Red Sonja: Age Of Chaos #4 - Dynamite Entertainment

RED SONJA: AGE OF CHAOS No. 4, April 2020

Packing his narrative’s twenty pages with plenty of pulse-pounding pugilism, Erik Burnham’s storyline for Issue Four of “Red Sonja: Age Of Chaos” must surely have catered for all the varied tastes of this mini-series’ audience, whether they be fans of the titular character, Chastity Marks, Evil Ernie, or Purgatori. For despite this particular instalment of the Minnesota-born writer’s epic collaboration between Roy Thomas’ co-creation and some of the more supernatural inhabitants of the “Chaos! Comics” universe arguably starting off a little slowly as the She-devil with a sword surveys the streets of Kor, the sheer slug-fest which quickly follows her meandering does a first-rate job of incorporating all of this publication’s leading cast in its senseless slaughter.

Indeed, from the moment Red Sonja and her “punk rock fan turned vampire” companion startle the sorcerer Barent within his somewhat secluded “place of business” and unleash the ghost of the long-dead seer Xoret upon the tiny viewing room’s occupants, this book’s delightfully fast-paced action-sequences simply won’t let its readers off of the hook until its excellently-penned cliff-hanger when the couple are depicted being hotly pursued by a horde of the ravenous undead across the narrowest of ravine crossings; “I can hold off a mob of vampires long enough for you to dump some blood on the thing. Wait? -- How much blood?”

Easily this comic’s highest highlight however, is Evil Ernie’s utterly fantastic dust-up with Purgatori “hundreds of miles to the west”. This truly is a no-holds barred brutalisation as the ghoulish psychotic killer tries his absolute best to go toe-to-toe with Sakkara, and eventually discovers that even being armed with an enormous zombie dragon is not going to give him the edge needed to overcome Lucifer’s one-time winged consort. Crammed with some genuinely funny banter, as well as plenty of back-chat from Smiley the Psychotic Button, Fairchild’s fight delivers some savage edge-of-the-seat moments, and provides the “Dynamite Entertainment” resident artist, Jonathan Lau, with the opportunity to pencil some stunningly dynamic panels, most notably that of Purgatori being swallowed whole by Ernie’s flying beast and then her tearing the putrefying creature asunder from the inside out in an attempt to be free of its unholy stomach.

The regular cover art of "RED SONJA: AGE OF CHAOS" No. 4 by Lucio Parillo