2014, Dynamite

To begin with nearly half of the pages in this thin comic are devoted to advertisements. Cezar Razek is obviously a highly talented artist who does gritty realistic male figures, yet chose to depict Red Sonja as a Barbie doll in silver breast plates.

The concept for this comic was bankrupt to begin with. Red Sonja was a Robert E. Howard creation featured in four of his rarely published stories of historical adventure set in Europe. She was a peasant girl about to be sold by her father who escaped and joined a company of mercenaries. Sonja was one part Joan of Arc, one part Black Agnes. This fool comic takes her and places her in the fabled Hyborian Age of Howard’s big brand character Conan, and proclaims in a narrative box 4 inches above her perfect silicone C-cups, “The tale of the she-devil who wielded a sword. The tale of the warrior woman who shaped the Hyborian Age.”

The entire point behind Howard setting adventures in his Mythic Hyborian Age was essentially Lovecraftian, that men—even a remarkable warrior king such as Conan—were incapable of affecting the course of history, that they were mere ciphers beneath toleration by the greater forces of the universe. Yet these guys make the leap that a playboy model with a sword literally carved history with it.

Red Sonja: The Black Tower, is the best example of ripping the guts out of an idea and inflating it with perfumed lies. In fact, the publisher of this would rate as a passable coven of degenerate sorcerers if Howard were writing this thing.