Black Gate

Last issue, Red Sonja competed in the Games of Gita, won, then killed the Queen of Athos. This issue, she’s still hanging around the city. Apparently, the queen wasn’t that popular. So her new friend, Mikal, is showing her the sights, which include a dark lake infested with shambling actors. “(T)hese strange beings, whose limbs are an eldritch mixture of beast and fowl and lowly reptile.” They slowly make their way to the aptly named “Theatre of Monsters.”

Walking into the Theatre, Sonja finds that the performances consist of monsters, who are clearly monsters wearing human masks, performing surreal renditions of standard plays. Of course, the actors behave with more dignity than the howling human audience around them. At one point, they invite Red Sonja to join their performance in exchange for a purse of gold.

Since Sonja is perpetually broke, she accepts the offer and takes the stage. But since it’s pretty much her fate to be perpetually broke, the offer of gold was a ruse and the monster performers try to kill her immediately. Several monster-corpses later, their leader is begging for mercy and offering to explain what just happened.

At this point, Mikal joins Sonja, having apparently been using the bathroom while she was fighting for her life on stage. The two of them are escorted to the lake, where the waters are parted Moses-style so that they can follow the monsters down to their underwater crystal city. There, she is told the story of how the monsters are descended from aliens whose ship crashed in the lake. After adopting water-breathing forms, they began to interbreed with various Earth animals (um, yuck) until the succeeding generations were the monsters that now occupy the city. Apparently, their leader was captured by the people of Athos and they are forced to perform as circus entertainers in order to ensure that he stays alive.

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Honestly, I’ve tried twice to summarize “The Demon in the Maze,” and I just can’t figure out how. It’s a psychedelic mess of gonzo insanity. It reads as if co-writers Roy Thomas and Clara Noto just switched off writing pages without any idea of where the story was heading or how it would end. The whole thing is plenty of fun; but at the end, I still can’t figure it out.

It starts with Sonja finally reaching Venzia (which she’s been heading towards since Marvel Feature 6). The first thing she sees when she’s in sight of its famous canal is two trading ships crashing into one another and sinking. Even though the ships are less a minute’s swim from shore on either side of the canal, none of the sailors survive the crash.

Sonja doesn’t really have time to consider this mystery before she happens upon a woman being attacked by three bandits. She easily kills the trio in less than a page, but a fourth bandit, hiding in the shadows, knocks her unconscious and drops her to an underground mirror maze. The mirrors mess with her head to the point where she first hallucinates herself as a withered old woman (rendered only a little hilarious by the fact that she’s still wearing the chain mail bikini), then watches as her arms transform into snakes that begin to strangle her. Realizing that it’s an illusion, Sonja calms down and lets her mind “go limp,” at which point a passage out of the maze opens up. She leaves the maze and walks into the plot of the story.

An old man (who is never named) lies dying on the ground and explains that the underground chamber is the prison for an evil wizard (also unnamed) who wants to rule the world. Apparently, the chamber is also the prison of a demon (once again, unnamed) who can only be freed by a human hand. But not any human hand (otherwise, his cell-mate the evil wizard would just free him). The demon can only be freed by a human of exceptionally strong will (translation: the evil wizard is a wimp). The demon created the mirror maze as a test: anyone with a will strong enough to see through its illusions would have a will strong enough to free the demon. The fact that the maze is littered with bones implies that a lot of other women have been trapped down here.

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Finally, after four years of guest appearances and Marvel Feature auditioning, Red Sonja gets her very own title. And judging from the cover, it’s going to be some opening story. We’ve got a wizard, a giant snake that’s about to bite her leg (even though its head’s already been cut off and guts are spilling out of its neck stump), a giant dead spider, some little gray goblin-looking guy in the background, and a unicorn. And Sonja herself is walking past her own title banner, seemingly ready to step out of her issue, bloody sword in hand, to kill YOU. “To the death” is always a good bad-ass line for an action hero, so we’re ready to see everything on this cover that isn’t Red Sonja dead by issue’s end.

Well, first of all, there’s no giant snake. There’s no giant spider. There’s no goblin. It’s just a mean-looking wizard and a unicorn. Just so you know.

The story begins with Sonja having to kill her horse after it breaks a leg. She’s still feeling pretty bad about it a few hours later when she stumbles on a group of men with torches surrounding a horse, apparently intent on killing it. Coming closer, she realizes that they’ve cornered a unicorn. Seeing a mob abusing a “helpless proud creature” bothers her to the point that she starts cutting through a dozen men to free it. Jumping on the unicorn’s back, the two of them ride away. During the struggle, the unicorn’s horn was broken off, so that it just looks like a horse with a head injury; but Sonja’s quite happy to have the beast as her companion.

So, for those who are reading Red Sonja on a subtextual level, the woman who’s sworn a vow of de facto chastity rushes to help the mythic representation of purity only after its phallic symbol is removed. Of course, there’s no reason to read any symbolism in a naked woman and a symbolically castrated beast bathing together, sleeping together, or leaning against one another in a picaresque sunset. And there’s certainly nothing about the nervous creature growing a new horn, “even more beautiful than the other,” as it gets to know Sonja. Nor is there anything to the bitter old man inciting ignorant villagers into a fury over the unnatural union of Red Sonja and the unicorn.

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So the next issue blurb at the end of Marvel Feature 6 was just a bit misleading. After you went back to the comic shop (or newsstand or drug store or wherever people went in 1976 to get comics), paid your thirty cents for Conan the Barbarian 66, and got the issue back home, you would discover that it wasn’t a continuation of the story from Marvel Feature 6 at all. No, “Daggers and Death-Gods!” instead told the story of Conan and Belit docking in Massantia to trade some “honest loot, freely plundered.” After some tense negotiating, they are told of a missing page from the Book of Skelos being kept in the Temple of a Thousand Gods. There’s a hefty reward being offered by an unknown client (who works through a middleman) to anyone who can steal the page from the temple. Conan and Belit make their way through the temple and, after nearly killing eachother, thanks to a caretaker’s spell, they find the page … and Red Sonja. So issue 66 actually tells a story parallel to the one we just finished, with the promise that the next part will, for real this time, be told in issue 67.

Well, we’ve already invested sixty cents into this story, so we might as well invest another thirty to find out where it ends. Issue 67 opens with four pages of re-caps to the stories we read in Marvel Feature 6 and Conan the Barbarian 66. After the recaps, Sonja and Belit have exactly one panel of dialogue before Belit draws her sword and tries to kill her. Red Sonja called her a serving wench and that was all it took because, as Belit is fond of reminding us, she’s actually the daughter of the death-goddess Derketa (Belit believes this because Belit is crazy). The fight lasts for three panels before Belit concedes that Red Sonja is a better swordswoman and throws her sword aside. But she hasn’t conceded the fight, only changed weapons. Apparently, Belit (like all crazy girlfriends) carries a knife. At this point, Red Sonja probably realizes that Conan has enough problems with his delusional knife-wielding girlfriend, so she opts instead to grab the page, slice through the torch that lights the chamber, then flee under cover of darkness. Because Red Sonja only has crazy delusions of grandeur after watching her entire family murdered. For Belit, it’s a lifestyle.

The rest of the issue is Conan promising Belit that he’ll track down Sonja and the page, then getting sidetracked when he discovers an old friend has been imprisoned for murdering one of the town guard (which he’s done so many times, you’d think he’d be surprised to find that some people actually get arrested for it). After killing a half-man/half-tiger (honestly, no one’s even surprised by this sort of thing any more), he frees his friend and discovers that he was locked in the cell next to the man who originally stole the page (small world, Roy Thomas, awfully small world). He meets back up with Belit and they take in this new bit of information just as Red Sonja races past them on horseback. We’re told that the story will be continued in Marvel Feature 7.

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