Two words: Chainmail bikini.
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I was bullied all through the fifth and sixth grades. My nickname was “the punching bag.” It was apparently fun to line up at the top of the stairs and punch my arm as I walked from the playground to class.
As is true for many in that type of situation, I found a kind of solace in comics. My brother Josh captures the feeling in his graphic novel, Jacob’s Apartment—that vicarious experience of being able to stand up not only for ourselves, but for others.
One of the comic book panels that has stuck with me—we’re talking for decades—has Thor, captive on an alien ship, staring down some alien guard. I don’t remember the precise narrative details, but the emotion of the scene remains clear and evocative: the alien has issued a command; Thor has refused; the alien glares up, menacing. Thor returns the stare—no violence, no threat, just a resolute, calm refusal—and the alien gulps and backs off.
All this talk of aliens and gods may seem a bit odd, even pathetic, for an old guy (though less so, perhaps, given the success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Wonder Woman), but these images were deeply resonant, especially for a scrawny kid who spent much of his time strategizing ways simply to avoid conflict.
My other hero was Conan, both in the comics and in the original pulp stories by Robert E. Howard—self-reliant, fearless, powerful, living on his own terms and by his own code.
Everything that I wasn’t.
Red Sonja stepped right into the morass of all that pre-/early-teen angst. Yes, the chainmail bikini played to my hormones. No use claiming otherwise.
Still, there was something beyond the hormones, something about a powerful woman living on her own terms that somehow clicked with me. Things may be getting better now—maybe—but back then, narrative roles for women characters were fairly limited: they were damsels in distress, or rewards for (super)heroism, or (a step up, but with its own problems) villainous femmes fatales. For the most part, Sonja didn’t fit those conventions.
I stopped reading comics quite awhile ago, mostly because the titles I read recycled the same stories, and that repetition grew dull. But I would dip my toe in the comics pool from time to time: Death: The High Cost of Living; Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth; Logicomix; and the more recent series Bitch Planet.
When I heard about Gail Simone‘s feminist reworking of Red Sonja, I figured it would be fun to revisit the old flame. I didn’t know anything about Simone, aside from the fact that fans—including my sisters, Lavender (No Man’s Land) and Fawn (The Awkward Spinster)— spoke very highly of her. And I wasn’t disappointed: Volume 1, collecting the first six of Simone’s eighteen-issue run, presented a complex array of complex women characters, dropped into a situation every bit as brutal and bloody as sword-and-sorcery should be.
So I bought the other two volumes of Simone’s Sonja. I’m halfway through Volume 2, and I’m enjoying it every bit as much as I expected. Simone has a wickedly wry sense of humor, which she uses (as one of many tools) to overturn the genre’s problematic tropes.
This includes the iconic Red Sonja outfit. In one scene, Sonja visits a courtesan “palace of fleshly desires”; since she’s dressed in her chainmail binkini—in the rain, no less—it’s assumed that she’s applying for work there. “Er,” says the madam, “may I ask why you do wear this… ensemble…in the rain?”
Well played, Ms. Simone.
[Note: For those interested: Ginnis Tonik wrote an interesting and insightful history of Red Sonja, at least through the 1980s or so. (The post is listed as “Part 1,” but I can’t find the other parts. Maybe someone reading this can point me to the other parts, if they exist….)]