Oni Press
$3.99 an issue
Written by Cullen Bunn
Art by Joelle Jones
Color by Nick Filardi
Lettered by Ed Brisson
Designed by Keith Wood
Edited by Charles Chu
Note: I have endeavored to avoid large spoilers though it is not possible to talk about something in a vacuum. Forgive any trespasses.
What we love about Sword & Sorcery, the best of that sub-genre of Fantasy, is what you find in Cullen Bunn’s Helheim. There is action, monsters, villains, heroes as well as an emotionally charged human story. Bunn is best known as a writer who offers up interesting characters and Helheim is no exception. There is the tortured Rikard, grown to something inhuman but still good, the grieving father Kirk, who wrestles with father-son issues (Viking style, of course), and three intriguing females in Groa, Bera and the waifish, Cadlin. Even the sidekickish Shad offers up a Shakespearean counterpart to Kirk’s King Lear. Add to these characters twists and turns, fights and hard alliances and the six issues just melt away in moments, leaving you gasping for more. (They’ve promised us more!)
I’ve been around the block enough times to know what may have inspired Bunn’s vision of the frozen north beset by sorcery. These influences are not Conan, as so much dull, uninspired S&S is, but the horror genre. (It is easy to forget that horror is always half of the Sword & Sorcery combo. Check out Bunn’s awesome Harrow County for horror.) Rikard’s piecemeal super-body is surely Frankenstein’s monster inspired. The witch war that tears at the lives of the Norsemen may have come from the Richard Matheson story of that name though it is set in modern times. Or maybe not. The point is Bunn has given us that perfect mix, something familiar but new. Not predictable, not spouting the same old tropes. I can recall the odd tale of warriors fighting the undead (“Legions of the Dead” by L. Sprague de Camp & Lin Carter (1978) but this seems the point at which Bunn begins, not ends. Helheim feels more like the original Beowulf or Robert E. Howard’s “Queen of the Black Coast” (Weird Tales, May 1934). Helheim has the same visceral tension when Rikard has hacked his way through an army of evil and stands there saying, “Finished? How could that be?”
A mention of the artwork seems a must for a comic book review. In this department, Oni Press has made an excellent choice. Visually my brain gets tired of anything that smacks of John Buscema and Savage Sword of Conan (having read them all!) This same eye-to-brain fatigue lessened my enjoyment of the first Hobbit film for the same reason. I wanted to “see” something different. Joelle Jones has supplied that difference. Angular, stark, at times quiet and moody, her art was charmingly fresh. (The only similar art I can think of was Ernie Colon’s Arak, Son of Thunder (1987), the early issues.) Nick Filardi’s palette of colors are wonderfully muted and Northern as they should be.
The last time I was this pleased with an unusual choice for S&S comic art was the single story Alex Nino did for Conan called “The People of the Dark” (Savage Sword of Conan #6, May 1975) I often looked at that piece and said, “Why don’t more people try something like this?” Visually Sword & Sorcery comics need to stretch as much as the writing to keep it from becoming that “Literary Fossil” that Alexei Panshin once accused it of becoming. Artists are as important in making those choices, as any issue of Dynamite’s Red Sonja proves. You can do Marvel retread if you want to play it safe, but the real work is being done by writers like Bunn and the art team at Oni Press.
Of course, Bunn and Oni Press did follow through with a sequel, The Brides of Helheim (2014). Cullen Bunn then went on to write his own Conan comic called Conan the Slayer (2016) with artist Sergio Davila. We avidly wait his next Sword & Sorcery comic…
For another S&S comic review: check out Klaus by Grant Morrison and Dan Mora.
