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Author: Cynthia Ward

Short, Strange Trip: Stalker #1 – 4, by Paul Levitz, Steve Ditko, and Wally Wood

Short, Strange Trip: Stalker #1 – 4, by Paul Levitz, Steve Ditko, and Wally Wood

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Stalker, issue 1 (DC Comics, June 4, 1975). Cover by Wally Wood and Steve Ditko

It must have looked like a can’t-lose comic: An original sword and sorcery title with art by two legends. One was Steve Ditko — the co-creator of Marvel’s biggest solo superhero, Spider-Man, and creator of Marvel’s psychedelic occult investigator, Dr. Stephen Vincent Strange. The other was Wally Wood, the storied veteran of EC Comics’ infamous horror and crime titles.

With scripts by future DC Comics President/Publisher Paul Levitz, DC’s new S&S series (launching in July 1975) would be bizarre and amazing and creepy, filled with the touches that made the mid-Twentieth-Century Dr. Strange comic such a trip, and it would be set within the Weird and horrific and sometimes-cosmic environs of a fantasy subgenre still fresh to comics.

And Stalker was all of these things, except a hit. The bimonthly title was unfortunately cancelled in January 1976, after four issues.

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Feminist Icon in a Chain Mail Bikini: Red Sonja: Queen of Plagues by Gail Simone and Walter Geovanni

Feminist Icon in a Chain Mail Bikini: Red Sonja: Queen of Plagues by Gail Simone and Walter Geovanni

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Red Sonja: Volume 1: Queen of Plagues (Dynamite Entertainment, March 4, 2014). Cover by Jenny Frison

If you saw the cover of Red Sonja: Volume 1: Queen of Plagues which accompanies this review before you started reading, your eyes probably popped with shock or narrowed with anger. The odds of either reaction went up if you were unhappy because it sported a cover controversially featuring a chick in a chain mail bikini.

Your reaction to the cover of Red Sonja: Volume 1: Queen of Plagues might not be entirely negative if you grew up reading the 1970s comics which featured the original chick in a chain mail bikini: the indomitable swords and sorcery character Red Sonja, the She-Devil with a Sword. In those years, I thought her chain mail bikini was the stupidest-looking costume ever to appear in a comic book (where there’s never a shortage of competition). Yet I was also inspired. I wanted to learn fencing, and she was supreme with a sword. And, even when an artist sexed her up, Red Sonja was the strongest female character I encountered with any regularity in my teen years.

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It’s Got Its Ups and Downs: Hercules Unbound #1-#12

It’s Got Its Ups and Downs: Hercules Unbound #1-#12

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Hercules Unbound #1, by Gerry Conway, José Luis García-López, and Wally Wood (DC Comics, November 1975). Cover by José Luis García-López

Live long enough, it seems, and you will revisit the pleasures of your youth. You wonder if they still hold up, or perhaps you’re looking to learn if (or how) they shaped the person you’ve become. Which is why — for the first time since the mid-1970s — I recently reread Hercules Unbound #1-#12 (1975—1977), the complete run of a cancelled DC Comics series aimed at the 1970s’ booming sword & sorcery market.

DC’s Hercules is the demi-god of Greco-Roman myth, transposed to a post-apocalyptic then-future. The published issues of this solo series feature scripts by Gerry Conway, Cary Bates, and David Michelinie, and art by José Luis García-López, Wally Wood, Walt Simonson, and Bob Layton.

If the sheer number of creators on such a short run makes your spidey sense tingle, well, yeah. It’s not a great sign. But on this, more anon.

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Half the Sky: A Meditation on Battleborn Magazine #1

Half the Sky: A Meditation on Battleborn Magazine #1

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Battleborn magazine, issue 1 (Iron Age Media, , May 31, 2026). Cover by Samuel Dillon

This is a man’s, man’s, man’s world

— James Brown

One blustery Maine spring day, I blew off class to spend an hour hanging out with a friend in the math department’s student lounge. Picture a Coke welded to my hand and a coffee to hers, as we discussed fantasy and science fiction and divers other subjects in the “wrong” lounge (we were English majors, but it was the English/Math Building and the math lounge was empty. What can I say?). Picture my friend as the reason I figured out I’m a feminist a lot sooner than I would have otherwise. Picture the talk turning to men, a gender to which only one of us is attracted.

“I’m fine with men,” she said. Then she said something I hadn’t heard before, but have heard other women echo many times since: “I just want them to remember women hold up half the sky.”

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A review of Hellebore & Rue: Tales of Queer Women and Magic

A review of Hellebore & Rue: Tales of Queer Women and Magic

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hellebore-and-rueHellebore & Rue: Tales of Queer Women and Magic
Edited by JoSelle Vanderhooft and Catherine Lundoff
Drollerie Press (Ebook [Kindle], 238 pp., $9.99, February 2011)
Lethe Press (Trade Paperback, 238 pp., $15.00, May 2011)

Fantasy allows us to see the world not as it is, but as it might be.

Worlds where mortals have powers and abilities we can only dream of; where women neither need nor expect to rely on a man; where genders and orientations are equal, or face inequities starker than our own.

You’ll find all these possibilities, and more, in the twelve worlds of Hellebore & Rue: Tales of Queer Women and Magic, the new anthology edited by JoSelle Vanderhooft and Catherine Lundoff.

In opening story “Counterbalance,” Ruth Sorrell’s impressive first fiction publication, the world isn’t too different from ours. It initially resembles a typical urban fantasy milieu: magic’s real; the setting’s a modern metropolis; there’s a vampire slayer; there’s a nightclub/bar/safe space for the supernatural set. But the protagonist, Riley, isn’t the vampire slayer–she’s the most powerful being in Toronto. And the safe space? It isn’t, leaving Riley facing a newcomer much too powerful to oppose alone.

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