Tag: Frank Cho

Comic Book Review – Savage Red Sonja: Queen of the Frozen Wastes (Dynamite, 2007)

DSC_0125Year: 2006
Format: Trade Paperback (collects issues #1-4 of Savage Red Sonja: Queen of the Frozen Wastes)
Artist(s): Homs (interiors), Frank Cho (Covers), Will Murai (Colours)
Writer(s): Frank Cho, Doug Murray
ISBN: 9781933305387

Savage Red Sonja: Queen of the Frozen Wastes delivers an action-packed story and incredible art as Red Sonja, the She-Devil with a Sword battles the beautiful and deadly Ice Queen and her army of Yeti warriors! Under the Frozen Wastes, Sonja will work to lead and army, and restore the broken spirit of the Ice Queen’s human slaves.

Queen of the Frozen Wastes is my first foray into the world of Red Sonja. I have no doubt that there are much better stories starring the She-Devil with a Sword for me to discover but there were a few reasons that I opted for this particular TPB. Chiefly, it was the Frank Cho covers that drew me in. Cho is one my all-time favourite artists when it comes to depictions of powerful yet immensely sexy and voluptuous women, and his style is a perfect fit for an amazonian warrior woman like Sonja who is incredible to behold (with her ever-impractical chainmail bikini) and totally badass.

Secondly, it’s because I’m a cheapskate! I found this book used on ebay for £8 delivered. You can pay two, three or even four times that for a variant cover of a single, newer Red Sonja issue so being able to pick up a TPB, collecting this four-issue series and all of the variant covers, for less than a tenner seemed like a deal to me.

Unfortunately, Cho is only the cover artist for this series but bitching about that too much would be doing a massive disservice to the interior artist, Homs. I’ve not come across Jose Homs’ work before but I really enjoyed it here in Savage Red Sonja. He has a great understanding of anatomy and I didn’t see a single awkward or unrealistic pose. I especially liked some of his slightly more dynamic panels where there are overhead view of standing characters with perfect foreshortening.

The battle scenes are full of energy and movement and there is no shortage of bloody violence and death as Homs ensures that Sonja lives up to the ‘Savage’ part of this series’ name.

The plot sees Sonja out in the titular Frozen Wastes, leading a band of warriors against raiders. These are no ordinary raiders however, and Sonja winds up being captured and taken to a subterranean world of cannibalistic Yeti-men where imprisoned warriors are used as slaves and even food. Ruling over this twisted realm is a creepy queen with the ability to heal wounds in an instant; an ability shared by her warriors who have some sort of link to the Queen. Essentially, their injuries are mirrored on her own body and and both the Queen and her injured men can instantly recover from stab or slash wounds.

This seemingly immortal queen, as the only female, has been the sole source of reproduction for her people over the ages but she desires more children – stronger children – to ensure the survival of her tribe. What she seeks is some sort of freaky lesbian sexy time with Sonja to achieve this. I don’t quite know how the biology of all this is supposed to go down but Sonja is having none of it, despite being overpowered and even put on a leash as the Queen’s (sex) pet.

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Sonja manages to escape, reinvigorate the enslaved men, and start killing shit as she refuses to bend the knee and accept her imprisonment in this sinister underground world. Heads roll and the blood flows as the She-Devil with a Sword hacks her way through yeti men, hulking berserkers and massive beasts.

If I have one critcism of Queen of the Frozen Wastes, it’s that the ending is quite abrupt and a slightly unsatisfying conclusion to the enjoyable action that comes before it. It could have done with a couple more pages perhaps. Obviously, as a four issue series, it’s also quite short with a good chunk of this TPB taken up with all of the alternate covers and some sketchbook pages from Cho and Homs at the back.

That said, for what it is, Savage Red Sonja: Queen of the Frozen Wastes is an enjoyable, untaxing read that you can really kick back with. The plot is average but the visuals, the defiant character of Sonja and those glorious Cho covers make this a miniseries worth picking up.

I do have to give a shout-out to the first few pages though, where Sonja is in the wastes and saying that she hates the cold, yet is out in a blizzard in her bikini with a token fur hood/cloak as her only defence from the elements!

Comic Book Review: Shanna The She-Devil TPB (Marvel, 2006)

shanna-1Year: 2006
Format: Trade Paperback, collecting Shanna The She-Devil #1-7 (2005)
Writer(s): Frank Cho
Artist(s): Frank Cho
ISBN: 0-7851-1038-0

When a covert military team crash-lands on a remote tropical island, the soldiers make a shocking discovery: an abandoned Nazi lab holding the results of a long-term human experiment. The soldiers release the project’s sole survivor: a super-strong warrior woman held since birth in an incubation tube. Known only as Shanna, this voluptuous blonde possesses the strength of twelve men and a tenacious ferocity to match. On an island swarming with bloodthirsty raptors and an unstoppable T-Rex, the soldiers will need to win her trust – and quickly – if they hope to survive their unexpected tour of duty in this savage land!

I could go ahead and waffle on about my interest on Marvel’s B-Tier and below characters being the driving force behind my purchase of this particular graphic novel. Or I could tell you that my motivation behind adding Shanna The She-Devil to my bookshelf was formed from a desire to read something from Marvel that was self-contained and not up it’s own arse, lost in a network of crossovers and events. Both of these reasons would actually be true but I’m just going to be honest here: I bought this because it features a voluptuous vixen of a female lead and dinosaurs – two of the best subjects that can grace a comic book.

Before reading this, I had no idea who Shanna was. I recall seeing her briefly share a panel or two with Kazar in an early issue of New Avengers (when the team visited the Savage Land) but that’s it. All I saw was a sexy Jungle/Cave girl drawn by the awe-inspiring Frank Cho and I was sold. This particular 2005 mini-series is possibly a prequel to Shanna’s story but that’s just an educated guess based on how a stranded military unit find her, suspended in a tank of fluid – a leftover Nazi experiment who initially acts upon instinct alone without the knowledge of society or morals.

shanna-2
Perving on Shanna: not advisable. Doesn’t he see the strategically-placed spray and foam anyway?

The team take Shanna back to their makeshift stronghold where she gradually develops, learning to speak and understand her surroundings at an incredible rate. Unfortunately, they also unwittingly take a deadly, weaponised virus back with them in amongst some medical supplies and it gets released, infecting several members of the team and giving them less than ten days to live. There is an antidote but it means returning to the lab: a six-day round trip over an island teeming with carnivorous dinosaurs. A suicide mission in other words.

Fortunately, they have Shanna.

Neither the wild nor the dinos scare Shanna. Super-strong and agile, Shanna is a superhuman warrior – the perfect weapon born of twisted Nazi experimentation to create such a being.

The plot is pretty throwaway and so is the attempt at adding some depth through “Doc”‘s journal entries where he narrates the situation and describes Shanna’s progress as she slowly morphs from an instinctive killing machine – driven by pure survival – into a more human-like person, capable of empathy and reasoning. The main draw here is obviously the non-stop action that sees Shanna fighting hordes of raptors and even a T-Rex.

Frank Cho wrote AND illustrated this series and his breathtaking artwork is THE reason to have this Graphic Novel in your collection. When it comes to drawing bodacious babes with dramatic curves, Cho is a god in my opinion. Aside from having an enviable talent for bringing stunning women to life in the pages of a comic book, he is also a master of anatomy and realistic physics which makes for some truly dynamic action scenes and believable movement. I don’t want to keep banging on about Shanna’s figure but just look at how he makes her breasts swing around whenever she’s in motion – a lot of artists don’t bother putting this much energy into a moving character.

shanna-3
Physics at work. And lots of dead dinosaurs.

Away from the ladies, Cho also knows how to put together a good action sequence using a spread of small panels and sound effects. In this book especially, he is able to turn a fairly straightforward plot into a seven-issue action spectacle that never feels drawn-out for the sake of it.

Shanna The She-Devil isn’t ground-breaking nor would it ever be a critical darling but fuck the critics because this is raw, unrestrained fun – a welcome dosage of action starring a badass, ultra-sexy jungle girl kicking the shit out of dinosaurs and fighting with primal savagery. There’s gallons of blood too and some pretty graphic deaths whenever a soldier is offed by a dinosaur or when Shanna is tearing through a pack of a raptors with two machetes. In short, it’s a bit of a turn-your-brain-off-and-enjoy book and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, especially when Frank Cho is on illustrative duties.

Aside from the wafer thin plot and so-so attempt to try and add some depth to Shanna’s character, the only other gripe I have with Shanna The She-Devil is that it was just a mini-series. By the time I reached the end, I found myself wanting more.