Vertigo has begun issuing the compilations of Brian Wood’s series Northlanders with Sven the Returned. It’s really sort of a mixed bag.
Sven has returned to the Orkney Islands from far-off Miklagard (Constantinople) to claim his heritage on the death of his father, chief of his band of Vikings. Actually, Sven just wants the money and doesn’t care about ruling at all — he has a good life as one of the Emperor’s Varangian Guard and sees no reason to trade the splendors of the Empire for the dirt and cold of the North. However, it seems that his uncle Gorm has taken over and not only intends to keep the throne, such as it is, but the money as well. Gorm has Sven beaten and thrown out of the settlement. However, if Sven were going to be satisfied with that, he wouldn’t be much of a hero, would he?
The first chapter or two left me cold, to be quite honest. Fortunately, once Sven was left to his own devices, the story started to pick up, aided and abetted by Enna, known to the Norsemen as “the Hunter’s Daughter,” a Scots orphan who lives alone in the wilderness and makes free use of her bow.
Ultimately, though, the story is little more than an inventory of Sven’s increasingly bloody ways to do away with his uncle’s followers, relieved by one long flashback to his life in Miklagard and the woman he had there. It’s a script marked by a great deal of blood and sex and liberal use of the f-bomb, which I guess makes it an “adult” comic, although I can’t quite shake the suspicion that the target audience is male and about twelve to fourteen years old. The attempts at adding philosophical depth don’t quite jell — they’re a little blatant for adults, and probably irrelevant for twelve-year-olds.
Davide Gianfelice’s drawing supports the story very well, capturing the mood and setting almost perfectly — it’s rough and somewhat angular, with bold lines, although the figures don’t really have any particular weight to them. The layouts, sadly, are standard-issue frame-follows-frame, and this is a story that would, I think, have been helped by a more intuitive flow. Wood did, however, make the script lean enough that the art is able to bear part of the narrative, which it does very well.
As noted, after the first chapter or two the story became much more engaging, but I’m not sure whether I want to continue the series. I guess that depends on what Book Two is like.
(Vertigo, 2008)
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