Red Sonja: Blue Reviews
I know Red Sonja: Blue (hereafter referred to as RSB) just a single-issue comic book and not the Mars landing, but as it’s still a project that fills me with childish glee, I hope you, dear reader, will indulge me a bit further.
One of the hardest things about being a writer is the gap of time between when one finishes a piece of writing (releasing it to the publisher as edited and complete), and when the damn book actually comes out. At best, it’s a matter of months. Sometimes it’s a year or more. Months or a year between your finishing something and when you have the slightest idea whether anyone will actually LIKE it.
Those months, if my mother will excuse the language, are FUCKING MISERABLE, full of nail-biting and muscle-knotting bouts of anxiety and self-doubt. Did I get it right? Will people like it? Will they get what I was trying to do? Will they think it’s as kickass cool as I do?
You never know, and the waiting can kill you. Not just because the sales numbers and reviews can make or break your career (though they can), but because you released a piece of art in the world, and whether you admit it or not, a lot of your self-esteem is tied into what people think of it.
So it was with RSB. I am a life-long comic fan, and I have talked shit with my friends about many a poorly-written book over the years. How would mine hold up in a debate amongst overeducated, judgmental, middle-age hipsters, like me and my friends? Further, how will it appeal to my fiction readers, who never read a comic in their life and picked this up just to be supportive or completeist? Good lord, what is my mom going to say?
But the first set of reviews are in, and my heart it returning to a normal rate. People seem to like the book. There are some really nice things said by hardcore fans on on the Dynamite Red Sonja: Blue message board.
Also Blair Marnell, clearly a long-time comic reader who is unfamiliar with my prose work, writes an amazing review on Crave Online.
Then there’s Niall Alexander, who is one of my fantasy readers and longtime followers of my blog, who has only recently returned to the comic shop after a long absence. You can read Niall’s excellent review on his blog, The Speculative Scotsman. He has some interesting theories as to why the project has morphed a bit over the last year. He also brilliantly lowers the tone of all reviews everywhere by managing to tie in the subject of queefing, something my agent assures me he could happily have gone to his grave knowing nothing about.
Dude.