WEPAAAA! Barbarella is tearing across lava on a flying ride while Red Sonja is out here walking through a landscape that looks like hope packed its bags and left a forwarding address. Fam, I am already seated. Red Sonja / Barbarella #1 puts two women with very different methods inside a story where somebody clearly should have checked the merchandise before touching it. Homero Rios and Diego Yapur come out with pulp confidence, a sense of mischief and enough ugly scenery to keep the glamour from getting too comfortable. The opening takes its time bringing these personalities together, though. If you bought the ticket strictly for their chemistry, you will spend a chunk of the issue waiting at the gate.

Rios introduces Barbarella with movement, heat and a conversation she is having while doing something dangerous. She is carrying out a mission, trading remarks with Colonel Plate, and making it clear that a superior officer’s anxiety is not going to ruin her style. Her confidence has a playful edge, but the script also lets her question what she is being told. I appreciated that combination. She can be amused by danger without becoming oblivious to it. The lava sequence establishes her approach through action: keep moving, ask questions, and refuse to let somebody else’s stern instructions become the most interesting thing about the day. That is a fun entrance for a character who needs more than a pretty pose.

Sonja’s introduction comes with a different temperature entirely. Her journey moves through wreckage, dead bodies and a landscape full of signs that something has gone terribly wrong. She is looking for answers, but her patience is obviously not available for public use. Rios keeps her dialogue clipped and pointed, letting the surrounding misery provide the context. I like this Sonja’s practical anger. She can recognize a cursed situation without standing around admiring its symbolism. Her exchanges with the figures she meets have that familiar tension between a blade and somebody who thinks they know more than the woman holding it. You can practically feel her deciding how many more words she is willing to tolerate.

Diego Yapur draws the hell out of the contrast. Barbarella’s opening is crowded with motion, machinery and roiling heat, while Sonja’s pages look scraped down to their bones. The ruined landscape has texture everywhere: skulls, broken structures, worn fabric and shapes that turn a distant view into something worth studying. Yapur’s faces can be beautiful without making the surrounding world clean. His characters look capable of sweat, suspicion and sudden violence. The costuming belongs to the pulp vocabulary of these heroines, and the drawing commits to it. Their personalities still come through in posture and expression, so the women remain active presences rather than decorative interruptions to the scenery.

Once the story moves toward the bizarre marketplace material, the design work gets especially delicious. Strange figures, improbable objects and crowded architecture make the place feel like trouble with a vendor permit. The eye has plenty to inspect. The auction environment also gives the crossover a physical mechanism beyond a casual bump across dimensions. An object carries a problem, curiosity does the rest, and suddenly very different lives are colliding. Yapur stages the initial reactions and exchanges with enough energy to make me want more pages of the pair together. A few densely furnished panels demand an extra glance to separate the action from the surrounding detail, but the page flow generally holds steady.

Fares Maese’s colors deserve real love here. Barbarella’s heat and glow arrive in a full blast of orange and gold, while Sonja’s earlier surroundings feel drained and grim. The red hair stays visually forceful against that battered world. When the settings shift, the palette helps your brain change gears before the dialogue has finished identifying the place. Taylor Esposito’s lettering has an equally busy job, from ordinary conversation to communications and those larger bursts of action. The balloons remain navigable through the detailed artwork, and the sound effects belong to the book’s exuberance. Nobody on this team seems embarrassed to be making a loud, strange adventure comic. Good. Commit to the damn meal you are serving.

My biggest complaint is the balance between separate introductions and the actual team-up. Both opening tracks have personality, yet the combined premise is what made me open the book, and that payoff arrives late enough to feel rationed. Some of the marketplace explanation also lands in a cluster, right when I would rather watch these two women argue, improvise and find out whether their methods can coexist. The first issue gives us a solid collision with consequences instead of a complete adventure, which is fair for an opening chapter. Still, I wanted a little more shared breathing room before the next complication tightened around them. These characters have too much potential together to spend all night on introductions.

Rios gives each heroine her own attitude, Yapur supplies a world worth getting lost in, and Maese and Esposito keep the sensory overload readable. The book is richest when its strange environments and blunt personalities are doing the talking. A little less setup and a little more time with both women in the same mess would have pushed this higher for me. As it stands, this is a handsome, mischievous opening with sharp edges and a promisingly crooked destination. Crusaders, if swords, space travel and suspicious magical merchandise sound like your kind of shopping trip, pull up. Just let somebody else test the mirror first, because I am not paying the interdimensional return fee.

Crusaders Score:
4/5

Writer: Homero Rios
Art: Diego Yapur
Colors: Fares Maese
Letters: Taylor Esposito
Editor: Matt Idelson
Cover Art: Joseph Michael Linsner
Publisher: Dynamite Entertainment

More from Comic Crusaders: our conversation with Homero Rios about Red Sonja / Barbarella.

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