pillage people

Thor: Vikings
Garth Ennis/Glenn Fabry
Marvel/MAX

the god, the bad AND ugly

ok, to describe this 5-issue throwdown by one of my favorite writers, Garth Ennis, i can just simply show you this pic:

ok, that beats how Tommy Lee Jones died in Under Siege

in a nutshell: in 1003 AD, Harald Jaekelsson and his band of marauding vikings (is that an oxymoron? weren't there any vikings who, you know, just sold pots and pans, but in an obnoxious salesman kind of way?) has just sacked a village and decides to undertake a voyage to the New World (sacking local villages probably got too boring). the village's priest, wounded and dying, still manages to call them out and curses them with a runestone and a few drops of his blood. what's a viking to do? why, make sure the annoying geezer stays dead this time of course. problem is, instead of a few drops of blood activating the curse, its a bucketful and the whole nine yards ...

and so Jaekelsson and his men find themselves landing in New York - around 1,000 years later than Leif Eriksson discovered the North American continent (i'm told that Eriksson invited him to join his voyage, but Jaekelsson had to "go quench a burning fire in his loins"). the curse had transformed them into the undying, and of course the stupid tourists at the South Street Seaport thought they were from the Capital One commercials. except they were uglier.

what's in your gullet?

hey, that's the second time the South St. Seaport has been mentioned in this blog. i love New York!

mayhem ensues as undead, rotting, magical Norsemen do what they were born to do in modern-day Manhattan - pillage, pillage, pillage. heads and limbs get chopped off, women get raped, blood everywhere - just a normal day in a Garth Ennis book (just kidding, Garth!).

Ennis doesn't forget the other details, but just enough to keep the action going. check a couple below:

now THAT should've been a Capital One commercial!

and guess who's sitting in the Oval Office. i swear to God, for all its faults, we love democracy. can you imagine people rioting because of political cartoons?


so where the are so-called superheroes who defend this fair city (99% of the time - this never happens in Boise, Idaho or Billings, Montana)? why, just like the cops and soldiers before them, they're getting their asses handed back to them of course.

the Avengers have defeated time-traveling, world-beating lunatics
but can't overcome a shipfull of undead rotting corpses

and what about the main protagonist of this book, the hero of epics, the son of Odin, the Thunder God, the Mighty Thor?

oh, he's just dandy, between drowning by the East River, with a bitchslapped face, two broken hands, getting chained to and yanked down by his own mystic hammer, and getting run through with a sword. bah. god of thunder, my ass.

oh, the ignominy.

when Thor finally decides to get out of the stinky river and join the battle, he finds Dr. Strange, this universe's resident mystic, waiting for him. i am actually fascinated by and loathe this version of Doc Stephen ... since when did he gain a dismissive attitude and a satchelful of killer retorts, again?


perhaps its because he knows Thor did just suffer a severe beatdown, so Strange was bold enough to throw zingers at him. at any other time, Thor would have thrown his hammer at Strange for being so glib.


so what's Dr. Strange's grand plan? well, he figures out that the runestone curse got extended because the old man messed the trick up with more than the requisite amount of blood. so to counteract this, they need help from warriors who were descendants of the old man (which i'm not sure of that he would have any, given that Jaekelsson sacked his whole village - but let's just get on with it). Ennis inserts tongue-in-cheek humor everywhere, but primarily through Strange (while analyzing the old man's bloodline: "mostly farmers and fishermen, a carpenter or two, another wise man, a goatherd - oh! i wish i hadn't seen that."), and if it weren't for the character as i knew it, would be a winner through and through.

rounding up the selection process from the descendants, we have the following:
(1) Sigrid the tomboy

famous last words.

(2) Magnus the conservative Christian

if this was how they recruited believers, i'd jump to it right away

and (3) Erik Lonnroth, of the Nazi Luftwaffe (but with his heart in the right place, naks)



it really helps as well, to have this new Dr. Strange at your side. i can imagine Magnus laughing inside his helmet, if he managed to understand the wisecracks of the 21st century.


lest we forget, its Thor who's headlining this book, and he makes his presence (re-)felt, by simply yelling his tormentor's name, causing damage to a few eardrums (Fabry does a nice job here).


running parallel to the wiseass Dr. Strange, Thor suddenly seems to have watched a lot of TV lately, presumably of American sporting kind. how can you not laugh cheer?

in other words, start pissing in your pants.

the outcome becomes predictable, as you know this four warriors would kick ass. Thor likes 3 extra warriors by his side, as evidenced by past history. in the kicking ass department, the whole thing becomes an Indiana Jones-type roller coaster ride, especially with Erik the Nazi flyboy fighting off vikings who jump on his plane.

i like Fabry better when he's doing covers, but he's done an ok job here. Ennis, as usual, spins a yarn out of the rotting carcass that is his brain, and its not something i didn't really expect. but i'm always interested in his work, and he's in that top shelf of comic book writers i prefer, with Millar, Ellis, Morrison and Busiek/Waid.

the lesson to would-be conquerors: never count god-like creatures out, even if you gave them two broken hands and used their face as a punching bag. or else you'd end up somewhere out there. as in out there.


hey, wait ... this sets up the future sequel, Thor:Vikings in Space. think of all the damage Jaekelsson can wreak in the ISS. or maybe not.
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issues read: #1-5