The quality of me kicking your butt is not strained.
Creative Staff:
Story: Gail Simone
Art: Walter Geovani
Colors: Adriano Lucas
Letters: Simon Bowland
What They Say:
Beginning a new Sonja epic that will shake the She-Devil to her core! In THE FORGIVING OF MONSTERS, PART ONE, the Hyrkanian finds herself aiding a small village against a hideous and bloody infestation, while an enemy from her past threatens to crush her spirit forever!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
As I like to tell my students, the best stories are about something. The story is more than just the events that occur on the page—it’s a statement or an exploration of some core human truth. Some call this the theme, others the premise, but whatever you call it, it’s the quality that makes a story memorable and meaningful for a reader. The great thing about this quality is that it’s not limited to any one type of story (although elitists will tell you that only literary fiction can truly explore the human condition), even a tale about a swordswoman killing an evil wizard can tell us something about ourselves.
This understanding of the nature and power of stories is one of the reasons that I’ve fallen in love with Simone and Geovani’s run on Red Sonja. They’re certainly fun with great amounts of action, adventure, humor, and horror, but they mean something as well, whether it’s the importance of letting go of one’s past, the joy in discovering that you’re not alone, or the importance of forgiveness for both the forgiver and the forgivee.
Forgiveness lies at the heart of this new story arc (not that it takes a Lit major to suss that one out), and it promises to be both thought-provoking and heartbreaking. Sonja travels to Koth to kill an evil wizard, Kalas-Ra, who has been kidnapping the elderly for his magical experiments in the nature of the soul. Sonja delivers justice, but not before Kalas-Ra enacts his revenge in the form of a curse. Sonja will never be able to forgive again.
At first this seems like a pretty lame curse. She’s not going to get thinner and thinner and waste away to nothingness, a la Stephen King, or in be dragged to Hell in X number of days, a la Sam Raimi. Compared to those, not being able to forgive seems like she got off pretty light.
Of course, that’s not the case, as we discover later. Sonja travels to a nearby Inn, where she’s treated like a hero for destroying the wizard. There she sees a man who had been part of the raiding party that destroyed her village. She goes to confront him, but a serving boy spills wine on her cloak, and she flies into a rage, unable to forgive the accident. The patrons swarm her and knock her out, allowing the man to go free, and Sonja leaves with an unquenchable anger burning in her gut, and we begin to see how the wizard’s seemingly innocuous curse may well destroy the Devil with a Sword.
As always, Red Sonja comes chock full of humor, adventure, and great dialogue. Every time Kalas-Ra speaks, you wish you could go all Gumby and jump into a book just so you can punch him. He refers to himself as “one” and invents increasingly disturbing and sexual ways to refer to Sonja such as, “Lovely Flesh” or “Fleshy Delight.” Thanks to Walter Geovani’s excellent art, the leer in his eyes when he calls her these names succeeds in making me more than a little queasy. Her interactions with Havan the Firemaker are far more enjoyable.
I don’t want to give too much more away, but I will say that Simone positons more players on the board at the end, creating potentially multiple ways in which we will see how this premise of forgiveness plays out. I have hunches as to where this story will go, and if I’m right, then it’s going to be a hard road for everyone’s favorite Devil with a Sword.
In Summary:
Red Sonja 13 begins a new arc and it serves as a good jumping-on point for new readers. As always, the writing, the art, the color, and the letters are excellent and combine to make a comic that is full of action, adventure, humor, and thought. The concept of forgiveness, I believe, is going to be played out in multiple ways and the title, “The Forgiveness of Monsters” begs the question, who needs to be forgiven, who is the monster, and can monsters forgive themselves? As always, highly recommended.
Grade: A+
Age Rating: T+
Released By: Dynamite
Release Date: 12 November 2014
MSRP: $3.99
