Red Sonja Attacks Mars #2 // Review
The She-Devil with a Sword attacking monsters. She’s not using the sword, though. She’s on a flying platform shooting a blaster at winged demons on Mars. So clearly she’s out of her element, but she’s doing a pretty good job of defending herself in Red Sonja Attacks Mars #2. Writer Jay Stephens and artist Fran Strukan continue a fun mash-up between pulpy action fantasy and pulpy sci-fi horror. There’s not a whole lot going on beneath the surface of the series, but it’s a fun adventure to the angry, red planet with one of the more prominent warrior heroes in modern comics.
Sonja may be perfectly capable of firing the hand cannon that she’d found last issue, but she would vastly prefer to get within range of being able to eviscerate her enemies with a big blade. She WILL get her chance for that, but it’s going to be a bit of a risky endeavor given that things are as dangerous as they are on Mars. Surviving hostile creatures is easy enough for the warrior. Surviving the shifting sands of the Martian Desert? That’s another matter altogether. To make matters worse, she’s carrying an old wizard on her back.
Things get pretty goofy pretty quickly. Stephens weaves a various healthy fantasy tropes together into a series of events that probably would gain more than a little bit of power if they were waited a little bit more in the direction of drama. As it is, there is a whole lot of movement in a direction that seems to be all that coherent with respect to a feeling of peril or anything like that. It all just feels kind of silly. The villains it seems silly. As does the hero in this particular circumstance. She's still very formidable and very powerful and that script is not without it moments. However, it just lacks the central gravitas needed to bring it to the page it would be compelling.
Strukan’s art follows the mood and motion of Stephens’ script quite well. It feels very strange trying to follow it. It feels very strange trying to embrace it. Because it's not necessarily anything that would be all that appealing.The pulpy Mars of the series doesn’t really feel. very present on the page in a way that feels all that distinctly non-Earth-like. And so the distinct flavor of Mars is absent and it all just kind of feels like a weird fantasy story featuring aliens and pulpy sci-fi tech.
This is still only the second issue and there's plenty of room for us to settle down into something a lot more serious. It doesn't need to be totally serious in order to be successful. It just needs to have a little bit more to the menace that is required to really brin, sharp focus for the remainder of the series. Otherwise it's just going to feel like a series of jokes that we weren't quite staged in a clever way.
