Why? Why Brian Reed? Why are you complicating something as straightforward and simple as a Red Sonja comic with a pointless psychodrama where Sonja starts hallucinating between two divergent realities, one of which has her dressed like a geisha?
Ah. Well, as long as there's a good reason.
Seriously, though... this book confused me a lot more than the new Doctor Who one-shot - the one centering around The Doctor attempting to converse with a being who experiences time backwards.
The short version of the story so far (for those of you who missed my review of the last two issues) is that thanks to her patron goddess' death, Sonja has been reborn much more powerful but much more unfocused - i.e. mad as a hatter. This is supposedly why Sonja is doing such horrible and horribly out of character things such as raising demons and destroying Stygia. Well, actually that last one is pretty in-character for any barbarian hero during this time... but I digress.
This issue centers on two of Sonja's former companions - the warrior bard Osin and the ghost of the wizard/monk Suumaro- catching up with her and trying to talk sense into her, even as Sonja is hallucinating that she's fighting two clans of ninjas while wearing oriental garb.
Basically - after a lot of confusing pages like this, jumping between the two realities, Sonja winds up commanding two armies of ninjas and heading north to cut off Lucan - the bad guy who destroyed her family. Oh, and the "Blood Dynasty" magic gem McGuffin that everybody has been chasing over since Brian Reed took over this book? It turns out that the real Blood Dynasty IS Sonja.
*sighs* Look, I'm not saying that you shouldn't try and do a complex story with a character like Red Sonja... but this just isn't working on a lot of levels. What Mike Carey and Michael Avon Oeming did with this book for half its' run proved that you can tell intelligent, complex stories with these characters... but this is just layers upon lawyers for the sake of seeming deep without actually being deep.
We can only hope that things will get better after the end of this storyline in Issue 50. Maybe we can just have a nice simple story where Sonja fights a monster and loots some treasure from a temple? Please?
The Verdict: Is it issue 50 yet? Can we please get to the end of this never-ending storyline?!
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