A new era begins with issue #35, as we catch up with ongoing writer Brian Reed to get the scoop on the latest concerning the She-Devil with a Sword
By By Andy Serwin
Posted July 15, 2008
If there's one thing we've learned about Red Sonja recently, it's that death certainly becomes her.
Having killed off the She-Devil six months back, Dynamite Entertainment tasked new series writer Brian Reed and artist Walter Geovani with shepherding Sonja's title in the wake of her underworld journey through hell, which culminated with her being reborn 20 years in the future as the princess in a civilized kingdom. We caught up with Reed to discuss the title's new direction, which took off with last week's issue #35, and what he's got planned for the crimson-maned crusadess from here on out.
WIZARDUNIVERSE.COM: Brian, early on in the issue, you see this mysterious, white-haired barbarian with a crazy claw for a hand. At this point, should we know who this character is, and can you give us a little bit of information about him? REED:
He is someone from the past who has been rather important and is showing up again. We’re going to spell out who he is in an issue or so. But for right now, it’s kind of like, “What am I looking at?” If that's your response to it, then that’s fine for now. [Laughs]
Later on, this same barbarian is having an ongoing conversation with this shadowy figure after slaying the witch. I imagine there’s more to this mystery that will be unveiled as we go along?
Oh yeah, and if you notice, she’s dressed like someone we’ve seen before. She’s dressed like The Goddess.
So there’s a lot of stuff happening in this 20-year jump that will be uncovered as we go along?
Yes, there certainly seems to have been something. [Laughs]
What was the the thinking behind this radical change in the status quo of Red Sonja?
All of this new status quo is that no one has shaken up her world in the 30 years she’s been around. Roy Thomas did a great job of integrating her into Marvel Comics and giving her that kind of rule set to live by. No love for you, serve your goddess. What Mike Oeming and I did was we really broke The Goddess. This woman is not really a goddess, first and foremost, she’s a magician who create Red Sonja to destroy her old boyfriend Kulan Gath. Sonja has spent her entire life being lied to and then everything terrible that has ever happened in her life, happened because Goddess wanted revenge on this guy. This has just driven her insane. So, when Sonja finally does kill Gath, she went to hell and we find out, well wait a minute, this has happened before. That was kind of my idea of letting the Marvel era be one set of stories and letting the era that Mike Oeming had been writing be a set of stories, and now we’re starting on another set. We’re implying that every time it’s been Sonja, but it hasn’t necessarily been the same Sonja. This time around, the cycle has started and Goddess isn’t there to destroy her life.
So she can actually have a regular, normal existence with romantic entanglements now? In this issue, she is already mulling about how she wishes she could have a child; it seems vastly different from some of the past portrayals we’ve seen from her.
We all know that nobody’s life is ever nice for very long. [Laughs]
Later on in the issue, our mysterious barbarian is fighting some attackers, and one of them is wearing a trinket, and it kind of looks a little bit like Kulan Gath.
It certainly does! Sonja is not the only one who keeps coming back.
So is Sonja’s new love interest something you are looking to develop a little more, or will he be gone by next issue?
Daniel has been looking for something called the Blood Dynasty. All we know about that in this issue is it’s some kind of treasure. That’s going to be a big sub plot over the next two years—what is the Blood Dynasty, why is it important and how does it tie into Sonja herself? It’s going to be something that’s ongoing as we tell different stories over the next few years. Like I said, nobody's life is nice for very long, and a ship of pirates just showed up. [Laughs] I will leave it to your imagination as to what is going to happen next issue.
So shenanigans are definitely going to ensue before too long. Do you see yourself being around for this series for the foreseeable future? You've mentioned here you've got stories planned for two years down the road.
When [Dynamite President] Nick Barrucci asked me if I wanted to take over the book, my reply to him was, “Let me think about it for a day or two and make sure I’ve got a story to tell.” The last thing I wanted to do was sign up and spend two years writing “Pretty girl hits thing with sword.” That’s really fun for an issue. Then you’re like “Wow, I’ve got to write 12 more issues of this.” I just wanted to make sure a I had a story to tell. I sat down to write some notes and my plan was to just write a couple paragraphs and just do a real loose pitch of what my idea was and I ended up writing like 10 pages! [Laughs] I broke it down until I knew what I was doing in like issue #48. So here was the story I was going to do over the next two years if I was taking over this book. I didn’t say it to them, but I had decided that if they said no to any of it, I just wasn’t going to take the book because I just didn’t have any more ideas for her. I knew what I was pitching was pretty out there because it was essentially just, “Let’s turn over the table and knock all the game pieces on the floor and let’s start over.” They came back and said okay. When your pitch starts with “And then we kill her,” you know you’re in for a roller coaster of an approval process. But no, they came back and Dynamite was like “No you’ve got a story to tell, it’s fun, let’s do it.”
Can you touch upon some of the things you plan to do with her in the long run?
Honestly, this first issue is setting up everything. There are hints of stories in there that don’t come up for a year, but the groundwork has been laid. That’s what my first five issues are really all about; setting up the world and the new status quo, setting up the new characters she’s dealing with…I’m going to get away from the big time sorcery we’ve been seeing with the Kulan Gath story that went on for like the last year. It will kind of ground her a little bit—not to say the magic is gone, but Gath himself is going to be taking a back seat for a while. A lot of it is just kind of updating the character a little bit and giving her a little more control over her life. I’m trying to think of what to say and not ruin anything. [Laughs]
In a general sense, what is your insight to Sonja's character and what distinguishes her from the typical comic bad girl?
If you take away all the stuff around her, like the rape and Goddess and all of that, her personality is still that she’s a very strong person. I’m not talking about physical strength; deep down inside who she is, she’s this diamond hard human being who is willing to do whatever it takes to get the job done. That’s what kind of attracted me to her as a writer. She would walk through hell if it meant beating the bad guy. That’s really intriguing to me and I think a lot of the fun with her over the years has been giving her life and then taking it all away and then watching her just become this machine that marches straight ahead and destroys everything in her path that needs to destroying. Giving her a new life and taking it away piece by piece has been a way for me to get into that and really play with it.
Can you talk a bit about what artist Walter Geovani’s role is, and what he is bringing to the table?
It’s funny because I wrote it not knowing who the artist was in the first issue, which has been my trend lately—everything I’m doing has been that. [Laughs] I was a few issues ahead of him before I actually started seeing the artwork he was doing, so now I’m able to kind of cater to him a little bit more. His shot there in the middle, of the old barbarian guy and the way that he drew Sonja’s home and everything, has given me much more of a feeling of what this world is, which sounds silly considering I’m the guy in charge of it. But, he has let me know where I live now. I’m able to go, “Okay, that’s how you’re approaching this, then I know how to approach this next thing up here.” So as we move through the first arc, he’s still dealing with scripts I wrote before I knew who was doing the drawing. But as we get into the second arc, I’m able to really cater more to his skills so it’s going to be fun.
So how long until Sonja really starts going ape sh-- with the swords again?
That is a lot of fun of this rebirth with her—seeing her relearn that, seeing her get back the physical strength, seeing her get the skills and a little bit of her learning maybe what’s been going on with her all these years.
So she will be cognizant of these past lives to a certain extent?
As we move forward, we kind of start unveiling it to her and letting her put the pieces together. We actually don’t see her back in the metal bikini for another four issues, but get to really do the hero's journey of taking her out of the palace and teaching her to be a warrior. In the past we’ve always done like two or three panels. You know, “She was raped as a child and she grew up and she was a warrior and now she kills everybody!” [Laughs] In the process, we get to build her world too.
What can we immediately tease about next issue, #36?
[Issue] #36 is the end of Sonja’s life as she knows it, and is the first signs of what’s going on. It is the first hints of what is to come.
