Which brings up another issue: I've never read Red Sonja, but it strikes me as a, principally, TnA comic in a similar vein as Tarot (someone correct me if this is inaccurate). And it occurs to me that-that would compound the issue of putting Gail Simone on....anything.
I mean, I can just imagine putting someone like Simone on a character who's a Tarot cousin. Why the fuck would anyone want to buy that? Her approach would totally defeat the book's purpose.
I'm expecting a lot of Batman-type preparedness, explaining how a chick in an armoured bra can repeatedly kill large, battle-scarred Conan-types. Through smarts. Chick smarts. Yes.
Which has some appeal to me, to be honest: a lot of what I liked about Birds of Prey, and indeed Mike Carey's Lucifer, Morrison's Batman in JLA, and certainly Warren Ellis' Simon Spektor and Planetary, was the ability of the protagnoists to outthink their often more powerful opponents. As Carey wrote in Lucifer of Lucifer's defeat of The Basanos, "It is possible to have a good hand and play it badly." So, I'm half expecting that Simone's Red Sonja would involve a lot of the character playing a bad hand well.
Whether it is a poor cousin to a T&A book like Tarot, or indeed that dreadful thing published by Broadsword Comics, or whether Red Sonja is just Conan the Barbarian with tits, is neither here nor there. Any franchise can be saved by good writing (Alan Moore's Supreme is a great example of that).
