#417: the thing: the northman nightmare
the secret history of scandinavian encounters with things from another world
the thing: northman nightmare (2011, 1 issue, w. steve niles/p. patric reynolds, dark horse): when john carpenter directed the 1982 paranoia-and-body-horror classic the thing, he couldn’t have predicted that, similar to how alien and aliens would predicate a genre of spacebound horror, his landmark film would serve as the basis for a whole subgenre of icebound nightmares (though HP lovecraft anticipated it with his antarctic chiller at the mountains of madness.) it’s now a common enough theme — seen in such ideas as the early x-files episode ‘ice’ and the obscure PS2 survival horror extermination , as well as the more modern example of among us and its frigid planet research station map—that it has its own TV tropes page.
of course, like a lot of classic horror and sci-fi franchises of the late 70s and 80s, the thing developed a sort of expanded universe in the form of comics published by dark horse in the late 90s. these early comics, running under the title the thing from another world, presented a possible followup to the plotline of the film, though like with many such licensed comics of the day, it was often inconsistent, lore-wise, with its source material.
when syfy got the bright idea to create a prequel to the thing (and confusingly giving it the same name,) dark horse was summoned to do another comic book tie-in. though rather than a straight tie-in, writer steve niles optioned to go with a different take, relocating the action to early 12th century greenland, a time of vikings and the norse colonial project.
the storyline is pretty straightforward—an expedition of vikings is sent to a norse settlement to investigate why the settlement has been out of contact with home base for some time. after their ship gets caught in the ice close to shore, they trek the rest of the way to the village, coming across a mass of charred bodies, some of which seem to be human and animal bones melded together in unnatural ways.
upon reaching town they find the gates wide open and most of the villagers dead, with only a few survivors, a group of mysterious women and one hysterical man. after a night’s rest, the vikings notice one of their own is missing, and the women’s group has mysteriously gained another member; before they can investigate, one of the bodies thrown onto a fire for disposal turns into a raging, burning monster, and before long all hell breaks loose in typical fashion.
i can’t help but feel like this story would have been better as four or six issues rather than just the one. the action moves very quickly, and artist patric reynolds is forced to compress everything into smaller panels; rarely does he get the opportunity to fill even part of a page with a large, eye-catching panel (the burning monster on a rampage is the only thing approaching a full-page splash panel, and even then not only does it only occupy 2/3rds of a page, there’s another panel right on top of it!) we’re also not given much opportunity to get to know these characters, with only two of the protagonist crew even given more than a couple of lines.
still, though, reynolds’s pencils are sketchy, yet bold and expressionate; while i can’t help but feel like he probably used promotional photography for death metal albums as references for his vikings, he’s got a good talent for getting across the body horror of the things that swarm the village and its frigid environs.
it’s probably a credit to the concept that i was left wanting a little more than i got from the comic, as i’m a big fan of relocating iconic horror monsters into new situations and seeing how characters react to it in the different context. but northman nightmare just feels too compressed to be anything but a very oblique advertisement for the syfy film.
