Swords of Sorrow: The Complete Saga

Swords of Sorrow: The Complete Saga is an epic book, and I do mean EPIC! It runs to 504 pages and features all 21 issues of Dynamite Entertainment's biggest crossover event to date. The actual Swords of Sorrow story itself only took up six issues but it also featured many spin-off mini-series and one-shots. I only collected the six issue main series and the four issue mini-series featuring Vampirella. So, much of this TPB was new to me. It was written by Gail Simone with help on the mini-series and one-shots from Emma Bebby, Nancy A. Collins, Mikki Kendall, Leah Moore, Erica Schultz, Mairghread Scott and G. Willow Wilson, and featuring artwork by Sergio Davila (main series), Dave Acosta, Mirka Andolfo, Ronilson Freire, Francesco Manna, Rod Rodolfo, Noah Salonga and Crizam Zamora!THE STORY. A mysterious woman known only as The Traveller journeys across time, space and dimensions, bestowing magical ebony blades (the eponymous Swords of Sorrow) to a trio of female adventurers - Dejah Thoris, Red Sonja and Vampirella. Her mission is to prepare a last line of defence against the Prince of All Universes, a lovelorn despot with the power to shatter realities. To further aid the heroic trio, the Traveller also enlists the aid of other mighty women such as Athena, Black Sparrow, Eva (Daughter of Dracula), Irene Adler, Jane Porter (aka Lady Greystoke), Jennifer Blood, Jana the Jungle Girl, Kato, Lady Rawhide, Lady Zorro, Masquerade, Miss Fury, Pantha, Red and Voodoo Childe. These women were also given magical blades. United by the Swords of Sorrow, these spirited women must face not only the Prince's powerful Shard Men, but such agents of Chaos as Bad Kitty, Chastity, Mistress Hel and Purgatori.The heroines are recruited in diverse pairs, which we as readers get to know more about through the one-shot issues and mini-series. These teams-ups feature in alphabetical order, Black Sparrow and Lady Zorro (one-shot), the Chaos Quartet prequel (one shot), Dejah Thoris and Irene Adler (3 part mini-series), Masquerade and Kato (one-shot), Miss Fury and Lady Rawhide (one-shot), Pantha and Jane Porter (one-shot), Red Sonja and Jungle Girl (3 part mini-series) and Vampirella and Jennifer Blood (4 part mini-series).From the introduction to the book, Gail Simone writes, "You will notice these stories run concurrently and some issues take place in small moments during others. So you may ask: How do I go about reading this? We have presented the saga in the order that the issues were published to preserve continuity. This way, you will read the story as it originally unfolded, and won't come to the end of one series and have to backtrack by starting another. This is how we recommend reading this story... at least the first time." This works perfectly fine for me although I have read some folk criticising the book for being too confusing. Nah! It isn't!THE VERDICT. I bloody well loved it! Yes, every single page! Obviously, my main focus was upon Vampirella (my favourite comics character) and she was well served in terms of screen time, scripting and artwork. The team up between Vampi and Jennifer Blood worked extremely well. Some of the team-ups seemed a little odd, like Dejah Thoris and Irene Adler, but worked surprisingly well. What made this series work so brilliantly was the quality of the writing. Gail collected the best female writers in the business and got them to pull out all the stops, making full use of their talent and energy. Obviously with so many artists working on the series the artwork varies but thankfully, none of it is sub-standard. Overall, the quality is good to very good. Going back to Gail's introduction, she wrote, "for THIS crossover, I didn't want the usual boring stuff. I wanted a rough and tumble, fun and sexy, scary and action-packed classic epic. Subtlety be damned. I wanted something that felt like the creators of all these characters got together in a room after a three-day bender and just JAMMED. So that's what we did. We assembled a team of the best writers and artists we could find and just threw every firecracker we could right into the gunpowder factory. I hope you like it." Oh, I did! I liked it very much! In fact I like it enough to award it a 5 star rating. I have no hesitation in recommending this TPB to any one with even a passing interest in comics. Ultimately though, how much you will want to buy this will depend very much on how you feel about the characters portrayed within its pages and also your feelings on "girl power." This book is ALL about girl power and I certainly don't have a problem with that!

The idea is great, the end result was a little bit of a mess where the characters take forever to join up and some of the characters I was not that sure of but you have all the usual characters from Dynamite and it all sort of works out in the end - if you are a fan of any of the characters then you will need to add this book to your collection. Why did they miss out Barbarella ?? There is a new comic out soon that seems to be doing much the same thing with all the women meeting up again so perhaps Jane Fonda will turn up in that one and also they won't need the heavy endless build up of the teams. Still, great art generally as well as story if not fairly all over the place

A great series. With a cast of Dynamite's whole female cast in a company wide cross over. Things needed to be done right. The artwork is great, but does vary between the one shots, main and mini series, but I liked all the styles used. The story is a bit of a Grimm fairytale which for spoiler reason I am not going to say anymore.To be honest the main Dynamite characters I usually follow are Red Sonja, And Kato. I know of the other main characters to some degree, so I saw this a my chance to learn more about them. I have to say I am impressed. The series is done extremely well. I especially like Irene Adler (in Sir Authur Conan Doyle's original stories she was the "woman" when bested Holmes). Being a Sherlock Holmes fan myself I really enjoyed in the her parts of the comic, she is every bit a match for the great Sherlock Holmes. After this I will definitely be trying to track down more of her stories.There were two things I would have criticised about the book. The first is it seemed a bit rushed in places, there were times I turned the page and wondered if I missed something and went back to the last page to make sure a couple of pages were not stuck together. The second is a more personal thing I wish Kato had a bigger part, but that is just as she is one of my personal faverite.This huge saga spans 15 issues. An extremely powerful being called the Prince wants to recreate reality to suit him. To help him he has enlisted the most powerful villains of the reality promising each of the their greatest desire. However standing in his way is the Traveler. Another being with the power to control rifts into reality to recruit her own general she gives them the Swords of Sorrow, the only weapons that can kill the undead. This is a girl power story is if anyone has a problem with that don't bother getting it. However if you like epic sagas, with beautiful but deadly women read this. I do also like the part where most of the women are not really heroes I love the quote "Oh Darling... I'm afraid you've made the terrible mistake of thinking we're the good guys". There are not the women that will break your heart, but rip it out and feed it to you. You also have the cover galleries of all the covers as thumbnail about 1/4 of a page. The comic is well over 500 pages. So it is even great value for money.

You might think it a tall order to weave a coherent narrative with a story featuring so many characters from so many contributers... and you'd be right.This has it's moments and Gail Simone's story comes the closest to a decent arc. But it's, quite frankly, a bit all over the place. It doesn't help that I had never heard of more than half the characters, and the writers didn't exactly have the space to expand on each one to make you either understand who they were or why you should care.I was here for Red Sonja and Vampirella and, hence, for Simone and Collins. I guess, if I could extract those elements and dump the rest, I'd feel more positive about this reading experience.Worth a try, and try they did. But crossovers are rarely great.

I think buying this book like with a lot of other TPBs is better than buying all the comics, and cheaper too. Epic story featuring all the female characters from Dynamite Comics.