Try something different. That's what I feel Vertigo has always been about, even from my early days there as a runny-nosed assistant editor. I really treasure that sense of freedom, and it's why I love working on Vertigo books. Though I've known Brian Wood for a while, the stars never aligned for us to work together. So when I heard he was writing a series of connected one-shots for DMZ, I jumped at the chance. It was the perfect opportunity to experiment.

Like many artists, I tend to have a wandering eye when it comes to drawing. I'm influenced by so many disparate things, and would love to assimilate and pay tribute to all of them. I've very proud of my work with Josh Dysart on NEIL YOUNG'S GREENDALE, but after 150 pages of maintaining a certain style, I started getting a little antsy. Having focused on precise linework for the past few years, I really wanted to loosen up and bring some more energy and grittiness to my work. With DMZ, I was returning to a more familiar urban setting, and that level of comfort gave me enough confidence to experiment a little. Brian's wonderfully sparse and quiet story really put the focus on the visual storytelling, and it pushed me to deliver. The work reminds me a bit of some of my earlier books like Josie Mac from Detective Comics and one of my favorite art jobs, Vertigo's Beware the Creeper from 2003, but with the added bonus of some stronger drawing skills unexpectedly attained in the years since. It felt a lot like reconnecting with an old friend, and drawing these 22 pages has been more creatively rewarding than I ever would have thought. Knowing you have great people at your back makes it much easier to take chances, so thanks to Brian, and editors Will Dennis and Mark Doyle for keeping an open mind and supporting me all the way. Hope you enjoy the results.

Cliff

DMZ #57 is on sale this Wednesday!

NORTHLANDERS: METAL is a story about Erik and Ingrid, two young lovers on the run, leaving a path of destruction and dead in their wake.

It’s “Bonnie and Clyde” with Vikings.

But it’s also a story about Brian Wood and Riccardo Burchielli. For over four years now, they’ve been giving you a twisted, alternate future NYC over in DMZ. A fantastic book set in the not-so-distant future, where everything is going wrong. But drawing bombed-out buildings for years and years can get to you. Brian gets to take a break from writing about that bleak place when he does Northlanders (or DEMO, or DV8 or any of the other countless projects he’s always cooking up…) but Riccardo has been trapped behind enemy lines in the DMZ.

Until now.

For the next five months, Brian and Riccardo are pulling a 180, bringing their amazing storytelling skills from the future, to the dark past. They’re telling a bloody Viking tale like nothing you’ve ever seen before in Northlanders. This is an early, dark time in Viking history where the Old Gods still appear to be stomping about, and Erik and Ingrid are swept up in their grand plan.

It’s a big, bold, bloody story and it all starts in Northlanders #30 with METAL!

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It's all over, all over again, so soon?

Every time I think about Demo I'm reminded of how I got into comics in the first place. Parts of this story a lot of you have heard before, because the question is a very common one asked in interviews. But I'm going to try and go a little deeper, since it helps explain Demo.

Like almost everyone else I know and work with in comics, I never read them as a kid, not to any degree beyond seeing a Richie Rich comic in the waiting room at my childhood dentist. When I discovered comics, or rather when I discovered that comics could be for me, I was 25 and pursuing an art school degree. And that's what ended up defining what comics were (and, sort of, still are) to me: it's all about the medium.

I got into comics because of the form, not any particular story or a character or a title, not one universe or another, not the history of comics or of the people that made them. And it was the cold appraisal of the medium as a student trying to pick it apart, not that of a reader just looking for enjoyment. Even though, over a long time, I came to learn the history, to appreciate the creators and their seminal works over the decades, it's always been about the medium for me more than anything else.

Couple that with my instructors at college repeatedly driving home the point that there is nothing more important than creating new work and protecting what you create, there was just no way in hell I was ever going to end up seeking out a career working on company-owned books. It was just not the cards I was dealt, it's not how I "learned" comics. I don't say that haughtily--there are times I wish it were otherwise, since I don't have a lot of common ground with my peers when it comes to comics. It's alienating more often than I usually care to admit. It also meant that the growth of my career had an incredibly slow and frustrating start-- from 1997 through to 2005 I was essentially making comics for free and trying to find a toehold.

Anyway, I feel that this is why Demo is what Demo is. It's a very format-oriented take by a superhero-illiterate writer on what is an established sub-genre in mainstream comics: the "teen with powers." Skip ahead a bit in the backmatter of this issue and look at the original Demo pitch from back in 2002. Format is literally inseparable from what the story is. Good? Bad? Like I said, it is what it is.

I love Demo for what it is, and for what it's not. At times like this, looking back at a bunch of work just completed, it's really easy to feel pride at doing something that is unique and personal and so wholly Becky-and-me that it couldn't have been assigned to a different creative team like work-for-hire. I always think, and I'm sure I'm not alone, that the creator-owned books that work the best are the ones that are so owned and embodied by their creators that separating the two is inconceivable. Think of Casanova without Matt Fraction, Phonogram without Kieron and Jamie, or of Preacher without Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon.

So just like in 2004, Becky and I take a breather from a run of Demo. Many thanks to the Vertigo crew this time around, starting off first in a roundabout way to Will Dennis and Shelly Bond who were fans of the first series enough to offer both Becky and myself work on other things, and then later on thanks to Will, Karen Berger, Jack Mahan, and Mark Doyle for working to breathe a second life into the series. It's something of a cliched statement to say that they went above and beyond, but it's also totally true, and the fact that this new run of Demo stays so true to what Demo is and was is 100% due to their faith and diligence. Jared K Fletcher, Ryan Yount, and Amelia Grohman are also to be thanked on the production side, as well as all you readers, tweeters, and retailers.

I start to run out of nice things to say about working with Becky, which is crazy because is there anyone as nice in comics as Becky is? I've known her for a decade, very nearly, and working with her is effortless and completely rewarding. I continue to be humbled at the faith and hard work she puts into my stories. The perfect collaborator.

Until next time?

Bri

Playlist:
"One Hundred Years From Now" --Gram Parsons

DEMO Vol. 2 concludes this week with issue #6.

Northlanders: The Sea Road
Or, THOUGHTS ON HAULING STINKING SHEEP PELTS DOWN THE AARHUS/HEDEBY CORRIDOR.

Looking down the barrel of another Northlanders one-shot is a daunting thing. I tend to feel that with #17’s “The Viking Art of Single Combat” I wrote something that casts a pretty long shadow, and that was certainly the most ambitious script I had written to date. So when we needed another single issue to help line up schedules, it required a similar sort of out-of-the-box thinking.

What I came up with seemed simple on its surface: an entire story set on a Viking ship. Of course, right? Vikings and their ships, one and the same. But thinking about that further: fifty-odd men on a ship not much bigger than the average Manhattan junior one-bedroom apartment, with miles and miles of nothing but ocean all around? Now what? If Northlanders was a manga series I’d love to fill three volumes alone on rowing techniques and optimal ballast positioning, but, sadly, I can’t do that.

(Actually, what I’d REALLY love to do is put in a scratch-and-sniff patch that lets you see just what fifty filthy Vikings on a small boat smells like, but that would likely be even less well-received than 600 pages of rowing comics)

Anyway, my mind starting thinking about the notion of Vikings on boats as being something of a grind. Sure, there were the sort sailing off and burning foreign towns to the ground and getting rich, but what about the workaday Norsemen hauling cargo around the familiar routes i.e. the “sea roads”? No adventure for them – instead they have deadlines, labor costs and overheads, taxes and tariffs, and tidal delays, all in the pursuit of a narrow profit margin that allows them to, sigh, wake up the next day and do it all over again. What about those guys?

That’s Dag, our main guy in Northlanders #29, an old sailor worn down by the monotony of it all, entering his autumn years, realizing he’d done very little with his life but help make other people rich. No adventure, no deviation from what’s required. And so, one day under cover of a storm, he turns the tiller one way when it should have been the other, and sets off into the uncharted Atlantic.

Fiona Staples blew my mind with this one. I’ve known Fiona a little for many, many years and have always loved her work. But she’s a painter, really, and unless I’m mistaken this is her first job drawing a comic in just pen and ink... and one that’s about 75% water scenes. I can’t think of anything more difficult to draw and ink than churning water. Fiona knocked it out of the park. Check out a page here. Gorgeous, gorgeous stuff that colorist Dave McCaig worked his typical magic on.

Northlanders: The Sea Road – June 30th. A single-issue story, perfect for anyone familiar or new to the series.

Maybe we can do the scratch-and-sniff in one of the foreign reprints?

-brian wood