Savage Red Sonja #4
☆ Be the first to review + Add to your collection — Join freeSavage Red Sonja #4 is the narrative turning point of Dan Panosian's five-issue 2023–2024 mini-series — itself one of several concurrent titles Dynamite published as part of Red Sonja's 50th anniversary celebration. The issue crystallizes the series' defining creative thesis: that Sonja is as much a cunning strategist as a physical warrior, showing her outmaneuvering the Slayers of Shadizar through intelligence rather than brute force while a layered deception plot involving the blood ruby and Gresh's scepter reaches full complexity. Panosian's series was also notable for marking Italian artist Alessio Petillo's major American comics debut, making each issue of the run a record of that collaboration's arrival on the U.S. market.
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We Buy Collections ▸History
The series was first teased at San Diego Comic-Con in July 2023 and announced formally by Dynamite that same month, with issue #1 shipping in November 2023. Writer-artist Dan Panosian — a veteran of X-Men, Captain America, and the early Image Comics era, and more recently a writer on series like Slots and Alice Ever After — revealed in interviews that the story outline had actually been written decades earlier before he rediscovered it and pitched it to Dynamite CEO Nick Barrucci. Panosian personally hand-picked his collaborators: interior artist Alessio Petillo (recruited from Italian publisher Sergio Bonelli Editore for his American debut), colorist Francesco Segala, and letterer Dave Sharpe, with cover variants contributed by Frank Cho and Arthur Adams across the run. Issue #4 shipped on February 14, 2024.
Trivia · 8 facts
- Published by Dynamite Entertainment; released February 14, 2024 (cover-dated as part of the 2023 series volume).
- Written by Dan Panosian; interior art by Alessio Petillo; colors by Francesco Segala and Gloria Martinelli; letters by Dave Sharpe.
- Cover A is by series writer Dan Panosian; variant covers include a Cover B by Frank Cho, a Cover C by Enrico Marini, a Cover D Cosplay variant, and multiple ratio incentive line-art and virgin editions.
- The issue is the fourth chapter of a five-issue story arc in which Red Sonja seeks to reunite King Gresh's scepter with a blood ruby in order to fulfill — and thereby be freed from — her oath to the goddess Scathach.
- Issue #4 introduces the confrontation with Mayor Sem and his Slayers of Shadizar as primary antagonists, while deepening the mystery surrounding Markus (whose wife is revealed to be the Pale Witch) and his theft of the original scepter.
- The Slayers of Shadizar — a hired-killer faction operating out of the city of Shadizar — receive notable action-sequence focus in this issue, with artist Petillo designing their distinctive lampshade-style helmets and armor evoking ancient Asian cloth-and-paper construction.
- Savage Red Sonja was one of multiple titles (alongside the Torunn Grønbekk/Walter Geovani ongoing Red Sonja series) that Dynamite published simultaneously as part of Red Sonja's 50th anniversary in 2023–2024.
- Alessio Petillo's work on this series represented his major American comics debut, having previously worked for Italian publisher Sergio Bonelli Editore.
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