45 and counting: Happy Birthday, Red!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

RED SONJA (Richard Fleischer, 1985)

Something went seriously wrong with Richard Fleischer’s 1985 RED SONJA. And if one’s to believe the weight of reviews that have accumulated in these last 25 years, almost everything went disastrously wrong. Even Arnold Schwarzenegger (who played Kalidor, with top billing) considers it the worst movie in his career, and in due honesty, even a detractor of the acting abilities of the current Governor of California would feel hard-pressed to point a worst one out. And still, why should it be so? How could they miss so blatantly the characteristics that made Roy Thomas’s she-devil with a sword such a cult phenomenon among comic book readers?

Fleischer helmed RED SONJA only one year after directing CONAN THE DESTROYER (1984), in and by itself a very satisfactory pulp yarn. Although it was not an equal to Millius’s vastly superior CONAN THE BARBARIAN (1981), it was a clever movie, exploring and expanding the Conan mythos, and clearly demonstrating Fleischer’s ability to work in the Sword & Sorcery genre. Moreover, in Olivia D’Abo’s princess and Grace Jone’s warrior, Fleischer had two opposite and strong female characters that justified some expectations as to his own Red Sonja. So, what went wrong?

Many blamed the casting of Brigitte Nielsen as the titular character. However, and despite her considerable acting limitations, she was not a bad choice to play the hyrkanian red-head. If fault is to be placed, it should be with the characterization. Even dropping the chain-mail bikini, Nielsen should have been alllowed to wear her hair in the style she had in COBRA (1986) and to keep the steely countenance of her Ludmilla character in ROCKY IV (1985). Besides what, the cuirasse she dons in RED SONJA isn’t in the least flattering to her ample physical charms, and one can only but think that it was the producers’ intention to de-emphasize her cleavage. The Red Sonja we see on-screen is a totally de-sexualized (or, more correctly, de-eroticized) character, and I believe that is the main trouble with the film.

CONAN THE DESTROYER was such an enjoyable movie because in it Fleischer didn’t have to worry with the (always problematic) origin story. Milius had done (brilliantly) away with it, and so the story could advance along a more leisurely and self-contained pace. Not so with RED SONJA. Burdened with the origin myth of the red-haired warrior – and such a problematic one, at that – the story on-screen had to go along with the studio’s felt need of closure. It is a common problem with origin stories in film that the main plot of the feature must deal with the problems of said origin and resolve them with a satisfactory sense of roundness. But how to do it when the origin story involves such an un-PC element as rape and you do not want to treat it as a rape-revenge flick since it is aimed at a PG-13 rating?

It’s the tough balancing act between the seriousness of Sonja’s predicament and the light tone one expects from a pulpy adventure for kids that dooms the film to an inglorious fate. But is it that not the same problem that limits a more adult-oriented scope in any mainstream comic book? Not that the origin story of Sonja in the comics is devoid of problematic issues. Consider this: raped as a teenager, and empowered by a goddess with fighting abilities and swordsmanship, and undefeatable for as long as she abstains from sex (unless she is beaten in a fair fight), Sonja is a walking add for further rapes. (In the movie, Kalidor tiptoes around this question by saying “So, the only man that can have you, is one who's trying to kill you. That's logic.”, but there’s no denying what that amounts to.) In the comic books, the origin story was only told in 1975 by Roy Thomas and Howard Chaykin (“The Day of the Sword” in Kull and the Barbarians #3), when Sonja was already an established character (having appeared for the first time in “The Shadow of the Vulture” in Conan the Barbarian #23 in 1972), and even then she is deprived of her vengeance over her rapist.

By placing the origin story in the core of the plot, Sonja’s rape becomes not her background, but her defining trait. It is therefore imperative that she resolves this issue in order to carry on with her life. Sonja is a woman bent on revenge. When she accidentally discovers that it was Queen Gedren (a magnificent Sandahl Bergman), the sadist lesbian tyrant that ordered Sonja’s gang-rape, who’ve laid waste to the kingdom of Hablock, her face lightens up with a newfound-meaning for life. In “The Day of the Sword”, Sonja unwillingly saves the life of his rapist five years after the event. Insane from torture, her former assailant cannot recognize her and so her vengeance upon him is senseless. Sonja laughs. Because she has matured and she has overcome her plight – Sonja is already Red Sonja, she has a life-history of prevailing against unfavourable odds. Not so with Fleischer’s Sonja. The movie’s woman-warrior is an obsessed man-hating simpleton, whose “sexuality is displaced in exhausting bouts of swordplay”, as Nigel Floyd once accurately put it in the Monthly Film Bulletin.

Moreover, one can not but think that the filmmakers didn’t had much sympathy for the character, for they kept playing the movie against her as if anxious to pigeon-hole Sonja in a more acceptable feminine role. Sonja seeks revenge against Gedren, but since Gedren purports to destroy the whole world, her personal quest plays second fiddle to the main focus of the film. Feminist readings over the years have demonized the movie for its supposed treatment of homosexuality – not only is Gedren a lesbian, but it is because Sonja resists her advances that she orders the red-headed gang-raped by her troops (so that Sonja is effectively raped by a woman, not by men – who were only following orders). More subtle and perhaps perfidious, is the way the film keeps trying to fit Sonja in a world of domesticity defined by sex-roles. In at least two instances in the film Sonja must walk under huge phalluses (even if only implied): the entrance to the training ground where she learns how to fight with an incongruous and anachronistic Chinese master (Tad Horino) is located under the legs of a huge stone statue holding two clearly phallic swords, so that Sonja has to step (or ride) under its penis to enter or leave the precinct, as she does when Kalidor comes looking for her with news of her sister’s imminent dead. And her sister, who sets Sonja on her quest, is laying under the legs of a huge stone auroch, so that Sonja must crawl under its (inferred) penis to receive her mission in life. The message is clear: it is under the tutelage of the phallus that she is trained and that she gets her purpose (as it was under the phalluses that raped her that Red Sonja was born – significantly, Gedren is also seen holding a phallic symbol when she destroys the order of the priestesses and takes hold of the Talisman).

The phallus, however, is not only a symbol of power, but of fertility as well, and Sonja is made to play the role of mother to young Prince Tarn (Ernie Reyes, Jr.), on one occasion even suggesting to put him over one “knee and beat some manners into him”. That Red Sonja, Kalidor and Tarn are treated as a nuclear family is obvious from the scenes where Tarn imitates the fighting movements of both his surrogate parents. But even the mother role is awkward for Sonja, for when she tries to teach Tarn to use a sword, Fleischer chooses to make it look as if the warrior is teaching him how to masturbate, once more underscoring how unacceptable a woman-warrior is for maternity and how sexual Red Sonja’s role is, despite her manly look. And it’s no coincidence that she’s made to look the most sexy and sensual when lying down after the rape or when temporarily unconscious and semi-naked:

Brigitte Nielsen has a great physical presence on-screen, and carries well her fighting scenes. In another movie, with another script and a more mature bend, she would have made a great Sonja, capable of both fierceness and femininity, tough and sensual, intimidating and alluring. As it is, she’s lost in the quagmire of a would-be third Conan picture. Just a promise to be fulfilled, not much more than a operatic caricature of a great comic-book character and the illustration of the troubles of the comics medium: a world aimed at kids, populated by females aimed at grown men. Not a fair fight at all.