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The Wold Newton Family. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Kingdom Hearts. The Defenders of the Earth.

There is a storied tradition of tearing fictional heroes (or at least fictional protagonists) from the pages of their stories and throwing them together to clash and ally in the most epic of circumstances. By placing characters designed for, and defined by, the scope of their own stories and setting them in an environment where their interaction is natural, expected, and required, one hopes for a story that brings out the best elements of all the component pieces. Putting the characters together out of context forces a re-examination of their strengths, weaknesses and similarities. Their stories intermix, and become something larger, if not always grander, than the original narrative.

These reverse-engineered crossover stories are less like the superhero crossover events of the Marvel or DC Universe today, where shared universes have become the norm, and more like they once may have seemed when companies first conceived putting a detective in costume in alliance with a super-powered alien: incredible, and wholly unexpected.

We’re big fans of the concept (big fans), and Swords of Sorrow promised to take this framework and put it to a decided, and fascinating advantage. Dynamite owns the rights to a number of fictional characters and their universes, and has chosen to emphasise that many of those characters are dynamic and exciting women. By placing their roster of female characters front and centre, and by the crossover effectively creating a universe for them, Swords of Sorrow does something that even the soon-to-be all female A-Force cannot do: make that team of women the team – the one and only – in a way that can permit no renunciation or dismissal as an experiment or an also-ran. This is the crossover set of the Dynamite “universe”, and it promises to include a roster every bit as captivating as anything any other comic book company could muster. Add to that an all-star cavalcade of female creators, and you have a seemingly fail-safe recipe to create a must read. This is the definition of “two great tastes that go together”.

With that kind of expectation, it’s perhaps a little inevitable that the finished product fails to entirely meet it. As longtime fans of Gail Simone’s, we were certainly very excited for the first issue. Did it live up to its promise?

Sadly, not entirely. The issue introduces us to its heroines: Jana the Jungle Girl; Vampirella, Queen of the Night; Martian princess Dejah Thoris; masked avenger (and sometime partner) Mulan Kato; Jennifer Blood, vigilante assassin; and Red Sonja, the She-Devil with a Sword, perhaps the most famous character in the set. Rounding out the company are Irene Adler, the woman of the Sherlock Holmes adventures; Lady Zorro (whose name should speak for itself) and Lady Greystoke – née Jane Porter, the female explorer and bride of Tarzan, each introduced with a single panel.

The selection of characters is well-chosen. Many of them are genre icons in themselves. Jane Porter and Dejah Thoris date back to World War I, other characters carry a legacy almost as long and even more popular. These characters have the weight of time and multiple depictions behind them, layered stories creating the shadings and specificity that makes for an electric team-up. An ersatz space princess or generic barbarian mercenary doesn’t hold the same weight of history, but the legacy of the Swords of Sorrow characters also raises the bar – with characters like Vampirella and Thoris, innumerable past injuries at the hands of lesser pens require contextualisation and selective presentation to ensure you are only representing them at their best. This is before you consider that, as with all team-ups, the onus to discharge in the first issue is a high one – to establish these characters for those that don’t know them, while demonstrating your love and understanding of them for those who do, all while setting out a premise large enough to justify and reward their interactions.

In the attempt to clear this bar, each of the major characters are treated to a short introductory sequence in Swords of Sorrow #1, to an extent describing their roles in a typical adventure: tribal champion, monstrous protection, noble ruler, superhero, killer and fantasy heroine. Sonja is dying in a desert, Kato and Blood are clashing on the roofs of Century City, Vampirella is rescuing a woman from a monster, and Dejah Thoris is reviewing a strange event and Jana is saving children from a rampaging beast.

Unfortunately most of those sequences feel undercut rather than emphasised when they are truncated by the introduction of crossover elements. Perhaps because each of these stories is disrupted by the intrusion of the series’ metaplot, they don’t carry significant stakes of their own, making them mere introductions rather than complete stories in themselves. These introductions might have been better served by being shortened, making use of narrative captioning or some other form of shorthand, and allowing the genuine stakes of the conflict to be better established. Instead, we are left with some idea of what the characters do, but less of an idea of who they are and what they want. If the audience is assumed to know these facts, the lengthy introductions are superfluous, but if they don’t know them, they also don’t entirely get them here.

That then leaves the issue to hang on the “big” plot, the distribution of the titular Swords of Sorrow to these characters by an unnamed benefactress, operating out of Everywhere and Everywhen, addressed only as the Traveller. The Traveller is engaged in some kind of pan-temporal, pan-dimensional dispute with an equally unnamed enemy, one who is capable of controlling “all he can see or imagine”, who vows revenge against all women, who controls an army of faceless Adonises and devoted sexualised servants, whose love he demands.

It’s not hard to see this character stand in for both a certain subtype of comic fan who sees things through a gendered lens, or indeed, the patriarchy as a whole. While this is a perfectly functional villain, his specific portrayal invites anger more than fear. Sans his vague but immense powers, it is hard to see any of our heroines being even momentarily cowed by his menace. This may, of course, be by design: the issue touches on the idea of the protagonists as generals, rather than soldiers or prey, and draws the distinction between herd mentality and individualism. Individualists all, the non-compliance of the Swordbearers is posited as their greatest asset and uniting feature. They will bow down to no-one.

This is a strong beat, in that it includes a feature which makes sense as a response to the yoke of gender expectations, without being innately gendered. They women aren’t chosen as the to represent an idealised form of womanhood, or because this is a battle that the men cannot face, but rather they are selected as the best at what they do.

This is compelling as a deconstruction, and creates opportunities for future narrative, but within this first issue, we feel like we were left with little more than a broad articulation of the theme you would have grasped for the solicits, presented in the most general terms. The tension between these women and a world that struggles to accept their power is articulated, but it doesn’t feel viscerally portrayed. The premise is a thing that the issue certainly allows to be understood, but not felt. It may be that we, from within the lens of our male privilege, miss some greater emotional impact, but we like to think we’re eager enough for – and not inured to – stories about women and the challenges they face in a patriarchal society that this lack of impact is a function of the work as much as it is of the readers.

If all this makes it sound like Swords of Sorrow #1 is bad, that’s entirely unfair. Sergio Dávila’s art is crisp and Jorge Sutil’s colours are engaging and vibrant. Indeed, it is well worth noting that the art presents these protagonists with realistic, respectful posture and anatomy, investing them with a self-possession and coiled strength that goes well beyond the two-dimensional cheesecake that some past portrayals have reduced them to. This works in tandem with Gail Simone’s dialogue, sparkling as always with customary wit and grace, offering a number of great lines. The only thing, in fact, we didn’t like about this issue was the cover which our copy shipped with (Cover A, we are informed, depicted below), which feels like a step back in time to lesser portrayals of all of these characters. It felt exploitative (one posture echoing Milo Manara’s controversial Spider Woman cover) and disingenuous, reducing its diverse cast of heroines as clones of one another, distinguished only by revealing and vaguely genre-demonstrative garb. (We’ve seen, it should be said, a Kate Leth cover about which we felt the exact opposite and other covers seem to abound).

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It’s just that for all the aforementioned strengths, there was sadly little to knock our socks off. The truncated storylines made it feel like a prologue, rather than a first chapter. If this had been a #0 issue, distributed as part of the recent Free Comic Book Day, we’d certainly feel like it had been a worthy introduction, but as a story in itself, it failed to pack a comprehensive punch. From Gail Simone, author of a number of excellent done-in-one stories, presenting only the outlining sketches feels like less than we might have ultimately hoped for at this stage.

There are still many miles to go, and other creators are adding their voices in a series of “tie-in” mini-series’ focusing on the relevant Swordbearers. The richness of the concept is undiminished, and nothing has been done a disservice by the first issue, so we’re certainly still excited to see what comes next, but if the concept itself doesn’t sell the comic to you, Swords of Sorrow #1 may not do much to draw you into the story to come.

 

 

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