Customer Reviews

Northlanders Vol. 1: Sven The Returned

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

The blurb in the back of this book states that Northlanders is "Vikings finally done right!!. I am usually very wary of hype and take most of these "praises" with a grain of salt but after finding myself unable to put this book down I have to agree with that succint reviewer: Northlanders does what many books and graphic novels attempt but never achieve...it brings the past alive and recreates Viking civilization in a way I have never seen depicted in comics before.

The story is about Sven, a kinda of amoral cat who fights for the Byzantine Emperor as part of his elite Varangian Guards. The Varangian Guards were Norsemen specifically recruited by the Greeks due to their legendary ferocity in battle. Sven loves Constantinople...it's a city of wonders, where all shades of skins and religion and culture mingle in the streets. He has turned his back on his cold, snowy homelands and couldn't be happier for it. That is until the day, messengers arrive with the news that his father, a king in the Orkneys, has died and that his uncle has usurped his throne, kingdom, wenches and riches.

Sven could care less about ruling a northern wasteland...he just wants to take his inheritance and come right back to sunny, golden Greece...where the story takes us after that is what really makes his book a rarity: a mature look at war and culture and how enemies deal with each other.

About the art. I'm a picky fan when it comes to art. I want to see beautiful, eye popping things and any other day I would dismiss the art of Northlanders as simplistic. But at closer inspection you see that the art is subtle and efficient. It's filled with details you'll miss until the second reading, the characters all have their own "look" unlike the pin-ups of so many popular artists who draw all their characters with bulging muscles, rage lines and huge breasts. I wouldn't want the art any other way.

I highly recommend "Northlanders". A true graphic novel epic and a blockbuster film just waiting for Hollywood to notice it.

Brian Wood's Viking epic NORTHLANDERS tells the story of Sven, an expatriate Viking serving as a Royal Guard in Constantinople, as he returns home to claim his inheritance and birthright, stolen from him by his murderous Uncle Gorm. The massive scope of the book unfolds over eight issues, as Sven comes to grips with the changes his people and their ancestral land have undergone since he fled as a child, and prepares to gather an army to challenge his Uncle. There are places where the pace of the book is maddeningly slow, and others, such as the climactic battle, where we're rushed along, missing potentially important plot points, almost as though Wood realized he was running out of room and had better pick up the pace. (The transition from "Let's get an army together!" to the actual battle is, literally, one page.....We go from one lone man to an army of followers with little buildup or sense of time passing, and it was very jarring....) The art, by Davide Gianfelice, is appropriately gory and grimy, and serves the story quite well. My only major complaint is Wood's use of language that you probably wouldn't have heard a Viking use, such as when Sven doesn't hear Hakkar talking to him, because he "Tuned him out for a moment".....Isn't that a term that plays off of radio and television....? Instances like that, and when Sven says he should "Call this guy on his B-S", took me right out of the story and hurt the overall mood of the book. Small quibbles aside, NORTHLANDERS BOOK ONE: SVEN THE RETURNED is one hell of a beefy book (200 pages!) for under ten bucks, and it was good enough to have me wondering just where Wood could possibly take the series next. I'll be back for Volume Two......

Fantastic art and engaging story that increasingly drew me in to the characters, the times, the land, the peoples. I loved the contrasts between the gorgeous scenery and the bloody battles, between a magnificent land and a hard life, between the serving of oneself and the growth towards serving one's people. This is great storytelling, and I'm looking forward to more Northlanders.

Unfortunately, I have to agree with Amazon reviewers GilGaMish and graphic_persona: this is a rather poor plot- or concept-driven comic with very little character development. I am not an avid comic reader, but I enjoyed them in my youth and am often wistful when seeing the frequently well-done cover art of modern comics. I'm also partial to things Northern. I found Northlanders by going on a search for Viking comics. I wanted very much for this to be a knock-out piece. But neither the story line, the writing, nor the illustration stood up with the cover art and hype.

As the comic opens, Sven the Varangian Guard of Byzantium ruthlessly kills a messenger sent to inform him that his uncle has usurped his birthright back in the Orkney Islands. This is about par in the sense that violence supercedes sensibility throughout the comic. The protagonist is a worldly, materialistic, atheistic, nihilist who, over the course of the comic, transforms into an isolationist pagan family man. However, there are no real turns in the storyline that explain this transformation. Predictable characters appear (e.g., the girl-left-behind who has grown into a hot blonde bombshell... Ophelia for an age of violence and porn), and everyone changes loyalties and motivations for no apparent reason (except the deus ex machina ending). Ultimately, you can judge characters in literature only by how much they affect you. At the end of the comic, I really didn't care what happened to Sven or the other characters.

The illustration has left me conflicted. It is cartoonish in a way I was not quite expecting, although the landscapes depicted are of a much higher quality than the renderings of people. Perspective, angle, and foreground/background are all used effectively, but equally as often individual panels are laid out awkwardly. People appear in poses that interrupt the eye and that could be avoided by consulting a text on figure drawing.

Although this is supposed to be an "historical" depiction of Scandinavian life circa 1000, anyone who has been to Scandinavia or Scotland will notice that the plot takes place exclusively on overcast days in the dirt. This is supposed to feel "gritty" and "realistic" but is actually just a visual reflection of the nihilism and lack of imagination shown in the plot. Yes, the norsemen lived close to the earth in an extreme climate and harsh social conditions, but they also had summers, celebrations, love, art, and the range of human experience. This comic perpetuates the notion that you are either a young, beautiful, and rich swinger living on the Mediterranean coast, or your life is barely worth living and consists of a series of hardships interspersed with social conflicts.

After being disappointed by this purchase, I read through some reviews of Northlanders on the web. Most liked it, although I did find one review by someone who panned the first series, but quite liked subsequent stories. So, I'll probably try the next two volumes anyhow. I can't recommend this one, though.

Brian Wood has been a fixture at DC's Vertigo imprint for a good while, most notably producing the long-running hit creator-owned title "DMZ". With "Northlanders" he turns his attention to a very different style of writing, the historical drama, commencing an anthology series that focusses on a variety of different characters at different points in the history of Norse expansion throughout Europe. For his first arc, the eight-part "Sven the Returned", the primary setting is the Orkney Islands, in the midst of the North Sea, though the story spans as far away as Byzantium.

Sven, the son of a small-time Viking lord, finds himself far away from there when the story opens; he is in Byzantium, then the capital of the civilized world, in the service of the Emperor of the Western Roman Empire. Sven has no interest in his own culture, having long since realized that the Byzantines are the most powerful and advanced civilization around, far richer than any Viking ever will be. However, when word arrives that his father has died and his uncle has usurped his inheritance, Sven decides he must return home to collect the desired funds (killing the messenger on a whim). His uncle Gorm now rules the small, impoverished community, with the assistance of the clever thug Hakkar. Sven wages a guerilla war. Also present are his old fling Thora, now a servant girl in Gorm's household, and the mysterious Hunter's Daughter, who randomly fires arrows at people from her mountaintop dwelling places.

Character-wise, Wood both ducks and plays to conventional storytelling tropes here. The basic outline would suggest a certain type of story: Sven leaves Byzantium and reconnects with the true glories of his home culture, eventually changing his plans and taking the throne he had no interest in at the outset. Wood does not go this way, and, indeed, Sven's views of Norse culture aren't really any different at the end than they were at the start. However, Wood does take Sven on a semi-conventional heroic journey; he begins the story as an utter bastard, and by the end has softened up a bit and acquired some empathy for other people. As mentioned elsewhere, Wood does not attempt to replicate older vocabularies; the characters use some modern idioms and plenty of modern curses, which can take a bit of getting used to, but overall I found was fine.

The art, by Davide Gianfelice, is high-quality, equally adept at drawing gory battle scenes (of which there are not a few) and naked women (likewise, mainly Thora). This is a very unromantic depiction of the Middle Ages, heavy on squalor.

Overall, I would this as a four-star package.

Fantastic art and an interesting story with one of the most unlikeable main character- venal,cowardly, arrogant. It is basically a "big city guy goes back to his redneck hometown" story. The main character is an atheist who sleeps around with his rich gf in the "great city" constantinople. Of course, he can outfight every Viking he sees. Then he reclaims his title just to sell his people out to the invading Saxons and then leave.

Orkney, A.D 980.
Out of the depths of Europe comes Sven, back from half a lifetime serving as a Varangian Guard in Miklagard, the present day Constantinople. He comes to reclaim his position on Orkney, having abandoned the warrior life to settle and find a future in his homeland.

Sven the Returned is Sven of Grimness' story, the first trade paper back in the ongoing Northlanders series by Brian Wood, and it takes the reader to Orkney in the year A.D. 980 for a beautiful if very violent story of the returning son of the former leader finding himself dethroned by his own kin, now looking for revenge, and in the process piling up a mountain of dead bodies in a society so male dominated that only three women play any role in the story.

Actually, Northlanders installment 01 is one long male rivalry packed with codes of honor, warring and the sense of belonging to a barren land in the Atlantic Ocean, and had this been a novel it might have been written by for instance Preben Mørkbak (the Danish historian and writer whose great books about Erik the Red are about as bloody and male dominated), but being a graphic novel it is the drawings that carry Northlanders.

Now, the male focus should not put anyone off if they enjoy Viking stories, and the violence seems a logical extension of the revenge-theme that drives Sven through 3/4s of the book. That's just the way this story is written. Once you move further through the series you will see that Woods vision of the Northlanders is not a narrow-minded, violence-ridden, male-dominated saga propelled forward by mindless testosteronitis. But leave that for now. Northlanders 01 feeds of Sven's need to avenge the robbery of his past and the loss of his Norseman identity.

Going beyond mere violence and sword fights
There's something about Sven, however, which hints at more than just revenge and riches. Something about his past as a Varangian Guard, one of the Væringjar, for the Byzantine empire is echoing through his actions, and the little that is known about his past in Miklagard, or Constantinople, seems to run as his own slight undertow throughout his story.

And then there's Enna, the Scot girl from the hills on the island, who lives a hermit life in a remote cave on the edge of a cliff. As the story progresses she moves from the fringes of Sven's struggles to a central position in his life, going from rogue warrior fighting on all sides anytime to... well, that's for the reader to see, as the internal strife on the island is challenged by an outside force in the final chapters of the book.

This story is very violent, very bloody, and almost completely devoid of other human emotions than anger and pride for a good deal of the road travelled - but with drawings this amazing, so richly colored and brilliant at capturing Northern skies and landscapes, there's plenty to enjoy while the story progresses to its climax and the entry of a hitherto undisclosed side of Sven's emotional register.

In context
Northlanders - Sven the Returned comprises magazines 1-8 of the ongoing series. It is a graphic novel of 200 pages of which much is told in panels with no speech and just drawings. That adds to the strength of the book, if you ask me. Not because I don't expect the Norsemen to be the silent types, but because I like how a lot of the reactions of the main characters are unvoiced or only briefly spoken, physical ones that become become catalysts for further actions.

Somehow it blends with my idea of body and language and how that synthesis was performed around A.D. 1000. But maybe my romantic image is wrong. Either way it works well in Sven the Returned, creating space for Davide Gianfelice's beautiful artwork.

Northlanders i published by DC Comics' avant-garde label Vertigo, which likes to brandish itself as graphic novels for mature readers. For those interested Vertigo has a decent website which is pretty easy to navigate, but the real gem for Northlanders readers is Brian Woods own blog at northlanders.net, and the many uploaded sketches and the artwork at his flickr page.

Much recommended!

This trade paperback collects Issues #1-8 of the DC/Vertigo series "Northlanders" written by Brian Wood and illustrated by Davide Gianfelice, and first published in December 2007. Wood is known to many comic book fans from his acclaimed series "Demo", "Local" and "DMZ". These first eight issues of the series comprise the "Sven the Returned" story arc set in Viking culture circa 980 A.D, centering on a self-exiled Viking warrior who returns home to claim his birthright from his usurping uncle. Wood and Gianfelice portray the bleak, often violent grimness of common Viking life with a simple plot and strong characters and imagery. I read this trade paperback in one evening and have started reading the monthly Vertigo series. Amazon's current $10 price for eight full issues offers further motivation to buy this book.

"A very long time ago...in the lands we call home...these things happened."

So begins the first volume of Northlanders, the tale of Sven, a Viking warrior in 980 CE who leaves his plush Mediterranean lifestyle to claim an inheritance from the harsh cold lands of the North. But once there he encounters resistance from his uncle, Gorm, who is unwilling to hand everything over to Sven. Sven begins a one man war against Gorm and his men to get his money and his lands back.

Northlanders is a familiar tale of one man against a greater evil, dressed in brutal, vivid Norse clothing. The art is fantastic and explicit, bleeding emotion out in color. The story capitalizes on the hardest, most violent parts of Viking legends. But it has a soul too. Sven is a remarkable character, one worth following into the wilds of the world.

Northlanders is a solid addition to the libraries of horror, historical or Viking fans and a good graphic novel for those new to graphics to pick up.

In a new graphic novel series from Brian Wood, author of DMZ and Demo, and illustrated by Davide Gianfelice, comes Northlanders, Volume 1: Sven the Returned. Northlanders offers up a fresh historical graphic novel, like that of Eric Shanower's Age of Bronze and Warren Ellis' Crecy, as Wood brings the world of the Vikings to light with the detailed and gory art style of Gianfelice.

Sven is a disowned Viking. After his father is killed when he is a boy, and, as the heir apparent, he dishonors his mother by not protecting and defending her from his uncle Gorm who rapes her and takes control of the people and holdings, Sven flees from the northlands. He is captured and made a slave for most of his childhood until he is set free and refers to himself as a Varangian: a Norseman who has left his home. He spends his years in the great city of Constantinople as a member of the Royal Guard, until he is ready and returns to the north for revenge. The year is 980.

His old home is in the Orkney Islands, and he finds it not much changed from when he left, but having lived in Constantinople for so long, he must learn to live in the harsh climes once again. He also must gain the respect of his people. Sven begins fighting back against Gorm, employing all the skill and knowledge he has gained. The question is when he finally defeats Gorm and restores his family's honor, will he still want to be king and rule?

Northlanders is a fresh historical graphic novel that is a little shaky at first with this new storyline, but there is good character development and potential for the future volumes. With a fresh art style that captures the tone of the period, as well as being accurately detailed through the art, Northlanders is a series I look forward to reading in volume 2.

Find more reviews, as well as a selection of my writing, and a link to the book review podcast BookBanter at www.alexctelander.com.