The Red Goddess Revealed

This is the second-last week of the summer holidays and the third day of heavy, persistent rain. Down the road from me, opposite the station, the street was flooded. The shops on the High Street were deploying sandbags yesterday.
Yet last week, for the most part, it was sunny, hot and muggy. This is the first of probably three posts covering the week I spent in Lanarkshire, Galloway and Arran.

I'd postponed a trip away in the event of dry weather. When I was in Glasgow, I took the train out to Lanark and had a walk to the loch and then to the planned community of New Lanark, a World Heritage site.

Then I went south to the Rhins, stayed at my favourite hotel in Sandhead and visited Logan Botanical Garden and a hidden gem: Glenwhan in Dunragit, once the seat of a Fifth Century chiefdom which traded with Byzantium.

As you probably know by now, my love for Bronze Age sword and sorcery coalesced in Galloway in the Seventies. I try to bring along some comics or paperbacks in the Heroic Fantasy vein every time I head to the peninsula. This time, I had taken Dynamite's Red Sonja: Ballad of the Red Goddess.

This hardback marks the reunion of Roy Thomas and Esteban (Satana) Maroto, who first depicted the She-Devil with a Sword in her legendary chain-mail bikini. It was published in conjunction with the Barcelona comics convention of April 2018.  The graphic novel features a framing sequence for Maroto's lush, dreamlike section of the book by Santi Cassas.

 Maroto's origin for Sonja retells part of Frank Thorne's first issue of her solo title and the b/w 1975 Chaykin story from Kull and the Barbarians.
The rape sequence is naturally an uncomfortable and fairly graphic read. I was interested to note that Sonja's supernatural patron is here the Irish war goddess Morrigan ,instead of Scathach, the warrior maiden from Skye.

Ballad is reminiscent of the very first issue of the US Dracula Lives, with its black, white and red palette. Despite images recalling the work of Barry Smith and Thorne, it feels very European. Unfortunately, I found this tale of tyranny and revenge is too familiar and a little dull. I was hoping for a stronger, wittier story from Thomas.

Since moving to the North East, I've picked up a few sword and sorcery paperbacks in Leakey's. However, I bought Lin Carter's Lost World of Time on ebay. This was a quick read at under 130 pages and as one review on Goodreads says, the prose isn't so much purple as ultraviolet.

Carter sets this adventure one hundred million years ago on the Tenth World, Zarkandu, with its yellow skies, seven moons, ink-black shores and milky seas. The warrior princess Alara receives a message from the spectral enchanter Zasterion ( shades of Princess Leia) as the Black Hordes of the Lord of Chaos invade the sacred empire of Chalsadon. She has to recruit a champion, Sargon from Barbaria ( really) who wields a version of Mjolnir, the golden Maul of Jathar.

Savage, yellow hordes ( read: Communists) feature in several Carter series from Callisto to Gondwane- perhaps as a response to his military service in Korea. This book is more in the style of Tolkien's epic battle scenes rather than the Burroughsian Callisto or Thongor stories, There's no whimsy, as you would find in the World's End series, perhaps thankfully, but there's also no humour or personality of the kind you find in Fritz Leiber, for example. It's a rather dry, one-dimensional   Dungeons and Dragons warfare saga. I have to say I've enjoyed other Carter pulp novels more.

Coming next: Conan the Punisher

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