Jan 27, 2009
New NORTHLANDERS interview + news + images
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.
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I am sure you information gathering skills are vast. But I am, at this very moment in fact, in a topics class for my Masters. The Topic of this class happens to be “Plague, Death and Art”. Its a historical walk though of outbreaks of illness way before the “Black Death” up to the “Black Death” and then it continues on spending the last two weeks of the class on modern outbreaks.
If you need any notes, or such for the arc. Feel free to E-mail me and I can send you some of the notes, also with most Topics classes at this level, we are required to write a paper and my topic is Pre 14th century outbreaks. So as I work on that I have been finding all sorts of things.
what’s your email? or email me: brian@brianwood.com
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