Red Sonja 1982

Red Sonja 1982

Dynamite Entertainment 2021

Written by Amy Chu

Illustrated by Eric Blake

Coloured by Adriano Augusto

Lettered by Taylor Esposito

A mysterious killer android from the future hunts the legendary mercenary from the past. A.I. meets magic in a story that takes us -- where else? -- Hollywood, Beverly Hills, and the City of Angels! Amy Chu returns to pen this gnarly one and done action-filled issue that will totally take you back to the Summer of 1982...It’s an epic struggle between good and evil, mohawks and perms, New Wave and Heavy Metal!

Love, love, love this book! Amy wrote a nearly perfect story for Red Sonja and I’m completely and utterly blown away by what we see. I think that the way she ends up in 1982 is brilliantly handled and it really makes the most sense of what we’ve seen with her time hopping exploits. Well I will say Gail’s version was bloody killer as well and a lot for others to live up to and I gotta say Amy lives up to that challenge. The only criticism I have is that Pinky wasn’t shown enough, by this I mean fighting alongside her, she’s one of those characters whose able to steal the spotlight from everyone and that includes Red Sonja.

Love the way that this is being told. The story & plot development that we see through how the sequence of events unfold as well as how the reader learns information is presented with aplomb. The character development is phenomenal and this is thanks to the expert way we see the dialogue, the character interaction and how they act and react to the situations and circumstances that they encounter, which of course is what fleshes them out as believable people. The pacing is superb and as it takes us through the pages revealing the story, introducing the characters and setting the stage keeps the reader glued to the pages.

How we see this being structured and how the layers in the story begin to emerge, grow and evolve is fantastically rendered. The side bits like the auction or just Pinky in particular it all has these great side moments that tie into the main arc and create something from the parts to make the whole that much greater. How we see everything working together to create the story’s ebb & flow as well as how it moves the story forward is perfectly achieved.

The interiors here are absolutely bloody gorgeous! My one complaint here is that we don’t get a proper montage of Sonja trying on clothes and seeing her in the outfit on the cover. The linework is so frakkin amazing and how we see the varying weights and techniques being utilised to create the level and quality of detail work that we see is utterly mindbogglingly wonderful. That we see backgrounds as much as we do thrills me with how they enhance the moments as well as work within the composition of the panels to bring us depth perception, sense of scale and the overall sense of size and scope to the story. The utilisation of the page layouts and how we see the angles and perspective in the panels show such a masterful eye for storytelling. The colour work we see is equally as bloody brilliant to see! How we see the various hues and tones within the colours being utilised to create the shading, highlights and shadow work shows a mastery of colour. I mean Pinky’s hair with how the light hits it and how it changes those hues is beyond brilliant. Everything we see from the light sources and angles and how the colour adds depth and complexity to what we see is so phenomenally rendered.

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Thank G-D for dynamite because this is the kind of story that doesn’t come along as often as we’d like it to. This is so intelligently written and brilliantly illustrated and it’s just the perfect tour-de-farce of a story.