2010, Vertigo, an imprint of DC Comics
I cannot rate this comic.
The art is a 5.
The narrative is a 4.
The dialogue is a 1.
Grab this thing and skip all of the dialogue bubbles. The art is superlative and the story is good, rich in metaphor, and appealingly dark in this age of gilded angst. I just have a hard time ingesting the conversation of two Norse warriors when it is rendered in a repressed whigger’s version of hip hop English.
This quarter inch thick comic is broken into four separate stories spanning hundreds of years.
Lindisfarne gives a neutral depiction of the first Viking raid from the viewpoint of a boy who represents the modern Nordic ‘return to paganism’ movement. The story was good despite the anachronistic dialogue.
The Viking Art of Single Combat is something that you just want to view as art—skip the text.
The Shield Maidens is a sellout to the ‘woman of power’ cult and isn’t really worth the time, though the art is cool.
Sven the Immortal is easily the best piece in the collection. Even Wood’s Eminem version of Norse discourse could not ruin this piece.
According to New York Magazine Northlanders is ‘more modern and current than most Viking stories could ever be’. So, I will not chalk Wood’s African American/Liverpool English gangster dialogue up to him being unskilled but rather credit him with effective marketing to videogamers who use the f-word as their primary verb, noun, adjective, pronoun and adverb.
Really, the art is top notch and Wood does chart a plot heavy with metaphor. Check it out.
