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

NORTHLANDERS AS METAL

(or Norse Mythological Fundamentalism & The Notion Of A “Container Series”)

Heavy metal and Vikings go hand in hand. I didn’t need Becky Cloonan and Espen Jorgensen to tell me that. I’m pretty sure I was first schooled to this fact walking across “stoner bridge,” a little walkway that crossed a pitiful stream and opened up onto the back of my high school’s parking lot in northern Vermont. Crossing it meant running a gauntlet of rednecks, headbangers, weed smoke, and heavy metal t-shirts. From Led Zeppelin to Bathory, the imagery was dominant.

And while I am no fan of Viking Metal, I can appreciate the imagery.

I’ve started to refer to Northlanders as a “container series”. With each new story arc, I’m able to reinvent the book to whatever degree I like, and I’ve found that the core concept of the book is flexible enough to contain a really wide variety of genres and story types.

Sven The Returned was as straightforward as these things go, the most traditional Viking story I was likely to write. From that point on, coinciding with my ongoing research blitz, I’ve made a big point in seeing how far I can stretch the concept. With the upcoming story arc called Metal, I’m taking what I’m able to take from the musical genre and apply it to comics. This is not a story about music, but a story that taps into the same dark mythology and nihilistic worldview that inspires the genre. This is radically different from anything that’s come before in the last 30 months of this series.

“Norse Mythological Fundamentalism” is a phrase from my story outline. Also in there are references to films like Badlands and Natural Born Killers. What if Charles Starkweather was Northlanders’ Erik, an ugly, failed blacksmith who decides that the growing influence of this cult religion “Christianity” is in danger of erasing his cultural identity? And what if Juliette Lewis’ Mallory Knox character was Ingrid, a young woman pressed into service as a nun, suffering daily insults and abuse for being an albino and a pagan?

What if Erik eats a ton of shrooms, wanders the forests for a few days, and is now convinced that Mother Nature herself is instructing him to purge this new religion from the land? And what if Mother Nature is actually not a very nice sort of god at all, but is instead really creepy and violent? What if Erik murders a bunch of priests and nuns in order to free Ingrid, tears his town down around him, and thinks to himself, “why stop there?”

Metal flies in the face of a few rules I had laid out for myself when I started Northlanders. But that’s cool, because the fact that I feel comfortable in breaking them is a testament to the elasticity of the series’ concept. Back in 2006, thinking that there is no way that overt mythology has a place in this book, was fine for the early stories where myth was treated as nothing more than casual superstition, if it was even present at all. But starting with The Shield Maidens and now continuing with Metal, I’ve figured out ways to include it while still making sure that Northlanders is Northlanders. And not, I dunno, Thor.

Now, on to RICCARDO BURCHIELLI. Resident of Florence, Italy, bass player in a metal band, and trusted DMZ collaborator of nearly five years. Drawing even one issue of DMZ is no mean feat – ask any of the guest artists we’ve had. It’s incredibly hard work, drawing a wartorn New York City for a thousand pages and counting, but he’s a dedicated and loyal collaborator. I’ve been encouraging him to take a break from DMZ for the sake of his mental health for a while now, and it took a guest stint on Northlanders to finally get him to agree. “Write me something violent, Brian,” he said. “Something with a lot of swords and blood.” And no buildings or helicopters, of course.
This is the preeminent example of tailoring a script to an artist’s desires and skillset, and I know Riccardo is dying to let loose on something different.

The five-issue METAL, at its core, is a timeless story: two young lovers on the run, shunned by their respective societies. Where it goes from there is the stuff of nightmares, to be honest. Set at the dawn of the Viking Age, the era of Beowulf and Germanic paganism, before exploration and trade brought light to the dark forests of Scandinavia. Misanthropy abounds, as does nihilism and fatalism, obsession and racial devotion. Dark times, dark themes. And two blighted teenagers try to carve out a space where they can just be themselves without the rest of the world giving them a hard time.

Can’t you totally see that airbrushed on the side of a van in a high school parking lot?

I wish. Try NORTHLANDERS #30, due July 21st. Your comic shop can save you a copy with this order code: MAY10 0279

-Brian Wood

This weekend is the Maine Comics Art Festival. Check out the cool poster by Jeff Lemire (SWEET TOOTH, THE NOBODY) and designed by Brian Wood (DMZ, NORTHLANDERS, DEMO), both of whom are special guests at the show on May 23. If you're in the area, stop by and meet them!

The reviews and features just keep coming. Here are a few highlights that you may have missed:

USA WEEKEND features an interview with Brian about all his monthly titles.

G4 TV/Fresh Ink reviews DEMO #1

And COMICS ALLIANCE and CBR feature interviews with Brian about DMZ #50.

And now, here’s an exclusive first look at some upcoming covers [Not Final]:

DMZ #53

DEMO #4

NORTHLANDERS #28