Comic Book Review | Northlanders Vol. 2: The Cross + The Hammer

Late last year I reviewed the first volume of Northlanders, Brian Wood's Viking comic book. You can read all about it here.

In short, I found Sven the Returned to be brash, ugly and unduly brutal, but at the same time, kinda compelling. Deadwood with Norsemen instead of outlaws, and axes over six-shooters... though that's giving it more credit than I expect it deserves. In his first unnecessarily protracted arc, about a lone wolf's war on the evil uncle who'd hijacked his inheritance, Wood attempted nothing so ambitious as David Milch did. 

On the surface, Northlanders is all change as of The Cross + The Hammer, which is to say the second trade paperback collection of the series: there's a new artist - great at landscapes but lacking, I'm afraid, in the action department - a whole new story and a new central character. All appear to be huge upheavals, but however ostensibly different The Cross + The Hammer seems from Sven The Returned, I found the two books to be of a very similar spirit.

In Clontarf, in Viking-occupied Ireland, a spate of vicious killings has finally attracted the attention of the country's impromptu monarch. Someone - some gang of organised Irish rebels, by all appearances - is murdering the king's men, and only the king's men. Needless to say, this does not please the king, but he has kingly business to attend to - a war, amongst other things - so in his stead he sends Ragnar, a specialist hunter and killer of men, to put a stop to this insidious tyranny.

Curious and curiouser: when Ragnar arrives in Clontarf, in the first of the six single issues The Cross + The Hammer collects, he finds evidence that suggests they need trap only one man. But what kind of man must their mark be, to have slayed so many, and lived to keep killing?

Well he is a father, first and foremost: Magnus Rodain's life's work, as he sees it, has been about making Ireland a safer place for his little girl, Brigid, who travels with him, and indeed supports his every decision. This - Brigid's unquestioning willingness to hop along happily to the tune her father hums, despite all the awful things Magnus does supposedly in service of her future - this was the first of a few niggling issues I had with The Cross + The Hammer, and not the last.

In fact the last, if not the least or the most egregious, was the way Wood addresses the very problem I've just named and shamed. It beggars belief that Brigid comes to her father's aid after he's butchered an entirely innocent family because he was in a bad mood, certainly, but compared to the Shyamalanish reveal in the penultimate part, it makes perfect sense.

Between the first problem and that last, those reservations I have about The Cross + The Hammer will be familiar to anyone who read my early review of Sven the Returned. Most notably, there's an awful lot of wasted space on the page - in every issue an overabundance of wide or tall panels, and far too many splashes and spreads - such that reading this series on a monthly basis must have been particularly trying. With an entire arc gathered together like this the experience is markedly more tolerable, but you'll still make short work of it. There's perhaps than an hour's worth of reading in The Cross + The Hammer, give or take, so buy in with that in mind, if you're inclined to buy in at all.

And you know, I still think you should. Assuredly Northlanders would be a better book if it were a little less barren, especially if it stopped trying so damned hard to be provocative and "adult" - seriously - but it's a pretty decent one even given its predilections towards the empty and the explicit. Spare, in its way. And absolutely harrowing. With the aforementioned caveats, then, I'd certainly recommend The Cross + The Hammer, as I did Sven the Returned before it.

Comic Book Review | Northlanders Vol. 1 - Sven the Returned

Without some social contract in place - some agreement to say I will not harm you on the condition that you do not harm me, signed in spirit if not on legal letterhead - life, according to the 17th century political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, tends towards being nasty, brutish and short.

Nothlanders, the long-running comic book series about Vikings and all the bad juju they do by DMZ co-creator Brian Wood and in the first arc artist David Gianfelice, is nasty and brutish all right - in fact from the outset it is so very nasty and so excruciatingly brutish as to sicken, on occasion - but short? Short it is not.

Oh would that it had been! Would that Sven the Returned, the story this first trade collects, had been six issues of the ongoing long instead of eight; were that the case, Northlanders would have gotten off to an excellent start. But no. Instead, from the very beginning, writer Brian Wood seems content to spin his wheels, artificially inflating what should have been a solid introduction to the series to such an extent that it seems simply, sadly insubstantial.

It's the year 980, or thereabouts, and Sven has come home. Home for him, which is to say the place where he was born, is Orkney, a small island to the North of Scotland where Sven's father ruled the roost. Least he did till he died... murdered by his brother, Gorm, who has since piled evil upon evil and stolen Sven's inheritance. But now, after years abroad, living a life of luxury in Constantinople, the wayward son returns with dark designs of his own: to take back his birthright, by force if necessary.

And in the end, blood will tell. Fucking buckets of the stuff.

Northlanders has a pretty grim premise for a comic book - make no mistake: it is a far cry from teenagers nibbled by radioactive insects and blind men bearing sonar superpowers - and I'll admit I had my doubts as to whether such a story could sustain itself in the long term. That, in fairness, remains to be seen, but Sven the Returned seems an unconvincing opening statement in the case for sequential swords without sorcery, with as many high points as it has utterly loveless lows.

First and foremost, there are at least two issues' worth of padding in the first collected volume of Northlanders. Never mind the meaningless digressions that make up the larger part of what is in essence a fairly straightforward story - a bloated chronicle of Sven's lone wolf war on an isolated Viking settlement - for more egregious than these is Wood's use of space. There are wasted pages in each issue... needless single and double-page spreads in every last part which leave the heavy lifting to the artist, who despite his self-evident skillset can't single-handedly make something interesting out of nothing.

Here: look at Orkney. Rugged, isn't it? Now, look at it again. Had enough? No? Well, look at it ten more times! So it goes. 

This is lazy storytelling, plain and simple, and there is evidence of Wood's lamentably simplistic approach elsewhere. With all its contemporary cussing, for instance, the dialogue and narration of Sven the Return is obviously attempting a Deadwood, but Brian Wood is no David Milch - certainly not judging from this - and it sticks out like a sore thumb

That said, David Gianfelice's art is... if not attractive, exactly, then absolutely suited to the book. Alas, he's not the regular penciller; I'll be sad to see him take leave of the series as of the second volume of Northlanders, called The Cross + The Hammer. Which I will be reading.

If that comes as a surprise given my various criticisms of the creative force behind this series, then consider this: Northlanders is doing something that to the best of my knowledge no other comic book has done. Sequential swords without the sorcery. Dungeons without the blasted dragons. It's blazing a trail, in a way, and if there are a few missteps along the road to Something New... then so be it. So be it, so long as it isn't all bad.

And Sven the Returned is many things, but not that; not bad, not in any sense. Just too long, for what it is, and awfully self-serious where I'm sure a little silliness would have done this series the world of good.