Red Sonja

Red Sonja — The Complete Comic King Guide

Red Sonja arrived in February 1973, in somebody else’s comic, in the last few panels. Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor-Smith dropped her into Conan the Barbarian #23 and she has been in print more or less continuously for fifty-three years since — through Marvel, a small specialist publisher in 1999, and Dynamite from 2005 to this month.

Two things about her are worth knowing before you buy anything, and both of them surprise people who have been collecting for years.

The first is that she is not Conan’s, and never has been in any legal sense. Red Sonja is owned by a company called Red Sonja, LLC. Conan is owned by an entirely different one. They have been separate for decades, which is why Marvel’s Conan licence never included her, why the two of them almost never cross over any more, and why — the part that genuinely startles people — the 1970s Marvel Red Sonja comics are reprinted today by Dynamite rather than by Marvel.

The second is that the famous first appearance is probably not the book you want. That one needs a section of its own.

And a word on what these are actually like to read, since the collecting question tends to drown it out. The 1970s Marvel run is a genuine oddity — Frank Thorne drew most of her first self-titled series and his Hyboria is scratchier, stranger and more genuinely pulp than the Conan books running alongside it. It has aged better than its reputation. The modern Dynamite run is a different proposition again, and the reason to take it seriously is the names on it: Gail Simone wrote the 2013 volume and it is the one longtime readers point at, Mark Russell wrote a later one, and Christopher Priest is writing an alternate-continuity version right now. This is not a licensed book that nobody cared about. It has had better writers than most company-owned characters get.

Quick Facts

Story: A sword-for-hire in Robert E. Howard’s Hyborian Age, under a vow that she will never lie with a man who has not beaten her in a fair fight. She started as a supporting character in Conan and outlived the arrangement.
Length: Fifty-three years, four publishers. Marvel 1973 to 1996, a small Robert E. Howard specialist in 1999, and Dynamite continuously since 2005.
Status: ★ LIVE and being published now. Red Sonja: She-Devil With A Sword launched in May 2026 and is solicited through October.
Publisher: ⚠ Dynamite — and here is the part that surprises people. She is owned by Red Sonja, LLC, which is NOT the company that owns Conan.
Different owners, unrelated. That is why they hardly ever cross over.
Age guide: ⚠ Dynamite rates the interiors TEEN PLUS. The covers are a separate conversation — a lot of the variant tier is pin-up art,
and we would rather talk you through that than quote you a code.
Formats: A ten-dollar pocket edition · a 648-page omnibus of the entire 1970s Marvel run · the Gail Simone collection · and one of the largest variant families in comics.
At Comic King: We check four different books when a Red Sonja collection comes in, and three of them do not have her name on the cover.

The First Appearance Isn’t the Book You Want.

Conan the Barbarian #23 is her first appearance. It is not in dispute and we will happily sell you one. But look at what you are actually getting.

She is not on the cover. That is a Gil Kane cover of Conan with no Sonja anywhere on it, and we checked that against descriptions of the cover art rather than taking anyone’s word for it. ⚠ How much of her is inside is genuinely disputed — some accounts have her entering late and briefly, others describe a substantial role across twenty-odd panels, and we have not been able to settle it. That disagreement is exactly why two different labels circulate on slabbed copies, and why some dealers sell #23 as a cameo. We will tell you the argument rather than pick a side for you.

Conan the Barbarian #24, the following month, is the other half of the story. She is on the cover — pencilled, inked and coloured by Barry Windsor-Smith, in what turned out to be his last issue on the book. The grading companies label #24 as her first full appearance. So the two books circulate with two different labels, both of them defensible, and customers arrive confused.

Here is our honest read, and it goes against what most shops will tell you. The book to buy is #24.

It costs less. It is her first cover and her first full appearance. And when we looked at what happened to both books after last year’s film, #24 held up roughly twice as well as #23 did — and the number of high-grade #24s entering the market grew at about half the rate. Same story, lower price, less overhang. If you want one Red Sonja book, that is the one.

Then there are two more books, and this is where it gets genuinely interesting, because neither of them has her name on the cover either.

In both 1973 issues she is wearing a long-sleeved mail shirt and red shorts. Not the scale-mail bikini. That design came from a Spanish artist called Esteban Maroto, who drew it unasked and posted it to Roy Thomas — it was never commissioned and never licensed, Marvel simply liked it and adopted it. Its first appearance in an actual comic is The Savage Sword of Conan #1, from August 1974. So the character debuts in one book and starts looking like herself in a different one, a year and a half later.

And her origin — the murdered family, the vow, the deity who grants her the sword-skill on condition she never lies with a man who has not beaten her in a fair fight — is in a third place again: Kull and the Barbarians #3, from 1975. A black-and-white magazine, Howard Chaykin art, Michael Whelan painted cover. The grading companies’ own note on that issue reads "Origin Red Sonja."

That book is roughly forty-eight times scarcer than Conan #23 on the certified census — around fifty copies against two and a half thousand — and it sits in bins at about an eighth of the price. We are not going to promise you it will move, because it barely trades in a graded state at all. But it is a real origin issue at bin money and hardly anybody recognises it.

Four books before she is the character on the poster. Three of them under somebody else’s masthead.

The Run, Era by Era

Fifty-three years and four publishers, with a genuine gap in the middle where she nearly disappeared.

The Keys — Issues Everyone Hunts

The four books above are the whole list. Everything else in this franchise, across all four publishers, is bin material with the covers checked — and we would rather tell you that than pad the list out.

Two checks are worth running on any old copy, and they point in opposite directions depending on the decade.

On the 1973 books, look for a British pence price on the cover. Those copies are about seventy-six times scarcer than the American ones — thirty-three certified against two and a half thousand — and here is the counter-intuitive part: they sell for less. Four separate realised sales run between fifteen and seventy-three percent below an American copy in the same grade. It is the cleanest demonstration we have found anywhere that scarcity is not value without demand, and it means you should not pay a premium for one.

On the 1983 to 1986 Marvel issues, look for a Canadian price instead — and there the opposite applies. Sixteen of those Canadian variants exist on the certified census, roughly one copy in fifteen to twenty-five, and no price guide has an entry for a single one of them. There is not one recorded Canadian variant sale in the database we use. If you have a run of eighties Red Sonja in a box, those are worth pulling out, and we will look at them with you rather than pricing them off a book that does not cover them.

While we are on price guides: one of the entries for the 1985 film adaptation is labelled as the Canadian edition and is built entirely out of sales of the ordinary American copy. Its top-grade figure comes from a single sale that cannot possibly be the book it is filed under, because only one copy of that variant has ever been certified and it is not in that grade. We mention it because it is the sort of thing that gets quoted at people, and it is fiction.

On grading: it clears on three books here and even then barely. Conan #23 needs to come back at a fairly high grade to be worth submitting, Conan #24 and Savage Sword #1 a notch lower — and at those threshold grades the margin is small enough to disappear in a bad month. Every Dynamite Red Sonja is a guaranteed loss in a slab, including a top-grade one, because the book is worth a few dollars raw and the fee is not.

And one warning that runs the other way. Conan #23 is simultaneously the most liquid raw book on this character and the worst one to own in a high-grade slab — its top-grade population has nearly doubled in two years while the number of copies actually changing hands has halved. Buy it raw. We would not advise buying it, taking it in trade, or consigning it as a high-grade slab at anything like the published figure.

Every Format You Can Buy

Routing on this one is easy. Ten dollars gets you the Compact Edition and nine issues of the modern relaunch. Sixty gets you the entire 1970s Marvel run in one book. Forty gets you Gail Simone’s. If you are collecting rather than reading, it is the four books above and nothing else.

Screen & Series Status

Updated August 2026: there is nothing announced, and last year’s film is the story.

Red Sonja, directed by M. J. Bassett and starring Matilda Lutz, was released in the United States on 13 August 2025 — for one day only, as a limited booking — and went to streaming sixteen days later. It reviewed better than its reputation suggests, in the mid-fifties on the main aggregator, but it reported essentially no theatrical box office. The two public trackers disagree on the number and both figures are tiny, which is what happens when a film plays a single day and then goes to video.

We measured what it did to the comics, and the answer is worth the space.

In the twelve months after that release, Conan #23 in top grade fell by over a fifth. Conan #24 fell about half as much. A control book — Conan #1, same run, same era, same kind of buyer, with no Red Sonja in it at all — was essentially flat over the same period, and a basket of nineteen other Conan issues was down about six percent. So the decline was specific to the Sonja books rather than a general Bronze Age slump.

And the reason is not that people lost interest. It is supply. The number of certified top-grade copies of Conan #23 went from around fifty to around a hundred in two years, with the sharpest jump in the six months before the film came out — people graded their copies in anticipation. Then a one-day release delivered no new demand to absorb them, and the number of copies actually trading halved. More slabs, fewer sales, lower prices. The population is still climbing, so we would not expect that discount to close on its own.

The 1985 film is the other one people ask about. Brigitte Nielsen, with Arnold Schwarzenegger in support, and he has called it the worst film he has ever made — he jokes about threatening his children with it. It is not a good movie and we are not going to pretend otherwise. It made about a third of its budget back.

Nothing else is announced. No sequel, no series, no animation. The character’s fiftieth-anniversary licensing push in 2023 went into figures, statues, apparel and a set of prose novels written by Gail Simone rather than into anything on a screen.

Collector's Corner — Grading, Care & We Buy

★ BUY ON SIGHT: Conan the Barbarian #24 from 1973, raw, in very fine or better. It is her first cover and first full appearance, it trades roughly fifteen times a month, and it costs less than the book everyone chases. Check for a pence price on the cover — if it is there, pay less, not more.

Second on the list, and a genuinely overlooked one: Marvel Feature #1 from 1975, her first solo book. It is the cleanest data we looked at on this entire character — every sales bucket we opened was free of contamination, which almost never happens — and it is an inexpensive book with a real market.

When a collection comes in we check four things, and only one of them says Red Sonja on the cover. Conan #23. Conan #24. Savage Sword of Conan #1. Kull and the Barbarians #3. Two of those are black-and-white magazines that get filed with the magazines and forgotten, and the origin issue in particular turns up in bins constantly because nobody is looking for it under the name Kull.

Modern Dynamite Red Sonja arrives in a completely different shape — usually as a pile of variant covers from someone who bought them as an investment. We sort those honestly. Most of the pile is ordinary stock and a small number of covers carry real money, and the published guide will not reliably tell you which is which. About a third of the priced variant entries rest on a single sale, and one of those sales is over three years old.

On print runs: there are none published for any of these books, and that is a verified absence rather than something we failed to find. The industry’s circulation archive carries no data at all for Conan, Red Sonja, Savage Sword, Marvel Feature or Kull, and none for any title before the mid-nineties. If someone quotes you a print run on a 1973 Conan, they made it up.

On care: 1970s Marvel paper is fragile and the magazines are worse, because they were larger, thinner and stored badly. Bag and board the comics, and store the black-and-white magazines flat rather than upright if you can — the spines on those roll.