The ancient evil lives!
Creative Staff:
Story: Erik Burnham
Art: Jonathan Lau
Colors: Celeste Woods
Letterer: Carlos S. Mangual
What They Say:
The past meets the present with the future of literally everything at stake! The warrior Red Sonja has a plan to keep freshly killed wizard Kulan Gath from resurrecting himself again — but when the plan backfires, it allows a whole new kind of Chaos! to infest the Hyborean Age! Will these new beings be any easier to deal with than Kulan Gath, or has Sonja called a worse evil to her world? It’s the first chapter of a brand-new quest for the She-Devil – and it may be her hardest yet as for the first time ever, Red Sonja meets the badass characters of Chaos!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
With a few Red Sonja series floating out there these days, what’s one more? Dynamite has this piece that provides a crossover with the Chaos group of characters with Erik Burnham handling the writing duties. I’ve read a smattering of the Chaos characters over the years but they flat out don’t appeal to me so I’m going into this kind of wary, admittedly. Jonathan Lau’s a name I’ve not seen in a while but I enjoyed a lot of their work on the pulps and other books at this publisher over the years so getting some good sword and sorcery stuff plus all the strangeness of the Chaos group is ideal for his style. There’s a good sense of power and intent with the characters and the flow of it all is solid, though scenes with Ernie just feel like they’re a muddled mess because of his design.
Sonja serves as the bookends to this opening chapter here as we see her in the midst of one of many fights she’s had with Kulan Gath over the years. It’s one she intends to be the final one, however, as after she severs his head and he makes his statements about revival at some point, she takes his amulet of power and heads out to the deep seas to send it into the depths. It’s a smart move and in general with a little weight attached to it, it should be gone forever. And it technical was until it surfaced in the modern world and has now landed in a museum. It’s beginning to call out for a mortal to fall sway to it and that has Mistress Hel making her rounds to people like Purgatori, Jade, Evil Ernie and more to push them toward acquiring it so that it’s in the right kind of evil hands.
Most aren’t all that interesting in it but Hel does raise them toward it nicely enough with a few pointed barbs about how it contains true power that they don’t have. Having all of them arrive at the same time to try and acquire it just as some security guards are duking it out over it is comical, of course. This lets us see a bit of their style and power as they approach acquiring the piece and it sets the stage for the larger game that will be afoot as they realize just how powerful it is, such as what we see from Ernie. Sadly, for Sonja, she’s not getting any real respite from it because the back end shows her coming back to land only to be drawn into what’s going on in this far-flung future. Poor Sonja.
In Summary:
While I’m thrilling to several other Red Sonja books at the moment, the Age of Chaos one is going to have to work hard to join those ranks. Sonja is a draw herself and I like what little we get of her here. But the Chaos crew just have a real lack of appeal for me so it’s going to take some strong writing and story points for me to feel really engaged with it. The artwork is solid throughout as Lau is a talented artist working with some characters that have eye-catching visual designs. And Sonja’s always so expressive to work with that it can be fun just from the art standpoint. I’m curious to see what they’ll do with all of this but I’m mostly just wary at the moment.
Grade: B
Age Rating: 15+
Released By: Dynamite Entertainment
Release Date: January 22nd, 2020
MSRP: $3.99
