Red Sonja: Unchained #3 Review


As this literary tangent reaches its penultimate issue, is this series just about to start to discover itself?  Read on to find out.

The official description from Dynamite:

With a bounty hunter hunting her down in connection to a murder, and a demon haunting her dreams, Sonja finds that avoiding her past isn’t as easy as taking off her chainmail armor!

It’s always a symbolic act to take a comic book hero or heroine, and strip them of their average attire.  You rob them of what fans would consider normal and it always begs questions as to the purpose behind it.  This mini-series may be the sequel to a one-shot but it’s no different.  Within these questions the audience surely finds a motivation that drives their interest, and I’m happy to report there’s more to this yarn than a simply superficial visual twist.

Peter V. Brett pens the script and the pieces of this simplistic but nonetheless compelling puzzle are starting to come together.  The building blocks of the story have seen fit to give Red Sonja a curse to battle with, both emotionally and physically, that allows the author to begin to hint at some forthcoming introspection.  In a lot of ways this tale reminds me of a certain symbiote and the wall-crawler it attached to, in both situations there was an outfit with a mind of its own that couldn’t be removed by simple force of will.

When it comes to the reading experience the art by Jack Jadson in particular is a highlight.  I was absolutely floored by his renditions despite more than a few of the panels coming off as rather sparse in detail.  There are certainly some off moments to be found here but for the most part I have very little in the way of worthwhile complaints.

Red Sonja: Unchained #3 is a solid introduction to what should be an entertaining final issue.  My only gripe is that I wish the rest of the mini-series would have been this level of quality from the start, it would of made reviewing it a lot easier. Recommended.

4/5

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