A crappy little life
(No Spoilers)
I have never read an issue of Northlanders. It is a series I’ve heard alot of good things about but just have never gotten around to reading it. This issue was given to me because I like Brian Wood and Fiona Staples. Plus, even though it’s #29 in the Northlanders series, it’s a one-shot so it can be read as a stand-alone.
I’ve been really enjoying Wood’s work over in Wildstorm’s Dv8: Gods and Monsters mini-series so I was eager to see what he’s been doing in this series. The overall tone I got as I read this was like that of the old EC Comics. EC didn’t always focus on horror. Sometimes they’re books focused on other stories, like pirates for example, which is what the images here invoked in my mind. Here, we’ve dealing with Norseman.
We follow a man named Dag in this story who is using his boat to ferry around some Norsemen for money. He’s a lonely guy who’s just trying to make his life mean something. You really feel how pathetic he is as he shares his inner monologue throughout the issue. It seems like life has just dealt him a crappy hand. His journey is very similar to the main character in “Tales of the Black Freighter” from Watchmen. Without spoiling anything, there are several parts in both stories that mirror each other especially towards the end.
As I mentioned, I love Fiona Staples. Her art is so clean and crisp. She knows how to use facial expressions to convey what the characters are feeling and she’s got the details of everything down from the ship to the backgrounds. Plus, her panel work is so fluid and moves the story along quite nicely.
I’m usually not a fan of period stories in comics but Wood really made this one enjoyable. It truly is a one-shot in that I was able to read and understand it without knowing anything about the rest of the Northlanders series. It was a nice way to showcase this world and I applaud Wood for deciding to release an issue like this.
