Zeb Larson reviews Black Road #1…
Meet Magnus the Black, neither clean nor sober, neither Christian nor Pagan, but a man true to his word. When a ranking official under his care is brutally murdered, he’s prepared to hunt the killers to the frozen tip of Norway, religious war be damned. Northlanders creator BRIAN WOOD returns to the Viking genre along with artist GARRY BROWN (The Massive, Catwoman) and DAVE McCAIG (Batman, American Vampire) in this all-new series.
Those who are familiar with Brian Wood’s oeuvre ought to be familiar with Northlanders, which was a collection of stories about people living in the era of the Vikings. Black Road is a return to that kind of storytelling, and it is absolutely as hard and unforgiving as a Norse saga. Yet the brutality is nuanced in a fascinating way, with much of it coming from the Christians, all being observed by a man who doesn’t know what to think of the new god or the old ones. Meanwhile, he takes on a mission of vengeance for reasons even he may not understand. Warning: I will be discussing some spoilers from here on out.
Magnus is a Viking living at a time when Norway is undergoing forced conversion by Christians (which ought to place this sometime in the 12th century, but a year is never given). Magnus doesn’t like the Christians, who like to punish those who don’t pay their taxes by staking them to the ground, and he thinks the church tithes are simply reducing the people to poverty. But his wife is gone, so not much really matters anymore. When he’s offered a job to escort a cardinal of the Church north on the Black Road, he hesitates, but eventually accepts. That trip goes about as badly as you might expect, but he refuses to let the man’s murderers go free, especially after the Cardinal’s daughter turns up.
Brian Wood makes what might seem to be an unusual decision by introducing a dark-skinned blacksmith that works briefly with Magnus. Somehow, I can sense somebody on the internet raging that there couldn’t be any black people living among the Vikings, and I feel compelled to head off this criticism at the pass. The Vikings raided North Africa a few different times, on top of their activities in Spain (where there was a considerably sized Moorish population). It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that a few dark-skinned people went back to Scandinavia. Of course, it’s sort of irrelevant because it has no bearing on the story, and Brian Wood isn’t producing a scholarly treatise on Viking demographics, but still.
On to discussion of the book.
Magnus’ musings on Christianity really speak to his pain, and confusion about the incredibly chaotic world he inhabits. Christianity is a religion of love that was spread through violence, and its followers could be incredibly violent people. Yet Magnus doesn’t really have any nostalgia for the old ways. He might hate what the expansion of the church looks like, with people being literally nailed to the ground, but I don’t detect any belief that Odin or the old gods would salve the pain of his wife’s death.
As much as Magnus puts on a tough guy act throughout the book, he is looking for something better out there. Conversely, he can’t just ignore the evil that’s going on all around him, particularly out there on the Black Road. For all the anger he has toward Christian priests, he actually thinks the Cardinal was a decent man, and so he’s going to go out and chase down whatever evil is at the end of the Black Road.
Wood is a subtle enough author that he doesn’t make it clear what that evil is. Is it just despicable men? No, they seem to be pretty much everywhere, a farthing (ha) a dozen in this miserable world. Magnus dreams of a world on fire (a church in particular), and it left me wondering what he is going to find when he heads north. Are the men of the old ways planning something to take back the country that used to be theirs? Or is there some subtle supernatural evil at work here as well?
“Long is the way and hard, that out of hell leads up to light.” Magnus is leaving his own personal hell as he heads north. Maybe this is a revenge story, or a story of redemption, or just one guy trying to find either of those. It’ll make a good read.
Rating: 9/10
Zeb Larson
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Originally published April 13, 2016. Updated April 15, 2018.
