‘Black Road: The Holy North’ – Wood, Brown, McCaig and Wands (Image)

And here I am, hopefully proving that this blog does a little bit more than just post pictures of cool books (even though they were cool books)…

This week has been a bit of a nightmare but the up side to that is that although I don’t have the time to do everything that I need to, at least the week is going quickly ;o) Almost too quickly but what can you do apart from hang on and see where it takes you? I did manage to cobble a few minutes together for some reading yesterday and it was another stop on my occasional journey to read more stuff with Vikings in it. Brian Wood’s ‘Northlanders’ book ‘Sven the Returned’ had proved to be a very engaging read so when I realised that Wood had written ‘The Black Road’ as well, it didn’t take too much for me to go out and grab myself a copy (and by ‘go out’, of course I meant ‘order from Amazon’, stupid lockdown…) It took a while for it to get here but it ended up being well worth the read when it finally did. If that wasn’t enough, another quick look on Amazon told me that I only need to buy one more book to have the whole story; no multi-volume collecting to be had here. Not only does that save me a bit of money but it’s also really refreshing to see a comic book story told in just a couple of volumes. I’m getting a little ahead of myself though, lets talk about volume one first, ‘The Holy North’…

1000 A.D. The Christian conversion of pagan lands is well underway, turning the Viking north into a bleak war zone of occupation and violence. Magnus The Black is an ex-warrior turned fixer for the Church, only looking to ease his people through this painful time. But when a Vatican official under his care is murdered on the infamous "Black Road", he uncovers a secret, something so big it threatens to change the balance of power in all of Europe. 

If you’ve read the first couple of paragraphs here and thought that the length of the overall story (ten issues across two volumes) means that you’ll get more of a story here then I’m sorry but you’re in for a bit of a shock, ‘The Holy North’ is all about introducing us to Magnus as well as setting things up for whatever happens in the next volume, that and a bit of a twist in the tale right at the end. Things are left hanging with the intent that you’ll keep on reading. Cynical? Maybe, I don’t care though as what I found in ‘The Holy North’ was more than enough to have me counting down to my next payday (which is way too far away, sadly) so I can buy volume two.

The story itself is pretty straightforward here with a mystery to be solved and any amount of harsh terrain to get through in order to solve that mystery. What rescues the plot from being the kind of trudge that our characters make through the snow is Garry Brown and Dave McCaig’s art and colour collaboration which literally casts the story in a whole new light. We get a real sense of how inhospitable this world is, both in its very nature and also because of the hostility of the encroaching Christians. It’s simply drawn which somehow seems to convey the sense of brutality all the more effectively. This then gives the reader much more of an insight into Magnus the Black and why he leads the life that he does. When you’re left straddling the line between the old ways and the new, there’s probably only way that your story will end but Wood does a great job here of keeping things relatively vague for the next volume and giving us a view on what it was probably like to live through those turbulent times.

Like I said, we’re looking at a story that verges on the overly simplistic, for most of the book, but Wood is playing us here; well, he certainly played me. It’s all a ruse to keep us in a ‘comfort zone’ until he turns everything on it’s head with a betrayal right when we’ve been led to least expect it. All of a sudden, it feels like all bets are off and that anything can happen in the next book; a real surge of adrenaline to lead us into the next (and concluding) book. All we need to do is pick that book up and I’ll be doing just that.

‘The Holy North’ almost does its job a little too well at times, running the risk of being a little too straightforward for its own good. Some gorgeous artwork and a neat twist rescue it though with the twist in particular making my continued reading a sure thing. If you’re after a comic that’s a historical thriller, you could do worse than check this series out.