Sitha, the character introduced in the current volume of Red Sonja and adopted by the She-Devil with a Sword, gets her own title. Set a decade after the events in Red Sonja, with no Sonja in sight, Red Sitha a grown into a bounty hunter in her own right with more than a few similarities to Sonja including a knack for taking hard jobs, living and playing too hard, and getting herself into trouble.
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Kicking off a new arc, Red Sonja #7 opens with an introduction to Baroness Drang who has locked away Red Sonja in her dungeon for a week proving on drugged food and water which the She-Devil with a Sword has refused to consume. Meanwhile, Sitha is working with Kebra others to loot Drang’s treasure chamber bidding her time waiting to break out Sonja.
Despite being the beginning of a new story, it feels like we’re plunged into the second or third issue of an arc with Red Sonja #7, and I’ll admit feeling a bit lost as both Sonja and Sitha seem to have at least a week worth of tale untold with us jumping into the middle just in time for a weakened Sonja to faceoff with the powerful, but not all that interesting or well-developed, Drang and Sitha to come to the rescue.
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Three more tales of Red Sonja in black and white, and more than a little red thrown in, are collected in Red Sonja: Black, White, Red #8. In “Last Words,” my favorite of the three, Red Sonja confronts Master Valik the Merchant known for finding lucrative, but dangerous, jobs for thieves. These jobs are so dangerous, Sonja wonders just why any thief (including a few she knew) would ever take them.
Red Sonja and fifteen sailors survive the trip to Sleeper Island only to face the wrath of a demon even deadlier than the storm in “Fifteen Men on the Sleeper Chest.” And “Cursed” gives us Red Sonja and a young girl in the midst of a winter storm talking over the legend of a witch, killed by Sonja years ago, whose memory still haunts those in the woods demanding a sacrifice to be made to her.
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Red Sonja: Black, White, Red #8 Read More »
Red Sonja: Black, White, Red follows up one of the strongest issues of the black-and-white anthology with one of its weakest. The most interesting story of the three, “Sonja’s Gambit” involves a drugged Sonja tricked into a game by Queen Thamyris where Sonja finds herself as a figure on a chessboard with other living players forced into a game of life and death. Although it’s not clear if Sonja did obey the rules of the game, exactly, she still manages to win with the help of another pawn.
In a story that has ties to Sonja’s childhood, Sonja fights off werewolves in the forest to return the body of a nun she knew in her youth to be burned in a temple in “Unbowed.” And wounded Sonja makes a stand against a group of barbarians on a snowy mountainside in “Blood on Snow.”
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Red Sonja: Black, White, Red #7 Read More »
While these anthologies can be a bit hit-and-miss, I actually enjoyed all three of the black and white (and of course red) Red Sonja tales presented here. Red Sonja becomes increasingly agitated in my favorite of the three stories, “Morgona the Crimson,” when she learns someone is profiting off her likeness and claiming payment for her heroic deeds.
In “The Daring Rescue of Crown Prince Maximilian (Beloved of All The Peoples),” Red Sonja is hired by emissaries from the Kingdom of Levkoy to rescue their captured prince (who turns out to not be exactly what our hero was expecting). And following a fortune told, Red Sonja journeys to battle a giant who (along with her arrogance) was said be her demise in the appropriately titled “The Giant.”
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