Brian Wood – Comics + Graphic Novels

Spotted at the Shakespeare & Co. at Brooklyn College.

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Craftbar is Craft’s informal sister-restaurant, owned by (Top Chef’s) Tom Colicchio. Between the three of us, we had:

Corned Beef Hash, Fried Eggs, Béarnaise (mer)
Brioche Pain Perdu (me, audrey)
Irish Oatmeal w Brown Sugar and Buttermilk (audrey, me)
Bacon (me, audrey)
Coffee
$68 w/ tip + coatcheck

Meredith declared the corned beef hash to be the best she’s ever had. My pain perdu was on the sweet side but perfect otherwise. Really, everything was amazing but I regret not getting the buttermilk donuts.

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Current topics on my message boards:

Titles of Things To Get To in Five Years
Dubious Films You Love Anyway?
The Cross + The Hammer collection and other news
DMZ CASTING

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Dark Horse released on Monday its first digital comics formatted for the iPhone and iPod touch devices. “Terminator: Death Valley,” a four-issue miniseries by Alan Grant and Steve Pugh — originally published in 1998 — is now available in the Apple Apps Store/iTunes as a series of four “apps” priced at $0.99 each.

I remember buying this miniseries during the time Warren Ellis and I were pushing to get Steve hired on to our Generation X. I already knew Steve’s work from 2020 VISIONS and loved it, especially his women. Anyway, I still have my single issues but I’ll check out this app.

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(from DMZ “Friendly Fire”, art by Viktor Kalvachev)

This volume collects issues #29-34, the election storyline from last year.  It’s good, but don’t take my word for it… how about Greg Palast’s?  He’s the investigative journalist who, among many other things, single-handedly exposed the 2000 and 2004 voter fraud in Florida and Ohio.  Here’s a scan of his introduction.

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FRIDAY
2-3pm: SIGNING – DC/Vertigo booth
5:45-6:45pm: PANEL – Vertigo (Room 1A14)

SATURDAY
12-1pm: SIGNING – Midtown Comics #1541
3-4pm: SIGNING – DC/Vertigo booth

SUNDAY
12-2pm: CBLDF Seminar
2-3pm: SIGNING – DC/Vertigo booth

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(click for entire article)

Ryan Kelly’s arc ends with issue #16, and you have some great artists coming in on issues #17 and 18. What can you tell CBR readers about those two issues?

These are two single-issue stories, two one-shots. The first is an ambitiously titled story called “The Viking Art of Single Combat,” and it’s just as ambitious in deed as in word. Using a 22-page swordfight as context, I run down the theories and tactics used during that time in history. I imagine a cross between the visuals of Vagabond and the language of something like Warren Ellis’s “Crecy,” but probably more detailed than that. Certainly wider in scope. Something for the History Channel set. Vasilis Lolos is drawing that one. He’s drawn “Pirates Of Coney Island,” “The Last Call,” “Pixu,” and “5,” for which he won an Eisner.

The next is “The Shield Maidens,” which takes the folktale of the Valkyries, the women warriors, and grounds it firmly into reality — takes the mythology right out of it. As you can imagine, it deals with the women of a village and what they do when all the men have been killed in a siege. We’ll have Danijel Zezelj drawing this.

Any chance of characters from earlier arcs making a return appearance? Sven, perhaps?

Sven will return, under the title “Sven The Immortal,” and of course Davide Gianfelice will draw it. I hope it’ll be soon, within the next six months, but it all depends on the schedules. Right now I have issues #19 and #20 of the series planned for Sven.

What do you have planned for “Northlanders” later this year?

After these short stories, I am working on an outline for the next longer arc, which will be at least six issues and possibly eight. I had started gathering information and writing notes for what I thought could be a prose novel about the Black Death, but for a variety of reasons I am starting to think this idea would be better served as an arc in “Northlanders.” It couldn’t be about the Black Death, since that happened way later, but I found some records of minor outbreaks and sicknesses I could use as a starting point. Like I said already, this would be set in what is Russia today. I believe Leandro Fernandez is going to draw it.

(click for entire article)

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When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.

-Kipling’s The Young British Soldier

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DMZ 4
21/01/2009
DC Comics
Un quatrième album pour la série de Brian Wood, un brillant auteur, illustrateur et designer graphique qui a longtemps travaillé dans l’industrie du jeu vidéo (GTA, Max Payne…). À ses côtés, le très prometteur Riccardo Burchielli (John Doe). Le jeune journaliste Matty Roth, correspondant à New York, zone démilitarisée en proie au chaos dans la guerre civile qui ravage l’Amérique, procède à contre cœur à l’interview d’un soldat responsable d’un massacre à l’intérieur de la ville. Il apprend aussi comment New York est devenue ce qu’elle est, à travers le regard d’un enfant qui a quitté le Midwest pour se retrouver en plein cauchemar. Une série qui envisage le futur pour mieux s’interroger sur le présent.
Format : 170 x 260, 128 pages couleur.

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DMZ #41
Written by Brian Wood
Art by Nikki Cook
Cover by John Paul Leon
Having rejected the relative safety and stability of Parco Delgado’s government enclave (as well as a relationship with Matty Roth), Zee ventures out into the wilds of the DMZ. What is she seeking? Peace of mind? A greater truth? Or does she see Parco for what he truly is and would rather be alone and drifting than a part of it?
On sale April 15

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Best opening paragraphs, to any book, ever:

LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes — gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.

Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time — as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.

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In stores next month.

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Did you know I am part of a group blog/message board comprised of seven Vertigo creators?  Here are a few of the recent topics in my folder:

Anger + Comics Creators
DMZ #41 Logo Process
The New York Four First Pass Proposal
An Important Question
Numbers (Again)

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This is the Vertigo “On The Ledge” column I wrote to announce the book to the world, and I realized that a link no longer exists on their website, so I’m reposting it here to give it a permanent home.

Vertigo On the Ledge: with Brian Wood

Pitch me a monthly series, my editor Will Dennis told me. But something different, break out of your box. And so I did. The first line of the NORTHLANDERS proposal was: “A nihilistic crime saga set in A.D. 870, when much of England was under Viking rule.”

I’ve always loved Vikings. As a kid, I thought they were these badasses in fur and horns, watched over by scary gods of thunder and death, lissome shieldmaidens at their sides, all stalking the frozen northlands. All pretty great stuff to a 12-year-old, but I knew I needed to do something more, that it needed the maturity and sophistication Vertigo is known for.

I began to read, dozens of books. I went to Iceland. I went back and looked at photo albums from my many trips to Scotland – Orkney especially, the setting for the first NORTHLANDERS story arc. I set aside the mythology and the fairy tales, focusing mostly on history and day-to-day life. What I found most interesting was how the world was at the start of the Viking Age, coming up on the first thousand years of European history. Why the Vikings had to do what they did, and how, in a relatively short (and incredibly violent) time, they pulled Europe out of its dark ages and changed the world, albeit by swordpoint.

We went through many drafts of that pitch. It’s more than just a gritty crime story now, and I changed the date to 980. It’s become a series about millennial fears, clash of cultures and the death of the pagan way of life and the relentless march of progress. About one man, a stubborn Norse warrior in massive denial about who he is, reconnecting with the remote lands he grew up in.

And, since this is a book about Vikings, there’s a lot of sex and a lot of death – desperate men locked in shield walls fighting for their land and their lives yard by blood-soaked yard.

I broke out of my box, sure enough. But I’m still writing about the ideas I always do: identity, location, politics, war, people in love and lives in flux. It’s just set a thousand years in the past and with a lot more swords. I think the 12-year-old me would approve.

—Brian Wood

Me in Iceland at Godafoss, where the Vikings chucked, literally, their pagan gods over in favor of Lord Baby Jesus.

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Google Maps identifies the center of New York City as Times Square, so Flatbush skates by 6 of 7 nuclear bomb explosion scenarios with no thermal damage. Williamsburg, (unfortunately?), doesn’t fare well for most of those attacks. And even Park Slope gets caught in the danger zone if a B28 touches down. Finally this living south of the Park thing is paying off.

link

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DMZ38_final_layered, originally uploaded by brianwood.

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Khepri Comics is running a “bundle” special which gets you all five volumes of the series to date, at a great discount.

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Click here for the full article, with answers from Jason Aaron, Brian Azzarello, G. Willow Wilson, Jock, Cliff Chiang, David Lapham, and Will Dennis.

WHAT WORK FROM 2008 ARE YOU THE MOST PROUD OF?

Brian Wood: LOCAL. The best thing I’ve done, and hopefully the first of many Ryan Kelly collabs. And the first NORTHLANDERS book, which not only got me out of my comfort zone but did the same for a lot of people who thought they knew what a comic book about Vikings was.

WHAT WORK ARE YOU THE MOST EXCITED ABOUT FOR 2009?

Brian Wood: A few upcoming NORTHLANDERS one-shots should be excellent, if only for the artists we have lined up coughRissocough. Seeing how the new DEMO books come out, and writing issue #50 of DMZ. 50! Reaching fifty issues of a series is sort of like when I hit 30 years of age. I never thought I’d make it that long.

WHAT’S YOUR NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTION?

Brian Wood: I don’t make them. Each year, each week, each day I just try to make forward momentum, and improve in everything if only a little bit.

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Cover art by JP Leon; interior art by Nikki Cook

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LOCAL by Brian Wood and Ryan Kelly – I could have put a bunch of stuff up here by Brian Wood but I chose Local just because of it’s amazingness and massiveness. Although I feel like I specifically relate to Brian’s stuff because we came from similar music scenes, I think anyone could relate to it. Some of the best writing out there.

Brea Grant, actor, here.

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