Red Sonja #14 picks up with Red Sonja hunting the ax man who killed her father. She is still under the curse placed on her after she killed the old wizard: She cannot forgive even the smallest wrong. To make matters worse, she is hunted in return by the murderer and by the wizard’s brother.
While there is plenty of swordplay here, Gail Simone is focusing on Sonja’s internal struggle more. Initially, she is ready to ignore the curse, but ultimately, she faces the cost it will exact. One of the things that has made Simone’s run so strong is her ability to make Sonja a fully rounded person, complete with flaws, failings, and strengths. Simone has also given Sonja a range of traveling companions to act as her friends. Here, she has her would-be follower and apprentice, Havan, who does his best to bring her to her senses. The inability to forgive remains one of the best, most complicated curses yet devised to torment any character.
Walter Geovani’s work is especially strong this issue, whether he is drawing the small village inn whose people Red Sonja saved, showing the vengeance of the wizard’s brother in a full page, or focusing on Sonja’s expression as she contemplates her revenge and its consequences. Adriano Lucas’ coloring keeps to deep, rich coloring suited to the nature of the tale.
If you haven’t read any of Gail Simone’s run on Red Sonja, now would be a good time to start. If you have, then you know already how good the book has been and need only be told that she is keeping the standard high.
Writer: Gail Simone
Artist: Walter Geovani
Colors: Adriano Lucas
Letters: Simon Bowland
Covers: Jenny Frison, Stephanie Buscema, Matt Brooks
Simone has created a Conan knockoff with no redeeming features worth caring about. She’s made a flawed character alright. One so flawed my feeling about the ending was who cares?
Interesting. Is there an author whose work you like better?
I liked Eric Trautmann from the first run of Dynamite’s Red Sonja. He made great use of the Hyborian world and its varied cultures, perhaps the best of all the writers. Most, like Simone, have it as a very generic fantasy medieval world. Simone keeps referencing Red Sonja as a barbarian, but Hyrkanians aren’t barbarians. Barbarians are literally savages without literature, art, technology, law, etiquette, all that stuff Conan is railing against or finds chaffing and useless. Cimmerians and Picts are among the barbarian sphere of Robert E Howard’s world. Red Sonja’s reactions to the chef’s cooking in the second arc, or wearing fancy clothes and such in both arcs would be more in line with Conan than Red Sonja ever was. She would balk at being made to wear fancier clothes, but she was never against them as such. Her background was from a small farm so wasn’t a sophisticate, but she didn’t have Conan’s distaste for the etiquette of civilization in dealing with kings and aristocracy. Her ire would be directed at individuals as useless rather than the civilized world breeding them which is Conan’s attitude and seems Simone’s Sonja to me.
Simone has added things the first series needed, a sense of humor in the series. Her humor is entirely off putting to me, but humor is something that was pretty much absent from the whole first series. Trautmann did manage some with his supporting cast. He gave Sonja a company of mercenaries to command and we went through their various adventures as hired swords in the various Hyborian kingdoms. It was great fun, but not a lot of funny.
Finally, I wish Simone would get off Red Sonja getting so frequently captured, beaten, and or bushwacked by her enemies. I believe she wants to get away from a TV Xena or Wonder Woman type of heroine. The character never really loses or gets seriously threatened by their enemies. A lot of writers can do that with Red Sonja. Unfortunately, Simone’s Red Sonja has been captured and bailed by guest characters so many times that I wonder why she has a reputation as a bad-ass at all. Also, it bugs me when the main bad guys are taken out by guest characters and not the title character, something Simone has done in the last two arcs.
Writers I particularly enjoyed, Eric Trautmann, Michael Avon Oeming who started off the first series, Brian Reed (He was the first to get rid of the rape back story and had her start as a married woman. He had Sonja train herself to fight after her husband is murdered to avenge his death rather than god given help) Reed’s run is a reincarnation of Sonja, reborn after her death killing the wizard Kulan Gath at the end of Oeming’s run. I am enjoying Nancy Collins’s work so far. Her contribution to Legends of Red Sonja ‘The Eyes of the Howling God’ as I recall was great fun and I really liked her older Red Sonja in ‘Vulture’s Circle’.
I’m not sure Sonja is against fancy clothes as such–I enjoyed her scene with Aneva when the two were trading life-stories and trying things on. I also enjoy a good team book, so I’m having fun seeing Sonja working with a variety of different people–if it is sometimes the guest stars who take the villain out, it is Sonja who has brought them together & helped them see the possibility.
You have listed a number of interesting authors I will need to look up, though. Thanks!
For me, I never felt any great interest in the guest characters. Simone often uses them for humorous voice and her humor generally is off putting to me and takes me completely out of the story. The cleavage joke of the first issue, for instance, sounded like something from a bad episode of Xena. I can appreciate the intent of the clothes switching scene, but it just didn’t seem credible to do something like that under the circumstances they were in much less the soul searching conversation with a complete stranger on the part of Sonja. One might argue that such conversational confessions are the result of Aneva’s skill to relax people but it didn’t feel established as by Sonja wondering why she’s opening up to this stranger so readily. That aside, she was the best developed of the characters in the second arc and I wouldn’t mind seeing her come back.