Brian Wood – Comics + Graphic Novels

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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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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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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DMZ, another year of stories: 264 pages.

Northlanders, another year: 264 pages.

Demo, six issue miniseries: 132 pages.

The New York Four, the sequel book we signed contracts for, will happen this year.  I’m chatting with DC about format still, but assuming right now it’s not any shorter or longer than the first book: 144 pages.

Something Unannounced: 176 pages (might possibly bleed into 2010, but hopefully not)

I have some ideas I’d love to see done, DMZ specials, a short graphic novel, etc.  But that’s all in the theoretical category right now.  I can guesstimate 100 pages, since I fully intend to at least start on something shortly.

2009: give or take 1,080 pages of comics written.

Unless I die.

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