Zeb Larson reviews New Praetorians volume one…

New Praetorians is an interesting new series by RK Syrus and Satine Phoenix about a female soldier, an alien artifact, and a woman looking for vengeance. There are a few intriguing thematic ideas at work here, beyond the cool action scenes, particularly in regard to gender and sex in comic books. I will not be discussing any spoilers from the first volume, so feel free to read on.

Sienna McKnight is sitting as a captive in a cell in Khorasan, captured during an attempt to find a man known as the Scythe of Heaven. Sienna’s part of a covert military team outfitted with experimental technology derived from something called the Ansible. Sienna has been implanted with a cold-fusion powered rail unit that allows her to fire highly focused blasts of force. One of the members of that team is her adopted father, Brian. When Sienna gets captured while on a mission, her teammates must try to go back and rescue her. Sienna is no docile captive either, but her captors are not going to play nice. Somehow, her situation is connected to the Scythe of Heaven, and she wants to find him for her own reasons.

Syrus and Phoenix use the back pages of the book as an appendix of sorts to fill in the backstory and context of the story. Alas, there are some minor typos which break the reader’s suspension of disbelief. Mach 8 is not 760 MPH, but closer to 6,100 MPH. Still, the format works well and fills in some of the gaps in the reader’s understanding. I’m hoping that subsequent installments will give us some additional political context. As Khorarsan is a fictional country, some history would be enlightening.

I think there’s an interesting statement being made here as well about sexuality. Several of the characters discuss sex, but there’s no sexualization of the women at any point. Sienna’s not dressed in a ludicrously revealing and impractical outfit, nor is she discussing her sex life for the benefit of the listener. To a certain extent, I think the creators are trying to subvert an ugly trope about women in comics, which is the conflation of sexual liberation with sexual availability for the male viewer or reader. Here, the characters have active sex lives, but they’re not offering up a lot of details for the viewer, and the sex is reserved for the characters only.

Balancing the depiction of sex in this issue is how to write a female character. In other books, there’s a dichotomy between the oversexualized woman or the woman who is written as a man. Sienna avoids falling into either depiction. While she has plenty of moments of toughness and violence that might be thought of masculine (in the traditional sense), she also has moments where her behavior might be construed as traditionally feminine. She’s allowed to exist in both spheres, which rounds out the character.

The artwork for the book is solid. There are a couple of panels in which the characters appear somewhat rigid and the shading isn’t quite thick enough. It’s more than offset for me by the last two pages of the book, because the colors become much more fantastic and the shapes surreal. That suggests two things. One, we will have a lot of fun artwork to look at in the coming issues. Two, it also may mean that what Sienna is looking for will be more mind-bending than just a terrorist. There’s alien technology at work here that doesn’t appear to be well-understood by any of the characters.

Overall, this book is off to a good start. I’d like to see some more exposition about the world at large, and some dialogue and character development with the rest of Sienna’s team. There’s plenty of time for that to happen though. I look forward to the next offering.

Zeb Larson