"No-one can destroy the metal / The metal will strike you down with a vicious blow"

Comics are a tremendously varied and expansive medium, as I have rambled on about multiple times in the past on this blog. The variety of genres and types of comic-books being produced today is at the widest it has been in the United States since the short period in the 1950s when the Superhero genre was nearly dead and the Western, Pirate, Romance, Horror, War, and Humor genres were allowed to breathe for the first time in a long time.

Today in serialized comics, we have: anthropomorphic dragon-men police officers as well as sarcastic twenty-something slice-of-life magical-video-game-style romantic duelists, alternate-future war photojournalists, and now semi-mythological period-setting politically and violently warring vikings.

Actually, we very likely have eclipsed the variety of the 1950s entirely. And some creators are refusing to stop here!

Brian Wood's (@brianwood) latest blog post, titled "Northlanders as Metal", about upcoming issues of his comic-book "Northlanders", shows how it is possible to stretch your imagination about what comics can be. With issue #30, he will begin incorporating Norse mythology into the series (which has previously only included mythology as "casual superstition") and the new story-arc will be titled "Metal". Yes, "Metal". Now my understanding of metal is entirely confined to the hilarious music of Tenacious D, random musings of our very metal friend Seth, and episodes of Adult Swim's "Metalocalypse", but as Wood himself wrote:

"Heavy metal and Vikings go hand in hand ... I’m taking what I’m able to take from the musical genre and apply it to comics. This is not a story about music, but a story that taps into the same dark mythology and nihilistic worldview that inspires the genre. This is radically different from anything that’s come before in the last 30 months of this series."

This could be a whole new genre for the Comics world: Metal comics.

(Okay, there was "Black Metal", but that was a pretty tongue-in-cheek kind of Metal comic. As opposed to a serious borrowing of the imagery and subjects of Metal.)

Check it out on July 21st at your local comic shop. I'll be looking for it.

And so here to send you off and to welcome a new direction for Wood's "Northlanders" (and possibly a new genre for the entire medium) is the full song lyrics of my favorite metal/humor song from Tenacious D, "The Metal":

"
You can't kill the metal!
The metal will live on!
Punk-Rock tried to kill the metal!
But they failed, as they were smite to the ground!
New-wave tried to kill the metal!
But they failed, as they were striken down to the ground!
Grunge tried to kill the metal Ha, hahahahaha!
They failed, as they were thrown to the ground!

Aargh yaow!!
Aargh yaow!!

No-one can destroy the metal!
The metal will strike you down with a vicious blow!
We are the vanquished foes of the metal!
We tried to win for why we do not know!

New-wave tried to destroy the metal, but the metal had its way!
Grunge then tried to dethrone the metal, but metal was in the way!
Punk-rock tried to destroy the metal, but metal was much too strong!
Techno tried to defile the metal, but techno was proven wrong!
Yea!!

Metal!!
It comes from hell!!
"

I love Tenacious D. They crack me up and rock me hard at the same time.

Happy comics reading folk!

~ @JonGorga