Over at his LJ, Brian Wood talks about his upcoming NORTHLANDERS, his upcoming Viking saga for Vertigo:
Ah, not really a Viking epic… I mean, it’s more than that. The title NORTHLANDERS is a broad one. Sort of sounds like a soap opera, right, ike Eastenders? Anyway, Vikings will be one of many groups of people the series will include, keeping in the general time in history and geographic location. In time I want to do a story about the Black Death, about nomadic monks on Ireland’s west coast, about the Greenland Vikings, and even as far back as the ancient peoples that build Stonehenge, maybe. But, for now, NORTHLANDERS is about a Norse settlement on Scotland’s Orkney Islands, a member of the Varangian guard living in Constantinople, and a half-wild Saxon girl, all circa 880AD.
This isn’t true historical fiction, at least not in the way most fiction like this I’ve read is. The entire cast of characters are my own invention, although the locations and dates and most of the details should be pretty accurate.
NORTHLANDERS is not a barbarian title, a fantasy book, not pure hack-and-slash, and it’s not going to be full of half-naked men wearing horns talking to their gods. Mythology will really take a back seat in this book in favor of real people and day-to-day life. I have yet to see a comic treat Vikings the way I want to, which is good. I remember reading in the Times about that movie Pathfinder, and how the filmmaker explained why they had to use historically incorrect things like horned helmets, saying that depicting these people as they actually were would be kind of boring, would be too “quaint”. I strongly disgaree!
More in link. Since no art exists for NORTHLANDERS, we’ve been forced to illustrate this post with a still from PATHFINDER which is horribly inaccurate in all things except Karl Urban’s lack of pants.
