Northlanders #40

Written by Brian Wood
Art by Matthew Woodson

Wow.  Now this is an amazing issue of Northlanders.  It's one of the one-off stories that Wood always writes between longer arcs, and it's drawn by Matthew Woodson, an artist I'm not familiar with.  It's the story of a hunter, alone in the winter woods in Sweden, around a thousand years ago.

This man has been hunting a deer for a couple of days now, beyond the point of it making sense, even to himself.  What has happened is that a strange relationship has developed between the man and the deer, where the chase carries as much meaning to the beast as the pursuit does the hunter.  In a very short amount of space, Wood and Woodson pull together everything we need to know about this man, and I found I could sense the cold and isolation he is feeling.

Woodson's art is fantastic.  There's a look to many of the artists who have contributed to this comic, and Woodson fits somewhere near artists like Cloonan and Lolos, and manages to make the deer's expressions as readable as the man's.  The dream sequence, and the page with the northern lights are sensational.

This might be one of my favourite single issues of the year.  It definitely deserves an Eisner nomination...