Red Sonja Tarzan #1 Review

Written by: Gail Simone

Illustrated by: Walter Geovani

Colored by: Adriano Augusto

Lettered by: Simon Bowland

Published by: Dynamite

Ever since I’ve known of Dynamite Comics, I knew they were the place these days to find your licensed properties in comic book format. Also, having acquired so many licences, it was inevitable that crossovers between said properties would start cropping up. Who as a kid didn’t dream this up when playing with their toys, right?

So it is that this time around, the crossover is between Red Sonja and Tarzan of the Jungle. And what a start this was! The key I find to making this work is twofold: have a great writer who you can feel has a love for these characters, and two, have a story that at least on the surface makes some form of sense.

That is exactly what we get here. First, I don’t think I’ve ever read a Gail Simone comic that wasn't good. And in this issue, you can see how good she is at her craft. The one thing that came to mind while I was reading this issue was that I couldn’t believe how good the dialogue was. I hadn’t read a Simone comic in a while, but it all came flooding back to me that her dialogue choices are always top notch. You can feel the voice of Red Sonja while reading her dialogue. The same goes for Tarzan. You can feel their intensity and now having read this first issue, if someone would read their dialogue back to me, I could tell you who’s dialogue it was. It is that well done.

The second part, the story, is well established in the first issue. Right off you can assume that some form of time travel timey-wimey nonsense is going to be happening simply by the use of the two title characters. Knowing that, the next part is having a good antagonist to bring our legendary heroes together, and we get exactly that in Eson Dull. A hunter by trade, in just one issue Simone has made me hate this character, in exactly the way you should hate a villain. I’ll leave specifics out of this review, but he, in a few pages, establishes himself as a grade A jerk, to use a polite term, and I can’t wait to see him get his comeuppance.

On art, the team of Geovani and Augusto establish a good visual style throughout the issue. Geovani does a great job a layout throughout with neat tricks like the long vertical panel to denote distance, wider shots to capture as much as the action as possible and proper use of a splash page. I was worried at points that his Tarzan was a little on the thin side (Tarzan seems to always be in peak physical condition with bulging muscles), but that was done on purpose it seems for a nice end of issue scene.