Saga SW and Willow in a Red Sonja comic. Really.

The comic in question is a 4-issue miniseries, "The Black Tower" by Frank Tieri and Cezar Razek, and it is weird as all heck. So weird that I have to summarize it on this forum, but can't hope to do it justice.

I bought this series a few months back, and... well... let's just say that I was both gobsmacked and utterly unsurprised by the plot.

Issue #1

Okay. So the Black Tower from the title just appears one day in the little medieval town of Lur. Two people - a man with black hair and a blonde woman, both wearing silver crowns - emerge from it. (Silver crowns? How very Tolkien.) They are immediately attacked by a mob who take them for demons.

The mob kills the man, but the woman is saved when Red Sonja arrives and fends off the attackers. In the process she cuts off the right hands of a dark-haired pair of identical twin lookalikes, a man and a woman. (These two are characters from Trinity - that is, the unreleased sequel to Willow.)

Sonja also defeats the leader of the mob, Fengar Tolt, by castrating him. Meat and veg. He survives, however, because a surgeon treats his wounds later on.

The surviving woman retreats into the Black Tower, but the dead man's crown is still lying on the ground. Fengar Tolt's lieutenant, Bilas Mar - who has a severely broken nose courtesy of Sonja - takes it up and proclaims that the Black Tower's inhabitants are not demons, but gods to be worshipped. The townsfolk, who had been ready to rip their gods asunder mere moments ago, readily agree.

Red Sonja, disgusted by this display of idolatry, leaves.

Issue #2

Fast-forward a number of years. Bilas Mar is dead, immolated by her own priests. The religion she founded now employs a huge number of women, the Sisters of the Black Tower. And all of them are drawn wearing the getup worn by Jean Marsh in Willow.

(A choice quote: "They [the priestesses] sought to quell the oncoming storm." "The Oncoming Storm," a name later appropriated by Russell T Davies of Doctor Who, was the Elves' name for Bavmorda in early versions of Willow.)

With Bilas Mar's death, Fengar Tolt eventually became ruler of Lur. The castrated king (but is he a Fisher King?) wants revenge on Red Sonja for the loss of his manhood.

So Sonja is captured and sentenced to die in the arena for Tolt's amusement. She now wears an eyepatch: turns out the twins who lost their hands back in issue #1 have since given Sonja some scars of her own. Said twins are now sporting crossbows attached to their right arms.

Anyways, Sonja defeats her opponents, kills the twins, and throws Tolt into his own arena. He survives, however, because his lieutenants surround Sonja.

But then the doors of the Black Tower open, and out comes... an army of robots with black bodies and chrome faces. Either they're long-lost family relations of Jack Kirby's Darkseid, or else they're modeled after the black-clad police robots from THX 1138.

And they're all wielding red lightsabers.

Seriously.

Red Sonja, disturbed by this violation of copyright, flees.

Issue #3

Fast-forward a couple of years. (Yawn...)

"The Soulless" (as the Sith police robots are known) keep order in Lur. They enforce the rule of the Sisterhood of the Black Tower with iron fists, ruthlessly stamping out other religions and severely punishing anyone deemed to be a criminal.

Fengar Tolt is captured by the Sith police robots and put in a futuristic torture device. It causes him to swell up and explode. For some reason, he doesn't survive.

Red Sonja, now with white streaks in her red hair, leads an army to take the Tower. She rides a dragon into battle, but her dragon is killed and her army defeated. The armaments of the Soulless -- that is to say, black Trade Federation-style hovertanks with laser cannons -- are superior to her medieval weaponry.

Sonja charges into the Sith robots in a suicidal attempt to turn the tide, but they surround her.

Just then, however, the door of the Black Tower opens again, and out steps a new fellow, covered head to foot in purple and chrome armor - Thraxis, the Lord of the Black Tower. The Soulless begin chanting "Hail Thraxis!" as this guy makes his appearance.

Thraxis (or should that be Þraxis, with an Old English letter?) rather immodestly takes up the shouts of "Hail Thraxis" himself. Sonja responds with a two-word phrase vulgar enough that the comic bleeps out the entire first word.

Then Thraxis beheads her with his red lightsaber.

Red Sonja, having lost her head, dies.

Issue #4

More years have passed. (Really? -ed.) Thraxis now appears personally in public from time to time, to lord it over his empire in Lur. He takes advantage of his role as priest-king by having nubile young women brought in every night to sleep with him.

One of these women is a redhead with a marked resemblance to Sonja. She gets him in bed -- where Thraxis turns out to be a pasty white guy with a dodgy neckbeard -- and he tells her his origin story.

Turns out the Black Tower was a time-travel device, and his parents (the man and woman from the first comic) were time travellers. Their machine was damaged on arrival in Red Sonja's world, so they went out to do repairs. At which point they were attacked by the mob, and Thraxis' father was killed.

(Also, in early Willow concept art by Moebius, Madmartigan had black hair and Sorsha was blonde. So those two were thinly disguised cameos?)

His mother retreated to the Black Tower, where she gave birth to Thraxis and died in labor. Thraxis was raised by the robots who maintained the Tower - the "Soulless".

Thraxis takes the nameless woman to his trophy room, where among various severed heads, Red Sonja's head is mounted on the wall.

And then Nameless Woman stabs Thraxis to death. She gives him a speech about how her past is unknown even to her. Maybe she's the daughter of Red Sonja? Maybe she's a clone? Maybe she's a reincarnation? Whatever it was, she's monologuing like she wants to get a job as understudy to Lex Luthor.

(More seriously: the multiple-choice options for resurrecting a dead heroine were a key feature of the branching plotline of Worldsend, the third Willow film.)

So Nameless cuts off Thraxis' head. And then she fires up his time machine, now fully functional, to go back into the past...

...and stab Thraxis' pregnant mother in the womb, preventing his dystopian reign from ever occurring. (Ouch.)

As Nameless fades away like Marty McFly, Bilas Mar runs for the hills, forgetting all thoughts of the crown lying in the dust...

...just as Red Sonja rides into the town of Lur, curious about the Black Tower on the horizon.


I can't even begin to do justice to how strange this comic is. More to the point, why didn't Lucasfilm sue the pants off Dynamite Comics for this?

My theory: Because such a comic was one way of spreading clues about the secret Lucas/Spielberg time capsule... including among other things the complete Willow film trilogy.