Savage Red Sonja #2
Savage Red Sonja #2 (December 2023) is the emotional and narrative turning point of Dynamite's 50th-anniversary companion series for the She-Devil With a Sword, delivering the kind of high-stakes, consequence-driven sword-and-sorcery storytelling the title was explicitly designed to revive. In this issue, Sonja loses both of the traveling companions she had sworn to protect — Prince Lucian and his bride Celia — to the undead horde besieging King Gresh's haunted castle, a gut-punch of genuine loss that critics noted 'significantly improves on the first issue with consequences, stakes, and the promise of trouble in the future.' The deaths of Lucian and Celia, and the Blood Ruby Sonja ultimately recovers from the keep at that cost, drive the emotional engine of the entire five-issue series; every subsequent issue is haunted by the guilt Sonja carries out of these walls. As one of two Red Sonja series running simultaneously in late 2023, the book also demonstrated Dynamite's commitment to offering readers stylistically distinct takes on the character during her golden anniversary year.
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We Buy Collections ▸History
Savage Red Sonja was announced at San Diego Comic-Con 2023 as a companion title to Torunn Grønbekk and Walter Geovani's ongoing Red Sonja series, both positioned as part of the character's 50th-anniversary publishing program. Writer-artist Dan Panosian — who had previously contributed covers to the Unbreakable Red Sonja series leading up to the anniversary — revealed in interviews that the story's outline had been written decades earlier, and that he rediscovered it and pitched it to Dynamite CEO Nick Barrucci, who immediately greenlit it; senior editor Matt Idelson then came aboard. Panosian personally assembled his art team, handpicking Italian artist Alessio Petillo, for whom Savage Red Sonja represented his major American comics debut after prior work for Italian publisher Sergio Bonelli Editore, alongside colorist Francesco Segala and letterer Dave Sharpe. Issue #2 shipped December 6, 2023, one month after the November 1 debut of issue #1.
Trivia · 8 facts
- Published by Dynamite Entertainment; on-sale date December 6, 2023 (cover-dated December 2023); 32 pages, rated Teen+.
- Written by Dan Panosian, with interior art by Alessio Petillo, colors by Francesco Segala, and lettering by Dave Sharpe — the same creative team throughout the five-issue run.
- Issue #2 is the pivotal chapter in which Prince Lucian and his bride Celia, the two supporting characters introduced in #1, both die — Celia falling from the rotting drawbridge of King Gresh's castle and Lucian leaping to his death attacking the undead horde — laying their loss on Red Sonja's conscience.
- The series title consciously evokes Marvel's black-and-white Savage Sword of Conan magazine; Panosian stated the name reflects a side of Red Sonja he felt deserved attention, and that the series was designed to hearken back to the tone of Robert E. Howard's original pulp sword-and-sorcery prose.
- Alessio Petillo's American debut: the Italian artist, previously known for work at Sergio Bonelli Editore, makes his major U.S. comics debut across this series, with Petillo personally hand-picked by Panosian.
- Cover variants for issue #2 include art by Dan Panosian (Cover A), Frank Cho (Cover B), Joseph Michael Linsner (Cover C), and a cosplay variant by Rachel Hollon (Cover D), plus multiple ratio-incentive line-art and virgin editions by Cho and Linsner.
- The series ran for five issues (Nov. 2023–Mar. 2024) and was subsequently collected in the trade paperback Savage Red Sonja: Devil in the Sand (Dynamite, 2024).
- The book is a self-contained story independent of the concurrent flagship Red Sonja series by Grønbekk/Geovani; Panosian explicitly designed it to be accessible as a reader's first Red Sonja story, placeable at virtually any point in Sonja's timeline.
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