Red Sonja--Empire of the Damned #4 // Review
The old man seems more or less harmless. His eyes lack any color at all. His skin is pale and withered. He and everyone he was traveling with was just attacked and by the looks of him, he doesn’t seem to have made it out in good health. Why doesn’t the she-devil with a sword trust him? It’s a dangerous place where she comes from. She’s about to find out just how dangerous in Red Sonja--Empire of the Damned #4. Writer Steve Niles manages a very tightly-woven chapter with talented artist Alessandro Amoruso and colorist Salvatore Aiala.
The old man claims that there were marauders. Six of them on horseback. They overwhelmed everyone and took Luna prisoner. Sonja and her companion shouldn’t have any difficulty at all tracking him down. What they can expect to happen from there is going to have to be left to chance. Sonja doesn’t trust the old man, but she doesn’t have much of a choice if she’s going to be able to save Luna from the marauders. And really...it’s’ just six guys on horseback. What could possibly go wrong? Sonja has had little difficulty handling that much on her own and now she has the help of a warrior.
Niles does a solidly respectable job of maintaining an interesting story that plays with the reader’s expectations without bogging the story down in too much narrative. The dialogue is quick and crisp. There isn’t the kind of heavy exposition or narration that so often plagues sword and sorcery fantasy. It’s just a clean and brutal chapter in an increasingly satisfying serial that never tries to reach for too much. Niles knows what he’s capable of in 20 pages and he knows how to fill them without cluttering up the narrative.
Amoruso follows the spirit of Niles' script more or less brilliantly. Everything seems to hit the page running. Not all of the action is perfectly=framed on the panel and some of it feels kind of stiff and awkward in places, but Amoruso does some brilliant work staging some of the most impressive action in the whole issue, so he’s able to execute the brutality in the issue when the script calls for it. There’s a great deal of forward momentum that moves-in from the opening pages and never really lets-up until the cliffhanger on the final page. Aiala’s color provides depth, radiance and an often breathtaking sense of atmosphere in another fully satisfying tumble through the pages with Sonja.
Everything feels remarkably lean and well-balanced in a series that continues to prove to be one of the better Sonja series in recent memory. Niles and company do an impressive job of juggling everything and keeping it just unpredictable enough to feel wild without ricocheting off into strange and unfamiliar territory for a sword and sorcery action series. Above it all, Sonja seems powerful and beautiful...just exactly as she should. She feels formidable, imposing and thoroughly captivating.
