Friday, April 28, 2023

Somebody bought this and didn't redeem the coupon for a sixty-minute Maxell blank tape? I can't believe it!

Well, you did have to send in eight Bubblicious wrappers: that's a lot of chewing! From 1983, Red Sonja #2, "Blood Debt!" Written by Tom DeFalco, pencil breakdowns by Mary Wilshire, inks by Nestor Redondo.
I don't have the first issue--or, at least don't have it right next to me--but this seems to be continued from there. Feverish from drinking polluted water, Sonja hallucinates her origin before collapsing, and is near death. Luckily for her, a kindly fugitive stops his flight to tend to her, which sadly leads to him being recaptured and murdered. Sonja was still too weak to do anything about it then, so she then has to track the killers down. Outside of a bar, she nearly has one of the killers in hand, but he's then killed when his drunken friends try to help, and Sonja is captured. The local warlord, the bloodthirsty Lady Feema, takes an interest in her, though...(That name really feels like a placeholder that made it to the final draft!)
This is pretty plot-heavy, but reads as well as any Conan of the same time. It's also longer: the first four issues of this series were a dollar, when most titles were sixty cents, but it was 38 pages of story. It was also continued, which wasn't usually the case in the Conan books, although that would soon change.

2 comments:

Mr. Morbid's House Of Fun said...

At least you didn't say that's an awful lot of blowing, boy wouldn't their faces have been red ;)

Btw, the shadish gaslighting Lady Fema was giving her not being a whore is certainly something.

H said...

Yeah, this whole volume seemed to be one long story up until the last two issues or so. It's a nice idea, but Red Sonja is one of those books you pick up a couple of random issues at a time so that's a bit rough. The Bill Mantlo issues were relatively self-contained, thankfully. Nice art, too.