Sonja’s on the hunt for souls to feed the machine.
Creative Staff:
Story: Christopher Hastings
Art: Pasquale Qualano
Colors: Kike J. Diaz
Letterer: Jeff Eckleberry
What They Say:
Welcome to HELL…SONJA. She’s the Queen of Damnation. She lords over the fiery pit of eternal hunger and suffering. But now, she’s had enough of this evil s**t. She will bind together lost souls, and rove the multiverse to fill Hell’s belly with only the most deserving of its punishment. If someone so wicked is beset upon you, if you’re desperate enough, if no one else can help, maybe your prayer will be heard by…HELL SONJA.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
With the Sonjaversal series wrapping up recently and launching into this new Hell Sonja series, we get the return of Christopher Hastings on the scripting side of it. This opening issue is one that basically serves as a mild re-introduction of the various characters that populate it while at the end reminding us of the goals of it all. Pasquale Qualano is on board for the artwork and once again they deliver a great-looking book across the board. The characters look fantastic with all the variations of Sonja that we get while the new characters for this particular installment have an interesting look since it’s another low-civilization style world and there’s a good sense of sword and sorcery about it.
The premiere here is… well, it’s pretty basic. Enough so that by the end of the issue I knew that I wasn’t going to pick up more because it’s basically what a lot of the back half of Sonjaversal was and between that and Vampiverse I’m kind of worn out with it all. The main focus is going after a particular bad dude on a medieval-style world where the ruler is clearly evil and not a good guy. Red Sonja is leading the charge as subtlety is not her thing and that has caused the rest to come in along the way to bring their particular style. We get handy text boxes introducing each of them and all of their data/homeworld bits, so you know who is who by the end of it. There aren’t a ton of them but enough that it’s a decent group to work with. The fight has moments of tension, though you know they’re not going to lose anyone this early in the run since they spent enough time in the prior series introducing them all.
When they win and bring them back to where Hell Sonja is, we get the reminder of how all of this works in that their souls will break down to feed the machine that keeps the universe humming along without breaking. And it looks like the layout of the run may be familiar enough in that they’ll deal with new opponents for individual issues, at least for a couple, before finding a way to bind things together. Which is unfortunate because when you can map out this much of it this quickly, or that the opening issue just feels like another chapter of the previous series, it doesn’t draw you in at all.
In Summary:
While I liked what we got with some of the multiversal aspects of some of these characters early on, what we’re getting is an overload of it at this point for Sonja and Vampirella. And it’s not working it in a way that really feels creative or just doing something really different, like the Archie crossover both of them jumped into. Hastings’ script and work here is perfectly fine but after the Sonjaversal series and what I’ve read of Vampiverse so far, I’ve quickly become exhausted by it all. Pasquale Qualano’s artwork is great here and I liked seeing the designs for the characters once again, but there’s nothing that really speaks to me that says come back for more.
Grade: C
Age Rating: 15+
Released By: Dynamite Entertainment
Release Date: January 12th, 2022
MSRP: $3.99
