Don't get a big head now, Brian

Can we please discuss, just for a moment, the beauty that is Northlanders?

I mean, I've been riding Brian Wood's proverbial bandwagon for ages now, and you guys are probably sick of me going on and on about things like how awesome Local is, or much I enjoyed reading every story in Demo, or how excited I was when Brian sent me a copy of Supermarket IN ITALIAN!!!, but seriously. This thing is (if he's even at his crest yet,) truly his magnum opus.

Given that this line is only 5 issues in, I understand that this is no small claim.

However, I reply:

Have you read the friggin' thing?

My gosh, man. The beauty of it. The vast storytelling. The way I read this book is unlike any other I've gotten into since my "revival" a few years ago. I care about Sven. (And goshdarn it, I'll lay it out there, he's damned sexy.) But beyond that, the story is reaching around him in a way that you can't help but do anything other than hold your breath for the next issue.

This most recent one was the icing on the cake for me. We finally get a little bit of Sven's background, and an idea of who he is, where he came from, and why he's acting the way he is. (Although of course, not too good of an idea...) I can't believe for one, that this is coming at issue 5, and I'm not even bored yet. When was the last time you read a comic and didn't get a lick of back story until issue 5? Shit, when was the last time you read a #1 and cared, for that matter?

To be honest, period pieces don't generally work for me. I find it hard to relate to something taking place in a time that I've never experienced and haven't really been exposed to. (Follett's Pillars of the Earth did a good job of overcoming this for me, but many authors, regardless of medium, fail in this.) We don't have, as a culture, a great many viking stories. (And almost none with any sort of depth.) Other than Thor, and his dad Odin, what else do we know? That they wore horned helmets and had cool looking ships? That they pillaged and got drunk?

This comic injects more color into a boring subject for me than anything I've ever read before. It's not a history lesson, it's a modern-day story set in a distant past.

And to be honest, 1000 years suddenly doesn't seem that long ago.


PS-There is no better artist for this line than Davide Gianfelice. I'm a writer's reader, and so I give the majority of my focus to the unsung half of comic creation, but Davide really does what an artist is supposed to do-bring these characters to life even better than if they were simply just words on a page.