Concept: 5 stars

Art: 5 stars

Story: 4 stars

Dialogue: 2 stars

2009, DC Comics, NY, 144 pages

Northlanders is a brutally beautiful look at Nordic-occupied Ireland around Dublin in 1014. The key characters are Magnus, a ferocious Irish killer, his daughter Brigid, and their hunter, Ragnar Ragnarson, ‘Lord of Lands. The atmosphere evoked in the chapter titles, by the scenic art, the vivid combat, and the drama of the manhunt, is unfortunately compromised by the dialogue.

The dialogue is constructed well—the characters peaking like real individuals. The writer uses modern terms of recent derivation such as, perp, suspect, traction [in the political sense], case, military, profile, mission, issues and prosecution drawn directly from modern primetime TV law enforcement dramas. On one hand we have wonderful framing lines like ‘this cursed place’ and ‘Humiliate this land’. Then, on the other hand, we have Ragnar walking through this heavily textured medieval Ireland like an FBI profiler out of Quantico, making his debut on the ‘Criminal Minds Time Travel’ spinoff.

If Brian Wood would just stick to his brilliant narrative passages, and let Ryan Kelly tell the story with his stirring art, this could be as good as Lone Wolf and Cub. As it is Northlanders comes off as a crime TV screenwriter’s rewrite of Robert E. Howard’s Marchers of Valhalla or Sowers of the Thunder.