Comic book fans you've seen me review alot of stuff from both Marvel and DC but I thought that I would review something a little bit different oh it's still a comic book just not from either of those two companies. The character of Red Sonja was technically a Marvel creation but she was based on both Red Sonya of Rogatino and Dark Agnes de Chastillon so if you see author Robert E. Howard get credited there technically not wrong but anyways here is my review of Red Sonja: World's Apart Volume 1.
The story is Sonja is in the middle of a fight with villain Kulan Gath who as far as I can tell is someone who can use magic but anyways both he Sonja and a little boy suddenly find themselves in modern day New York and Sonja has to find a way to not only defeat Gath but find her way home. As you might have worked out by the name of this post this story is so huge that when the omnibus came out it got split into three volumes and so the story isn't fully resolved yet. I can say tho that taking these characters and putting them in a more modern setting to me is never a good idea all you have to do is look at the live action Smurfs movie to see how bad of an idea that is but it oddly works in this volume.
Volume 1 collects the first seven issues in this recent storyline and honestly I think that kicking this story of with an issue 0 to me makes sense. It makes sense because you can hook in new readers who might not want to go back and read several other series just understand this one page so by effectively rebooting this world you can get new readers in there and for me issue 0 does a good job of that because it gives you pretty much all of things that you'd expect from a Red Sonja book and it does kind of add a mystery for new readers because it doesn't explain her backstory.
You comic book fans won't no this but i'm kind of a Red Sonja fan I won't like go and buy every issue when it comes out. I will however check out several issues if i'm bored and I do know that one of the best Red Sonja writers is one Gail Simone. So for me reading these issues is odd because of the fact that i'm hearing a new writers take on the character and thus there voice is the one that comes across when I read it.
The new writer in question is one Amy Chu who really hasn't written anything of note but i'm sure she will in the future. At least she will if the writing in this volume is anything to go by because it's honestly really good Sonja is still the strong willed character that we remember but now there's kind of an added innocence to her which while it can be annoying at times and seem out of place for this kind of story it does work.
The artwork for this volume was done by Carlos Gomez who's work can also be seen in the recently released Star Wars: Age of Republic Special. Now here I would usually say that the artwork is bad but it's honestly not if anything it's alot better then the artwork seen in alot of comic books today and to me that's a really refreshing thing to say because I do hate saying that someone's artwork is bad so to see a book where the art is actually good is for me a great thing to say.
One of the things that I actually really hate about this book is that we have a lot of fish out of water scenes with Sonja. Which do make sense in terms of the story but they also don't need to do that many scenes one or two of those scenes would have worked but here they do it quite alot of times and ti got to the point where I would just skip those panels because I knew what the punchline would be because i'd seen it a few pages earlier.
It's scenes like those why taking characters that are from medevil times and placing in modern day is always a bad idea. Those kind of stories never work at least in my opinion because all they do is come across like your trying to be cool by referencing things that a modern day reader would understand instead of doing what's best for the actual character. Like I said before tho this idea does work for this character but they still use the fish out of water stuff way to much and it would have been better served if they didn't do it.
This volume does do something interesting and that's tell us that Sonja is never speaking English or at least what we'd say is English. To me that's a really interesting idea even tho it's something so small and gives Max one of the new characters this world a way into the world of Red Sonja because for a huge portion of this volume he's the only one that can understand her and it also gives the new character Holly who works at a museum a way into the world for the exact same reason.
We also get another new character called Spike and that pretty much rounds out all of the new characters for this volume there is a character called Jay but plot wise she adds nothing. It's also thanks to Spike that we get a less revealing outfit for Sonja which you can see in the above picture the only thing is she literally only wears this outfit for that one panel so it kind of makes that reveal pointless since she goes back to her regular outfit in the very next page and that's a shame because this new outfit actually looks good on her.
I have to admit that the action in this book is honestly really good it's alot better then what I thought it would have been. Yes the action does boil down to who can hit who the hardest but with the magic aspect that really does make things seem more fresh because if it was just Sonja hitting someone that could get boring pretty fast but because they mix it up by adding in the magic element it stops the action from feeling boring at least in my opinion.
Overall this wasn't a bad volume the story does show alot of promise and considering that I just watched and reviewed the freaking dreadful Barb Wire movie I really needed to watch or read something good. That said tho there are alot of issues that keep this volume from being perfect so it gets a 7 out of 10 from me.
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