Warrior Women - who's your favourite?

First of all I'd like to say thanks to Pat of Silver Age Comics and Paul D Brazil of You Would Say That, Wouldn't You? for giving this site a plug on their own blogs - although Pat has libelled Booksteve terribly by making out he's to blame for this site. Paul currently has a short story crime anthology out, that he's edited, in aid of the Children 1st charity.

But that's the present. And, because I hang around with intellectuals, I know that any history professor'll tell you the past is a far more exciting place to be.

That professor'll no doubt reveal that the past was a world of muscle-men in loin cloths, monsters, demons and sorcerers. It was a land of helpless wenches, duplicitous princesses and narked-off witches.

It's also a world of warrior women.

That leads me onto today's topic of debate. I think we all love a good warrior woman but that raises the issue of just who was the best of Conan's various fighting females?

I was going to launch a poll straight off but quickly realised there'd no doubt be someone I'd missed off. And so I'll do my usual thing of throwing it out to you the reader to give your opinions before I launch that poll.

Off the top of my head, I can think of three main warrior women from the Conan-verse: Bêlit, Red Sonja and Valeria. Speaking personally, I was never a fan of Bêlit, finding her a bit annoying, especially in her insistence on being in issue after issue after issue. I also worried that all that fur had to itch. Plus she ended up dead in the original Robert E Howard tales, which was the kind of downer you don't really need from your heroines.

But when it comes to Valeria and Red Sonja I've always been genuinely torn. I encountered Red Sonja first but I've always suspected that, whatever the origins of her name, Roy Thomas based Red Sonja very strongly on Valeria. Valeria also gets brownie points for having been in Barry Smith's masterpiece Red Nails. Then again, The Sonj was in Bazzer's last story in the monthly Conan the Barbarian mag, which was pretty classic-tastic too. Valeria always seemed a bit more mentally stable to me than Sonja but, then again, I suspect Sonja'd flatten her in a fight.

Anyway, that's my thoughts on the matter. But what about you? Conan's warrior women - who's your favourite?

Conan and Red Sonja smite the one thousand.

Congratulations to my snappily titled post Neal Adams, John Buscema and Red Sonja makes three. Conan the Barbarian #44, which has just become the the first ever post on Steve Does Comics to reach the 1,000 page-views mark.

Admittedly, some people might say that congratulating blog-posts for getting page views is a bit sad and a bit like congratulating a balloon for inflating but I feel one should celebrate every triumph in life, no matter how petty. So, congratulations to it regardless.

Those who wish to congratulate the post on its awesome achievement may do so in the Comments Box below.

Conan the Barbarian #43. Red Sonja goes beddy-byes.

You might think, from reading comics, that a warrior woman's biggest challenge in life is keeping her boobs in her bikini but Conan the Barbarian #43 reveals there's an even bigger one facing her.

Staying awake.

The story's this. Fleeing a gang of bounty hunters, Red Sonja and Conan find themselves in a mysterious valley filled with pink mist.

But they're not alone in there.

They share it with a strange tower and a man-bat-thing. While Sonja flaps around helplessly, Conan kills the man-bat-thing.

But then a new player arrives, to knock them out with the contents of a thrown vial.

When Conan wakes, he finds he's inside the tower, and a prisoner of a pair of sorcerers called Morophla and Uathact who're brother and sister. Morophla has designs on Red Sonja, whilst Uathact has her eye on Conan. Sonja's their prisoner too but she's still out cold.

She remains out cold all the way through the next few pages of exposition as Conan gets a potted resumé of the lives of their captors. Just three pages after finally reviving, she's out cold again as she's pushed into a pit, by the jealous Uathact. Conan jumps into the pit and rescues her from the subhuman creature that dwells there, and the tale ends with Conan and Sonja back in the tower dungeon as he's warned of the nightmare fate that awaits them. I would say that Sonja's warned too but she's still out cold and, judging by the way her mouth's hung open in the last panel, seems to be snoring.

It's a perfectly nice comic, as beautifully drawn as ever by John Buscema and appealingly atmospheric in places. Unlike the second part of this tale, Conan the Barbarian #44, it's inked by Ernie Chua rather than the Neal Adams stable and, while it doesn't look as lovely as that did, it still looks good. Glynis Wein should be praised too for her colouring job.

Sadly though, you can't get round the Red Sonja problem. If I'm eleven years old and have just given my newsagent seven pence for the return of Red Sonja, I want to see Red Sonja. I want to see her waving her sword about, shouting, "Tarim's blood!" breaking men's jaws and running around being stroppy. The last thing I want is her spending a good two thirds of the issue lying flat on her back, snoring. To make matters worse, in the first few pages when she is awake, she has to be rescued by Conan after being shot in the horse and, in the three pages toward the end of the tale when she's again awake, she comes over all squeamish and feeble just because a subhuman's looking at her a bit funny. The truth is you could've got any old serving wench, put her in this tale in Red Sonja's place and it wouldn't have made any difference to anything that happens. Red Sonja might've been dead for about twenty thousand years by the time this tale was published but there're times when I can't help feeling the 1970s weren't quite ready for the concept of a warrior woman.

Conan vs Red Sonja. Marvel Feature #7.

Way back when I was knee-high to a rock troll, I really didn’t like Frank Thorne’s take on Red Sonja.

I think it might’ve been the less than realistic hair, the strange eyes or just the fact she looked so angry all the time. She might’ve been an impressive warrior and filled a scale armour bikini nicely but you really wouldn’t have wanted to try and have a conversation with her.

Well, it shows how much I knew because, looking at this tale now, I love it. The Sonja that Thorne gives us might not bear any resemblance to John Buscema’s version, which is the first I ever encountered, but she does look like she could chop up a demon with the best of them. And whisper it quietly but the Hyrkanian hacker's actually quite cute in one or two panels.

I have to say this is a much better tale than the one it follows on from in Conan the Barbarian #67. It’s better because it’s more focused. While that story blundered off up an irrelevant and not all that interesting side alley, this stays resolutely on the "A" Plot, even to the extent that Belit disappears off on a track of her own early on and isn’t seen again - something I’m not altogether unhappy about. I have nothing against her - call me sexist but, as far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing finer in comicdom than a half naked warrior woman - but I can’t help hearing the name “Yoko” every time Conan says, “Belit.” Odd, then, given its tighter focus, that this was written by Roy Thomas, just as that was.

Apart from a rather nice scene in which Sonja reunites with her latest employer and gets an amiable tour of his corpse-filled lair, the tale’s selling point is of course that it features a fight between Red Sonja and Conan.

Sadly for us fans of the woman they don’t know as The Sonj, the implication here seems to be that, in a fair fight, Conan’ll win, whereas I like to think there’s no such thing as a fair fight when Sonja’s around and she’d simply cheat her way to victory.

Still, the fight - which goes on for a fair bit - is fun with each having the chance to kill the other but spurning it before resuming their battle.

Supposedly these second chances are given from a sense of honour but some of us don’t want Sonja to have a sense of honour and we’ve all seen Xena. We’re all used to the idea of subtext with our sword and sorcery. We all know the real reason they won’t kill each other.

As if to rub it in, their fight only ends when a serpent rears its head and they have to join together to fight it. Hmn, Sonja and Conan are getting physical and then a serpent rears its head. I think we know what’s going on there. Needless to say, their post-coil exhilaration convinces Sonja and Conan they’re best of buddies and should stop the fighting.

Trouble is, that’s when the real villain of the piece shows up. He’s a giant man-bat. Ten-to-one on he doesn’t start every sentence with the word “Skreek!” and keep going on about his wife.

We have to get the next issue of Conan the Barbarian to find out what happens next.

I don’t have the next issue of Conan the Barbarian.

But I’m going to get it.

Conan the Barbarian #67. Red Sonja vs Belit

If there's three people you wouldn't let loose in your local library, it's Conan, Belit and Red Sonja, as all three quickly reveal themselves willing to kill just to get their hands on one page of one book. Blimey, what'd they do for a whole copy of Harry Potter?

Sadly, however, it's not reading they're interested in. It's money. The page is from the legendary Book of Skelos and is thus worth a bucketful of cash to whoever gets their hands on it. Thanks to this - and them being typical, immature, petty and over-emotional females - we get the clash we've all been crying out for; Red Sonja vs Belit.

Well, admittedly, I've not been crying out for it, I'd be more interested in Sonja vs Valeria, who Sonja was clearly a bit of a rip-off of. But, still, beggars can't be choosers. When the clash comes, Sonja easily wins their battle with swords and we never get to see who's handier with a knife, as Sonja's more interested in stealing the page she came here for than continuing the fight. You suspect writer Roy Thomas couldn't really bring himself to admit that professional warrior Sonja would flatten her more rustic rival.

Despite being nicely drawn (but poorly inked) - and Sonja being quite cool, easily outwitting Conan and Belit, and happy to hang around in sewers - it's an odd tale that doesn't seem too sure what it's actually about. Its "A" Plot's quickly discarded in favour of a side-track in which Conan sets about breaking his old mate Yusef from prison. At the end of this diversion, there's a tacked-on and frankly ludicrous panel in which we're told that, while Yusef was in his dungeon, he found his way into the next cell, in which he met the man who stole the page and brought it here in the first place. It's clearly an attempt by either Thomas or Buscema to tie this otherwise irrelevant strand into the main plot but, as it doesn't advance either the plot or our knowledge of what's going on, it fails miserably.

Accusations of sexism have been flung at Roy Thomas over the years and this issue doesn't help, as Sonja and Belit, being typical wenches, can't get through a simple conversation without a cat-fight breaking out, and Tara of Hanumar who was introduced a few issues back as a live-wire tomboy is now, thanks to pregnancy, reduced to spectator status.

Then again, Sonja and Belit's behaviour, while immature and petty, is undeniably in character for both of them, so at least you can make some excuses for Thomas there. Having said that, of course, he was the one who gave them immature and petty personalities in the first place.

Maybe it's just me but the choice of cover for the issue's odd. Leaving aside that the Tara on the cover bears no resemblance to the Tara inside it, and is clearly just the helpless girlie who turns up on the front of every issue, and that nothing on the cover actually happens in the story, you'd have thought Sonja vs Belit, as the main selling-point of the tale, would've been the thing to make the mag's front.

Finally, are they sure about Conan's legendary battle-sharpened senses? Most mind-boggling scene is when Conan completely fails to notice, for panel after panel, that Tara's pregnant, despite her sporting a bump the size of Neptune.

Neal Adams, John Buscema, and Red Sonja makes three. Conan the Barbarian #44

Love at first sight. It certainly happens but does it ever last? Marvel Comics' Conan the Barbarian was an easy comic to fall in love with but also perhaps an easy one to fall out of love with. After all, like DC Comics' Weird War Tales, you don't have to read too many of those issues to realise you're getting pretty much the same few stories over and over again.

But, way back in 1975, the Hyborean Age was still a novelty to me and, unjaded by familiarity, I could fully appreciate the antics of the Hyborean battler.

In fact my first exposure to the strip had come through an unlikely source; Fleetway's unofficial Marvel Annual of 1972. Bearing in mind that the rest of the annual was made up of modern-day super-heroes like Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four and the Hulk, why they decided to include a Conan story - and from much later era than the other reprints - I've no idea but I loved it, as, pencilled by Barry Smith, Conan came up against evil sorcerer Zukala and his shape-changing daughter.

But I had to wait a full three years to finally see Robert E Howard's greatest creation in his own monthly mag; Conan the Barbarian #44.

And you know what?

It was worth that wait.

Why? Because not only was it drawn by my all-time favourite artist John Buscema, it was inked by someone called the Crusty Bunkers, which, we were told in the letters page, was a collective name for whoever happened to be hanging around Neal Adams' studio at the time.

Clearly Neal Adams happened to be hanging around the Neal Adams' studio at the time because large chunks of this tale - especially the faces - are clearly inked by him, And that combination of Adams' inks and Buscema's pencils really is something to behold. It has to be one of the most gorgeously rendered comic books of the 1970s. Not only that but Glynis Wein clearly decided to do the art justice by producing one of the best colouring jobs I've ever seen in a comic from that decade. There's just no way round it, the thing just looks fantastic.

As it happens, it was also my first taste of Red Sonja and though it's easy as an adult to knock the scale armour bikini, things look a little different when you're eleven. She had red hair, she had a sword, she ran around in a bikini, what more could you ask of a woman?

Well, in retrospect, you could ask she be less of a wimp than she was in this tale. Although we were given the whole, "she's a warrior woman who no man can have," schtick, reading the tale now, she seems oddly ineffectual. Basically, she gets pushed around a bit, mopes around a bit and then needs to be rescued by Conan at the tale's end. Still, it was the 1970s and it was Conan's mag, not hers, so what can you expect?

At least she got to bash him over the back of the head with a rock before she left.