She-Devil With a Mullet

I thought that maybe I would have a picture to break up the monotony of these long, long, LONG posts, but I guess not.
I started on a couple, but neither one was working out very well, so I scrapped them.
The girl from the rental office never called about my lease.
Of course, having a woman not call me after she said she would is hardly anything new…
A bit ago a friend of mine pointed out that in all my talk about comic book movies I’ve never mentioned the “Red Sonja” movie, which, while a bit out of left field, is true nevertheless.
I have not previously commented on “Red Sonja.”
…
I don’t know that there’s really much I can say about the movie. It was terrible, and Brigitte Nielsen was terrible in it, and had been a terrible choice for the role. For one thing, she had none of Sonja’s smoldering intensity and passion (which was largely pent-up sexual desires, since one of the central aspects of the character was that she would give herself to no man unless he could first defeat her in battle, and since Sonja was such a formidable swordswoman, she went undefeated for a long time.).
The other thing that was lacking was Sonja’s flowing mane of flaming red hair. The red mullet they gave Brigitte just didn’t cut it.
And what was up with Arnold essentially playing Conan in all but name?
All in all a terrible, terrible movie, though writing about it does make me realize that I was mistaken in my earlier claims about Marvel not managing to have any movies successfully brought to the big screen prior to “Blade.”
However, I don’t know that “Red Sonja” or the Conan movies actually count, since they were not actually owned by Marvel. Marvel simply had a licensing deal which allowed them to use the characters. Same goes for “Kull,” which, at the time the movie was made, may not have been a license that Marvel still possessed.
In any case, I’ve never read any actual Robert E. Howard Red Sonja stories (or Kull stories for that matter, but I have read all of the original Conan stories and probably dozens of post-Howard Conan novels), so my experience with the character is strictly limited to the comics, and I haven’t even read that many of those.
When I think of Sonja, though, my mind conjures one of two images; either Frank Thorne’s rather classic rendition of her wearing what was essentially a bikini made of chain mail (Actually, come to think of it, it was more like scale armor, but either way, the thing looked damned uncomfortable. ) or the image of her in a simple, belly-baring mail shirt and leather “Daisy Dukes,” as presented in an old Conan story penciled by Barry Windsor-Smith.
I believe that particular story may have been her introduction to the world of comics, though I could EASILY be mistaken. It was, at any rate, the Cimmerian’s first encounter with the “She-Devil With a Sword.”
The comics that featured the Frank Thorne version of Sonja ran in the 1970s. In the 1980s, a new Sonja series was launched. I only ever read a couple of issues of that. I remember being less than impressed by the artwork, and annoyed by how skimpy Sonja’s outfit wasn’t.
The mention of Frank Thorne’s interpretation of Sonja brings to mind what I think is an interesting anecdote.
At some point in the early 1970s there was a young woman named Wendy who, in addition to being one of the rarest of creatures (particularly in that time period), a woman who actually read comic books, frequently accompanied Frank Thorne to comic book conventions dressed as Red Sonja.
I have to tell you; I’ve seen some pictures of Wendy in her Sonja outfit, and she was pretty damn hot.
That’s not the most interesting part, though.
At around the same time there was another comic book fan named Richard Pini. Via the letter page in “Silver Surfer,” Wendy and Richard became acquainted, eventually married, and went on to publish the “Elfquest” series of comics as a husband and wife team. "Elfquest" went on to become one of the earliest success stories in the field of comic self-publishing.
In addition to being a total babe who knows comics, Wendy is also an extremely talented artist in her own right, so all I can say is that Richard Pini hit the comic book geek jackpot and is probably the luckiest comic book geek in all of creation.
In fact, I think he may have used up all the luck that was available for comic book geeks, and if he didn’t Kevin Eastman, co-creator of the “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” and publisher of “Heavy Metal” magazine, undoubtedly used up whatever luck remained when he married former “Penthouse Pet of the Year” Julie Strain…
Anyway, as I was saying, there’s not too much more I can say about Red Sonja either in movie or comic book form, but she is something of an archetype for the female warrior character, so I think she did deserve a little more cinematic respect than she got.
I have actually read some stories that Robert E. Howard wrote about a different red-haired swordswoman, named, appropriately enough, “Swordswoman.” I don’t remember who came first, Sonja or Swordswoman, but they were separated by a vast gulf of time (Swordswoman lived in a time period much closer to our own), yet retained many similarities, not unlike Conan and his predecessor Kull.
I don’t know if anything’s been done with Sonja in recent years. I do know that Dark Horse Comics now seems to have the rights to Conan and are publishing their own Conan stories. I don’t know if they have any plans for, or the rights to, Red Sonja.
I find it out, though, that Marvel seems to have lost the rights to the Robert E. Howard properties, as they had actually incorporated them directly into the Marvel Universe. Conan’s “Hyborian Age” is an epoch in the history of the MU, and Conan, Kull, and Sonja have all been established characters. I don't know what impact losing those licenses has on their ability to make use of concepts that sprang forth from them, but it always struck me as odd that Marvel chose to make licensed characters a part of the mainstream continuity of their original creations.
In a similar fashion, Marvel had incorporated the Micronauts, a comic based on a line of toys, into the MU, and did the same with Rom, Spaceknight, who was also based on a toy.
I believe that Image Comics currently has the rights to the Micronauts, and I know they had been publishing books featuring their own versions of the characters. This did actually impact Marvel in a story I read not too long ago (though the story itself was several years old) which featured characters culled from their old Micronauts series who were simply referred to as “The ‘Nauts,” since, presumably, Marvel could no longer use the prefix “Micro.”
Apart from making Minestrone soup (which turned out excellently), I really didn’t do much with my Tuesday. My biggest accomplishment was managing to sleep.
Hopefully tomorrow (well, at this point I guess it’s today) I’ll have either some pictures to post or some more interesting stories to tell.