Sonja Reborn

#1A

Stjepan Šejić Regular

Release:

Aug 27, 2025

Creators

Writer	Christopher Priest
Artist	Alessandro Miracolo
Cover Artist	Stjepan Šejić
Colorist	Giovanni Caputo
Letterer	Taylor Esposito
Editor	Matt Idelson

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Someone took my clothes…while gifting a fine set of jubblies.

While my exposure to her was limited to an issue or two of her first series at Marvel, a couple of issues of her second series at Marvel, and a couple appearances in Conan stories, I’ve always liked Red Sonja.

I mean, I even willingly watched the 1985 movie, though I have not, as of this writing, watched the more recent movie.

That said, it wasn’t until Gail Simone took over writing the character that I started actually regularly buying any of her books from Dynamite. Once I did that, though, continuing to read the She-Devil’s adventures continued on autopilot after Gail finished her run.

Dynamite does, after all, really love launching a new Red Sonja series, sometimes more than one at a time, and the comic shop auto-adds them all – or most of them, as we’ll get to – to my pull list.

The quality has been hit or miss, but I mostly see each iteration through the end because the end – followed by or overlapping with a new beginning – tends to come pretty quickly.

Some others I eventually dropped, and after the most recent series wrapped, I was thinking about not sticking with the redhaired Hyrkanian, even though the newest one is being written by Christopher Priest, whom I met last year and who has been a dependable storyteller whose work I’ve enjoyed for something like forty years.

When this issue launched and it wasn’t in the stack of comics the comic shop employee handed me, I figured my mind had been made up for me by their failure to add it, and though I looked at it on the shelf, I passed it by.

However, a month later, #2 was in the stack handed to me and my decision was in danger of being unmade. I checked if there were still any copies of #1 on the shelves and found nothing, so at the register I handed the issue back and said that I’d be dropping it as I’d missed the first issue.

Turns out there were still copies of #1 in a spot I hadn’t checked and the failure to include it previously had been a mistake, and was I sure I didn’t want to check it out?

So here we are.

Our story opens in the present day, in New York City, which is not the typical setting for a Red Sonja story, though it’s not exactly unheard of.

In that story, the spirit of Sonja traveled from the past and took over the form of a modern-day woman (Mary Jane Watson).

In this story, we get rather the reverse, as the spirit of a young woman named Margaret Sutherland travels to the past and takes possession of Sonja’s body.

But before that happens, Margaret, who works in a UK diplomatic office, has crossed the pond in order to kill her romantic rival.

As she pursues her intended victim through subway tunnels, she loses her weapon, runs past some Cthulhu worshippers, and falls into a deep, dark hole, finally landing somewhere far from the tunnels of New York in someone else’s body.

She takes it reasonably well, all things considered.

Okay, in fairness, the barfing is in response to the carnage surrounding her, as she has taken possession of Sonja’s form shortly after a battle in which she and the Cimmerian reavers she’s leading have been victorious.

While she’s confused – no more so than Sonja’s young squire – she tries to play along, as she’s certain that it’s all just the result of suffering a concussion, and besides, her body seems to know what to do, and this does all feel familiar in some way.

Plus, she still needs to find and kill Skye, the woman stealing her lover from her.

In the meantime, we get an enigmatic interlude between beings that represent light and darkness, beings who are, presumably, responsible for this Freakiest of Fridays.

Back in the Hyborian Age, Margaret-Sonja is trying to bluff her way through an encounter with a sword-for-hire she somehow knows is named Gaeric.

Gaeric is looking to get paid, demanding that Margaret-Sonja provide him the reward he was offered now that they’ve successfully sacked the outpost.

She offers him however much gold he wants, but gold isn’t what Gaeric’s after, and Margaret learns that she’s not the only one who’s gone on a long, strange trip.

…I mean, it’s certainly better than Sonjaversal.

That said, two issues in, I’m not sure I’m invested enough to continue much further.

Not because it isn’t interesting, but because I just don’t have the patience for another story that involves someone experiencing something impossible and vacillating between refusing to accept that it’s happening and trying – poorly – to play along with it.

It’s the sort of thing that just gets old fast.

While the art is interesting, I found – especially in the second issue – that at times the storytelling flow isn’t the greatest, making the action difficult to follow.

It’s also just generally hard to read with my aging eyes. The effect isn’t apparent in digital form, but on glossy paper, the white on red text of the captions can be almost impossible to read, at least for my aging eyes. As the light hits the page, the white text basically disappears.

And there are a lot of captions, as they serve as Margaret’s inner monologue.

One other odd quirk with the dialogue is that there are periodic footnotes explaining the meaning of various bits of slang and other UK terms used.

It just seems like kind of an odd choice. It feels kind of old-fashioned, like something you might see in a Marvel book in the ’70s or something.

Will this be the series that finally ends my streak of coasting along reading the adventures of Red Sonja? I’m not sure. I do have a fondness for the She-Devil with a Sword, and I’m inclined to give Priest a chance, but I’m really not feeling it, and honestly, money is a concern these days.

I guess you’ll just have to keep checking the Pull List to find out.

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