Red Sonja 6
When we last left our heroine, she’d just watched a crazy wizard get killed by a bell. Deciding to get out of the bell tower before anyone started asking her questions, she stole the nearest horse and made her way to the Singing Tower, which was more or less next door to the bell tower. Her traveling companion of the last couple issues, Mikal, is being held prisoner there and if crazy wizards and killer bells are in the tower where they keep guests, who knows what’s in the tower where they keep prisoners. And we’re off on another psychedelic sword & sorcery adventure.
On page one, we get our first glimpse of the Singing Tower and it is certainly … suggestive. A thick cylinder with a bulbous tip, the tower’s shape is more than a little reminiscent of, oh, let’s say a mushroom. A mushroom surrounded by enticing flowers whose slimy nectar Sonja is compelled to smear across her half-naked body in a state of pure ecstasy. Until she passes out from the sheer pleasure of the act.
Mushroom.
Her unconscious body is picked up by a pair of insect people (because, really, why not insect people?) and taken inside the tower. Before they can do much more than lay her out on a stone slab, Sonja’s awake again and drawing a dagger. The insect men vomit silk onto themselves until they’re wrapped in protective cocoons. So far, this is more or less a typical day in the life for the Hyrkanian harridan.
And then she sees a giant woman tied to a wall. Upon closer inspection, it’s obvious that the giantess is tied to the lattice-work of the wall by her own over-grown hair. When Sonja tries to free her from her own hair, she finds that it grows back faster than she can cut it.
Not that she has much of a chance to cut, since a swarm of tiny bee people attack her, stinging her back to unconsciousness, then forcing her mouth open to feed her more of the nectar that had knocked her out earlier. When she wakes up once again, she finds that her hair has begun to grown like the giantess, binding her to the same lattice-work wall.
Early on in Sean Howe’s book-length history Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, the reader’s imagination is spurred by a throwaway anecdote: in 1937, New York magazine publisher Martin Goodman and his wife planned to return from a trip to Europe aboard the Hindenburg — on what would turn out to be the final tragic flight of the German dirigible, which ended with a terrifying aerial explosion and fire that led to the deaths of 36 people. Goodman, as it happened, was too late to get tickets and took a plane instead. You can’t help but wonder, though. What if he’d died then, before he’d expanded his magazine line to include comics? Before he’d hired his nephew Stanley to work in the office and do fill-in bits of writing? What if Marvel Comics, the subject of Howe’s book, had been stillborn? What would have been different in the development of comics, of popular culture, of the North American imagination? Maybe everything. Maybe nothing.
The Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story was first given out in 2009. The category was a nice idea, especially given the increased prominence of comics in the media landscape, but I have to admit that up to this year, I’ve been underwhelmed by the choice of winners. Or, more precisely, winner, singular: Phil and Kaja Foglio’s webcomic Girl Genius took the award three times straight. I don’t dislike the comic, but from what I’ve read, I’d be hard-pressed to identify anything in it that makes it worth a major award ahead of any number of series — Hellboy or Mouse Guard or Wednesday Comics or RASL or All-Star Superman or you name it. After their third win, though, the Foglios announced they would decline to accept a nomination for the next year, in the interest of helping to establish the validity of the award. So the 2012 Hugo went to another title: 
