Red Sonja: Monster Isle
DYNAMITE
WRITER: Roy Thomas
ARTIST: Pablo Marcos
COVERS: Pablo Marcos & Cliff Chiang

Review by Larry Stanley

One of the last places you would expect to find a good looking red-headed barbarian would be on a little place called "Monster Island!" A sweet little vacation paradise smack loaded with beasties, brutes and malformed men of every description.
But that is just what Dynamite! has done with our beloved Red Sonja. And what a fun book it turned into. A one shot that is excellent and a worthy addition to the series.
Sonja is washed up on a beach with flashbacks showing a fierce storm, the sinking ship, and how she, Captain Toho and several of the crew came to be there, and before you can say "Cro..." uhm.. Never mind.
Lets just say that things quickly start to get a bit odd.
No one writes barbarian stories like Roy Thomas, and once more he demonstrates that ability by dropping our busty heroine into the Island of Doctor Moreau. And while the story is certainly a homage to Wells' classic, Roy tosses his own visions in here and there.
As the survivlors fight to stay alive, they find themselves attacked by vicious creatures that are a mixture of man and beast.
When Sonja and Toho meet Zarkovo, he explains the history of the island as a prison he was the warden of. He tells them how he discovered some ancient writings which taught him to use sorcery to mix human and animal. And of course, he plans to do the same to Sonja and Captain Toho.
And this, sports fans is not something we can expect our brave beauty to like, enjoy or accept.
Ok, so Zarkovo is a bit to much like a boring Moreau, but the action keeps going on and on. The final battle with the almost all powerful man-creature, a mixture of man and bull.
Marcos's art is very good, fitting the story and vision that we are presented with. While he sometimes makes Sonja a bit more muscular then I would have liked, she looks a bit more of the warrior I would have expected.