 

Said story-arc began to be deployed in the one-shot Swords of Sorrow: Chaos! Prequel (written by Mairghread Scott and illustrated by Mirka Andolfo) where we follow a mysterious unnamed character who has “acquired a measure of power over reality itself” (remember what I’ve said before about contrived writing? But wait, worst has yet to come, as Gail Simone goes one over this one in terms of plain silliness), as he picks up a team of female fighters comprised of Purgatory (“vampire and demon alike”), Chastity (“a monster and killer of monsters”), and Bad Kitty (“frenzy incarnate”) who, along with Mistress Hel, are enticed, through the promise of fulfilling their most deep desires , to protect the enigmatic man for the time needed to complete a rite that will expand his power a thousand-fold.

In a taste of things to come, and shortly after the mysterious character mentions that his “nearing triumph has attracted dissent”, we are shown a one-page glimpse of Red Sonja, Kato,  Jungle Girl, and Dejah Thoris, Princess of Mars. How these four represent dissent, or how they come together to fight the dastardly plan of the Mysterious One is something left for the main books themselves and the several tie-in titles (Sords of Sorrow; DejahThoris and Irene Adler, Swords of Sorrow: Vampirella and Jennifer Blood, Swords of Sorrow: Masquerade and Kato and, the one that really matters to us, Swords of Sorrow: Red Sonja and Jungle Girl).

As we here are only concerned about Red Sonja and her role in the unfolding (should I say, mainly uninteresting?) saga, I will only refer here to her own story-arc, reaching out to the main storyline only when needed to clarify the events concerning Sonja herself.

And so we start with Swords of Sorrow #1, an insipid effort helmed by Gail Simone with adequate art by Sergio Dávila, that not only has virtually no flame, but goes out of her way to undo the few positive things that Mairghread Scott had introduced in her prequel. If Scott has tried wisely to wring some mystery out of the identity of the Big Bad Villain and the rite he proposed to perform, Simone openly reveals his hidden motivations – as well as revealing him in such an uninspired visual that one would believe him to be a reject from the casting session for a comic-book adaptation of Rice’s Vampire Chronicles. If Scott purported him to be harboring some transcendent scheme concerning the nature of reality itself, Simone pulls him down the ladder to a mere magical Prince seeking to satisfy a grudge against women – “against all women”. (Did I mention somewhere contrived writing? Put simpleton writing instead.)

And, if his four female minions (pawns?) were given by Scott some deeply personal motivations for assisting on his mad scheme (and one over-the-topper as Mistress Hel wants nothing more than to completely destroy Earth), here Simone wipes it all out introducing them as if in thrall of this second-rate Harlequin villain. “She has her seconds, her little bitch warriors. And I have my own, do I not? And you are loyal to me because you all love me?” Really? Is that all Simone can come up with? Apparently so, as our four minions of evil sing in what I imagine to be a single voice from off-page: “‘Til the end of time, Prince”.

This adversary that has her own ‘bitch warrriors’ is a Wonder Woman-wanna-be that goes by the moniker of The Traveler and has as her minion a bald man apparently called The Courier. And his function in this first issue is simply to deliver a black-bladed Sword of Sorrow to each of the Traveler’s chosen champions, one of whose is Red Sonja.

 

Well, we all know who she is, but let me take a small detour here. When the Courier finds Sonja, she is dying of thirst in the middle of the desert, after fighting some bandits who took her sword and her waterskin, even if she slays “half of them before they have the sense to run”. Never mind how – really, how? – could that happen: she slays half of them and the others run, but get away with her sword and her water? Ok. That’s Simone logic for you. But that is not my main contention (a recurring one with me and Simone’s writing on Sonja). Sonja is dying of thirst in the desert, and she is sprawled under the sun, singing drunkenly. One can mistake her singing for defiance on the face of certain death. But then the Courier comes along, gives her water and handles her the sword. And what does Sonja ask of him? “What is this gibberish you spout? And more importantly, you haven’t got any wine, have you?” Am I the only one to find it somewhat problematic that in Simone’s hand Sonja seems to be no more than a drunkard? I refer you, dear reader, to “The Hanging Tree” in Red Sonja #1973 (2015), where Sonja starts a bar brawl because she isn’t allowed to drink till she’s filled to the brim. Here, barely dying from thirst, she asks for wine? Really? I do remember the first story illustrated by Frank Thorne (written by Bruce Jones), “Blood of the Hunter” (1976), where Sonja is also trekking through the desert, unarmed and running from a bounty hunter, nearly dying of thirst. When the hunter catches up with her, dehydrated, she gets to best him as only Sonja would be able to, but all through her predicament, there’s only one thought in Sonja’s mind: “I’d give all this fine booty for one berry tree in full bloom.” And, obviously, “Water… I must have some water soon..!”

  

It is true that in “The Song of Red Sonja” (Conan the Barbarian #24) it is said that she “drinks the strongest man under the table – and outswears a Zingaran!”, but she dances happily, not drunkenly, and she drinks in celebration, not out of habit. If Simone relies heavily, time after time, story after story, in this simplistic character building, to tell us that Sonja’s as much of a man as the next drunkard, and farts as loudly, her storytelling technique is little more than amateurish, and the only way she can advance the story is through sudden personal moments of insight – more akin to religious revelations – that tell the characters what’s going on, in a way not seen in comics since the forties.  Not to mention the infantile expedient of having the black swords serve as universal translators. But that is the least of Simone’s troubles and can be excused as a time-saving narrative device. When the Courier delivers the swords to the chosen women, there are some dislocations among different comic universes: Tars Tarkas is taken from Mars to the Hyborian Age; a T-Rex is taken from Jana’s world to contemporary London; Kato’s car is taken to Jana’s island, etc… These dislocations seem to have the only function of page fillers in Swords of Sorrow #2, where they take up half of its pages. However, only minutes after he delivers the swords, the Courier is crying to the Traveler that “I’ve failed you, Traveler. The women you have chosen… they will not rise to the task. All time and space is doomed.” Vampirella is still trying to escape the T-Rex, Sonja is still grappling with a confused Tars Tarkas, and yet… I’ve failed you, Traveler? The women will not rise to the task? This is the worst kind of bad writing. Try to milk tension and suspense out of lack of events. Tell, don’t show, perhaps?

But it is not a lonely example. Soon after reluctantly joining forces in Barsoom, Sonja and Dejah Thoris have to fight the shard warriors sent to kill them by the evil Prince (sorry, I couldn’t resist), and both women lead them on a merry chase to the Dead City of the White Apes of Mars, who dutifully take care of the pursuers. Sonja and Dejah Thoris barely have had time to catch their breath, let alone ponder the implications of all that happened. However, in a few minutes, Dejah is pointing her binoculars to the Martian sky and declaring: “These… doorways. Portals. They lead to different times, worlds, even dimensions.  And worst of all… Several stars, entire constellations. They’re just… gone.” Never mind how precipitous those conclusions are for someone who has seen but one portal, she deduces even more. “I thought the portals were a nexus of some kind, bringing everything together. But (…) I believe we are the nexus. Ourselves. And more like us.” Sherlock, eat your heart out!

These instances of action ex nihilo could be overlooked if part of a cohesive plot of unstoppable narrative drive that would take the reader by pure force of ideas and execution. But that is not the case. These are join-the-dots moments that telegraph to the reader the exact points where the author had no idea of how to go from action A to action B (or set-piece A to set-piece B) on the list of ideas jotted down on post-its strewn along her desk. It betrays, once more, poor writing. And that these moments are connecting points for incoherent ideas is painfully clear. Consider that, despite this last dazzling moment of insight on the part of Dejah Thoris (and Sonja, for Simone, has a tendency to play a brutish second fiddle on her own stories), she fails to recognize Sonja when she crossed to Barsoom while fighting Tars Tarkas, despite the fact that a huge Martian boulder has been carved by unseen forces into a giant statue of the Hyrkanian warrior. A statue that plays no distinct function in the story, that is not explainable by the motivation of any of the characters on either side of the lines (I may be proven wrong on this point as we’re just halfway the book run, but I would bet my entire Red Sonja comic book collection that I won’t be), and thus can be read as nothing more than the writer thinking, hey, wouldn’t it be great if there were to appear in Mars a huge statue of Red Sonja?

Well, after they escape the shard warriors and have one more magical insight as to the abnormal character of the events shaking the entire multiverse and other dimensions, Sonja and Dejah Thoris enter the portal In search of the culprit, thus closing part two of the saga. Dejah Thoris will team up with Irene Adler in nineteenth-century London, and Sonja with Jana, the Jungle Girl in her Lost Island. In my next post I will review Swords of Sorrow: Red Sonja and Jungle Girl #1 (out now), as there’s no Sonja in Swords of Sorrow #3.

What there is, however, is enough to make any normal reader throw the book at the nearer wall, hoping it will go out the window and down an infinite cliff into a sea of broiling flame. In a preview interview for the books, Gail Simone tried to wet reader’s appetite by hinting that “There’s a very, very famous character, a character of legend (you will know his name) of massive power who is embittered about humanity, but specifically all females. His heart was broken and he blames women. ALL women.” From what we’ve glimpse thus far of said character – the Prince – he has no resonance with any character fitting that description. However, in issue #3, the Traveler sends a messenger to the Prince stating that she knows who he really is, and that she holds in her possession the woman that caused all his hatred. The idea is so absurd (dumb, is probably the better term)that I will refrain from repeat it here, and, in all honesty, with any other writer I would feel sure that it was no more than a middle-of-the-run red herring. Yet, if it realy is so…

If it really is so, and despite the wonderfully insightful and updated version of him by Bill Willingham in his Fables comic-book, Simone would have to do the most procrustean and rabid feminist reading of Perrault’s and Grimm’s stories for it to work. If it will work, is a matter open for debate, that only the next three issues of the series will settle, but that Simone’s vision is blinded by rabid feminism is scarcely in dispute.  In issue #3, in another of those out of the blue plot contrivances, five of the Traveler’s women warriors get in possession of the Philosopher’s Stone, which comes with an inscribed prophecy. A command to “seek the crown, the blade, and the leech”. 

Lady Zorro immediately understands that those are not objects, but people. Generals. And, has she easily deciphers the enigma (again, Shelock, eat your heart out), the page spread shows us Dejah Thoris, Red Sonja and Vampirella, punctuating each of Lady Zorro’s utterances: “The crown is royalty. A Queen. Perhaps a Princess [you’re sure it’s not a King, perhaps a Prince?]. The blade is a warrior, that’s plain. And the leach is a monster. Vampiro. Vampire”.  And, with no need for further clues, she immediately states that “we need these women. I feel it in my heart.” A feeling that goes unchallenged by Sparrow as she, apprehending the sudden collision of realities happening around them, utters virtually the same words. Only a very bad writer would put on paper such basic trite, or someone so blind to the world that she would take ideology for reality. Or both. Enough said.