Sonja Reborn #3 // Review
Maggie’s watching the primitive death around her. And she’s thinking about it like a modern person. She’s thinking about the fact that here’s a lot of death and violence in the modern world. So much of it isn’t real. Before finishing primary school, each child will have seen thousands of acts of violence and thousands of deaths. But none of it’s realy. You feel desensitized to it...until it surrounds you. Maggie is learning what death really is in Sonja Reborn #3 Writer Christopher Priest makes a careful peripheral dissection of high fantasy in another sharply clever issue that is brought to page and panel by artist Alessandro Miracolo and inker Rafael E. Semeraro. Color comes to the page courtesy of Giovanni Caputo.
Sonja’s servant continues to follow her as she makes her way away from the battle. He insist she’s Sonja. Sonja insist she’s some woman from a modern world named Maggie. He mentions something about the battle, but she knows it wasn’ a battle. It was the slaughter of indigenous people. She’s seen death before. Real death. She’s caused it. And she’s made questionable decision back in her past life in the future. But she’s never seen death on that scale before.
Priest does a clever job of taking the perspective of a contemporary 21st century woman and placing her in a sword-and-sorcery fantasy world. The decision to take a good, hard look at the nature of murder in fantasy is a clever one that marks a sharp turn away from anything that would have been more of a light adventure. With the latest issue in the series, Priest is clearly deciding to make a careful dissection of some of the basic elements of sword and sorcery fantasy as seen from a contemporary perspective. It’s provocative stuff.
Miracolo frames, the action with sharp eye towards clever, asymmetry and very refreshing perspective. A visual element of the action comes to the page in a way that fuels both viscerally earthbound and strikingly fantastic at the same time. The combination of the team works quite well to be advantage of a very appealing story. Both Maggie and Sonia come across as very relatable heroes. This is quite an accomplishment, given the fact that they're both solidly outside of the ordinary. The fact that the heart managed to make both the fantasy heroin and her 21st century counterpart seen relatable is quite an accomplishment on the part of the artist.
It's going to be interesting to see where Priest decides to take the drama next. Clearly there's going to be a fusion going on. And there's certainly a movement towards that. However, trying to do so, in light of the latest turn in tone is going to be kind of an interesting challenge for everyone involved. Given how accomplished the author an artist have been so far it's not hard to imagine that they'll do a really good job of reaching a kind of conclusion here. Time will tell.
