NORTHLANDERS #19
Review by: Bedhead
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Size: pages
Price: 2.99
This review contains spoilers, click here to read
There should’ve been a fight scene. There should’ve been a grand, gory conflagration where these three women—trapped on an island surrounded by enemies—sliced and bludgeoned their way through Saxon forces on their way to a true Viking victory. After the dramatic tensions brilliantly tugged tight in the previous issue, the tenants of story telling, of myth and comics, dictate a climatic, bloody release, a final satisfying coda, nicely and familiarly rung. Instead, Woods gives us a non-consequential monk, a brief flashback to a minor battle, and finally, the women just swimming away to safety, to small lives as small spinsters. And isn’t that just perfect, for Northlanders 19 is not concerned with telling myths, it’s concerned with making them, with how stories are constructed from facts that refuse to conform to three act structure. Thus the meaning of the monk confrontation where the kind brother presents the women with stories from the bible meant to dictate their acquiescence, and is in turn met with the women’s response: “you burned children pigfucker!” The women contrast their harsh reality to the Monk’s easy stories. Thus the meaning of the flashback where the one battle scene is told not as it happens but as a story in which the author repeatedly compares the fight to descriptions she’s heard of other battles. It’s a story talking about how it relates to the reality of other stories. Finally, thus the meaning of swimming away to small lives as small spinsters, where the women retreat from their destiny in the myth and become the very symbol for destiny, the three fates working on their loom. These women refuse to die as martyrs in a meaningless, but entertaining battle, and instead merely float away. They refute their fate, and decline the fight scene. However, as the comic ends, the women merge back into the tale, back into their fate as comic book characters, written and drawn. For awhile, thanks to Woods denial of the classic tropes to story they existed as real people, but as they sow their cloth we can imagine them transforming into their true selves—they are and always will be print on a paper, a story waiting to be told.
That said, Northlanders transcends Wood’s clever employment of a modernist technique to revel in a touch of realism. What’s fascinating about this issue is that Woods has deployed this technique of having characters escape a conventional story as a metaphor for the roles women were forced to play in Viking times. Just at the characters do not conform how comic book characters are supposed to act, while in that castle fighting for their lives, these women do not conform to how women in this time are supposed to act. For a finite moment, these three women threw off both the chains of story and society and faced to the oncoming hoards with a sword and a snarl. Then they returned to shore, found their cloth, and once again lived their destiny, became destiny. And that might be even better than a fight scene.
Story: 5 - Excellent
Art: 4 - Very Good
Art: 4 - Very Good
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