The Creators – Dan Panosian – Writer, Alessio Petillo – Artist, Francesco Segala – Colours, Dave Sharpe – Letters

The Players – Red Sonja, Lucian, Celia

The Story – Red Sonja encounters a prince and his woman who tell her of their plans to retake his father’s kingdom yet she knows there must be more to the story.

The Take – Taking the reins of the latest Red Sonja title is Dan Panosian who is having somewhat of a renaissance of late with the various books that sport his name and artist Alessio Petillo, a pair that aim to make their mark on the She-Devil With a Sword. The question begs then, have they? Being only the first issue, it has to hook in the reader and with the series supposedly taking a back-to-basics approach, it does just that. Panosian seems to understand what Red Sonja is about and what the world she walks in consists of and his writing proves that. Here, Sonja is a lone and sometimes lonely warrior, one who questions herself in some respects and one who does not in others. Meeting two others on the road who are being chased by cannibal bandits, she sees a little of herself in the girl named Celia. As it is and not wanting to encounter the larger band of bandits that ride behind the scouts she had just dispatched to the underworld, she joins the man named Lucian and Celia after hearing their story, determined to find his castle before the worst should happen. There is more that he is not sharing, though what it is she does not know and she has heard the rumours about the castle, about the ghosts or whatever it might be that haunts it. Still, she has nothing better to do and ghosts may be easier to deal with than cannibals. Petillo does a good job on the pencils though it takes a minute to get used to them as they are not what one might expect given the higher profile and the marketing given to this book. They are a little hard to describe accurately, though sparse might be a good word for them. Panosian-lite even, but as things move on, one can see that the man has a good grasp of what makes a story work and they convey the needed emotion to enjoy the book for all that it is. It is left on a bit of a cliffhanger of course, there is no way that the tale would be finished in one issue and taken as a whole, it does what it needs to – entertain the reader and pull them in enough to make them come back for an eventual second helping.

Worth It? – Yes.