BELIT & VALERIA: SWORDS VS SORCERY

by Max Bemis, Rodney Buchemi (Artist)

Robert E. Howard's Hyboria UNLEASHED! See its true nature, its unrestrained violence and sexuality!

Rising from a watery grave, Belit once again finds herself commanding a ship, sailing the seas in search of adventure...and answers. But when a deal goes wrong, she finds herself teamed up with the woman she was holding prisoner: the equally beautiful and deadly, Valeria.

These two iconic characters will find themselves traveling across Hyperborea on a mission to find out how Belit lives once again that will lead them straight into danger...from the gods themselves!

Collected edition includes the hit 5 issue series, complete cover gallery plus as a bonus, contains Robert E. Howard prose featuring first appearance of Belit, Valeria and the origin of the Hyborian Age!

Genres: Comics, Graphic Novels, Fantasy

144 pages, Paperback

Published January 18, 2023

Reviews

[Alex Sarll]

Well, that was a mess. And I don't just mean the wrinkles of copyright law whereby there can be an official Conan comics licence, which Marvel just lost for the second time (to Titan, I believe), but also unofficial Conan comics published by Ablaze, from which this is spun off. We open on Valeria awaking under the sea bed, spitting out a crab, and walking on to the shore, where she asks a convenient bevy of mermaids "Any of you bitches know where a well-mannered lass can get properly fucked?" First thought: disappointingly heteronormative when there's a bunch of comely mermaids literally sat right there. But OK, definitely establishes the character, and that's bolstered when she finds a suitable tavern and enters with the line "Attention! Gutter-apes! Fetch me some of that grapeless wheat-piss you neanderthals use to kill your scant brain-cells. And supply me with the most formidable cock amongst you...if the rest of you can stand to part with it." Which...yes, on one level I absolutely love the idea of a pirate-queen who routinely holds forth with the same level of bombast as Drs Nemesis and Doom. But that last bit sounds like she's going to tear the guy's cock off, doesn't it? Which is not implausible, but we soon see is very much not her plan. And this keeps happening, a tendency towards grand speechifying at all times which would be thoroughly entertaining if only someone had read it all back at some stage and ensured that, underneath the browbeating and bluster, it was actually clear what was being said. Worse – a high proportion of the cast talk in some variant of this register, and even the ones who don't are still prone to the same head-scratching deployment of words and lines which don't quite say what they seem to be meant to say. There's a speech by a wizard at one point, about how it can be possible that magicians are even vulnerable to any attack by dolts with swords, which I think might have had a good point in there somewhere, if only a decent editor had given it a going-over. As is, it just gave the impression that magic is in theory simply a case of magic-users being able to do anything they can conceive of, which is pretty much exactly how you're not meant to write magic in fantasy, last time I checked. But then even that title makes me worry about how well this team grasp the workings of fantasy. Swords Vs. Sorcery doesn't work as a riff, because that's already the default setting of swords and sorcery. It's like calling something Cats Vs. Dogs, or Cowboys Vs. Indians – you haven't put a twist on the pairing, you've just said it wrong. And this is a shame, because I would absolutely be in the market for a comic which succeeded at what this one is doing, having its cake and eating it by leaning in to everything associated with scantily-clad fantasy heroines (hell, there's even a mud-wrestling scene) while also both massively taking the piss and proposing a grand, conceptual explanation for why this improbable setting is like this in the first place. And the reason I grabbed this from Edelweiss, when I haven't bothered with Ablaze's previous Conan stuff, is that Max Bemis seemed like a writer who could deliver that – even aside from the entirely ridiculous but also quite moving Worst X-Man Ever, his meta issue of Black Terror was an absolute treat. But this one is in that annoying position where you can tell it could have been beaten into shape, given a little time and care, but instead it's been left to stumble out into the world in this malformed state.

[Nicholas Perez]

Judging from the preview and reviews, this will probably be crap despite the artwork. Nevertheless I will soldier on.

[Quentin Wallace · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 Stars

This was a mess. I will say upfront I liked the art, that was by far the best part of the series. But the story just lost me. For one thing, as other reviews have stated, this was very crude. The crassness just didn't fit characters created by Robert E. Howard. And keep in mind, Conan comics have always been a little ribald, but this was was beyond that.

If you can ignore the crudeness, this didn't start out too bad. But then about halfway through the story lost me. I'm not even sure exactly what was going on for the second half.

If you want to see some decent art this is worth checking out, but overall I didn't care for this one.

[Carl Grider · Rating 2 out of 5]

the art was pretty good. the rest was just WTF from start to finish. crazy and hard to follow. some times just way to much dialogue and the font used for like the journal entries was a pain to read.i would have given one star but the art seems to deserve more

[Petri Manninen · Rating 1 out of 5]

The artwork is quite ok, but that's about it. I think this whole mess is meant for teenage boys... I've always loved the world Howard created for Conan, and I think this comic does not do justice to it. It's almost a shame that Howard's name is used in this context.

[Ben Duerksen · Rating 1 out of 5]

The artwork is the only thing worthwhile about this series. It’s complete trash unless you just want to flip through and see colorful drawings.

[Rick Ray · Rating 1 out of 5]

Having enjoyed a lot of the Conan/Cimmerian related adaptations coming from Ablaze, I thought I'd give Bêlit & Valeria a shot. Oof, what a mess this comic is. The dialogue is completely off-tone, with way too much emphasis put on modern colloquialisms that just feel out of place for this kind of storytelling. I don't mind excess swearing, but this is dialed up to unfathomable levels of edginess. I don't know if this was meant to be slapstick or not, but it definitely reads that way.

The story follows Bêlit, the newly resurrected pirate queen, joining forces with the dangerous sorceress Valeria. They navigate the deadly world of the male gaze and try their best not to succumb to the sexual whims of the men around them. Again, I'm no prude but there are some laughably silly bits of raunchiness that just make this seem like an excuse to draw nude women to excess. I did quite like Rodney Buchemi's work on the interiors, despite the exaggerated feminine features. The colors are well done, and there are some moments of great panel compositions.

Overall, not a recommendation in the slightest from me. The lacking script is only exacerbated by the fact that Ablaze reprints the original Robert E. Howard story in the back showing just how loose of an adaptation this really was.

[Theediscerning · Rating 1 out of 5]

Thankfully this utter guff offered many reasons why I was perfectly justified in stopping reading it – the squidged-up cursive that required zooming in on too much, the horrendous writing, the wannabe edgy way with words, the bad artwork that can get us round a female figure perfectly and not much else… For young virgin lads only.

[Susanna · Rating 3 out of 5]

Definitely for the male gaze. The plot was a collection of imaginative stories a bard tells about Belit, the pirate queen, and Valeria, the sorcerer that didn't make much sense. Illustrations are full colour and beautiful, but for all that the description promises sexuality, they're very prudish. Violence is graphic.

[Victor Sanchez · Rating 1 out of 5]

Yesh, they were not lying. This is a terrible comic.

I don't like Robert E. Howard prose and I think his conan stories are among the weakest of the franchise, but this is just insulting. If you want to write Conan porn, just write it. Not this pseudo sexy andventure that was, in all possible ways, just an immature first introduciton to adult comics and sword and sorcery.

[Adam Fisher · Rating 3 out of 5]

Review submitted to Diamond Bookshelf for potential professional publication.

[J.A. Flynn · Rating 2 out of 5]

While I really liked the gory and nudity-filled artwork, the story was confusing. It was just so wordy and not really Howard-ish enough for my liking.