A collection of five Scandinavian illustrators and writers shines a light on the talent of fantastic art and unique storytelling.

As a print addict and graphic admirer, I am not immediately attracted to adult comic books, having left comics behind when I discovered girls.

In many ways, I find adults enjoying comic books and playing similar video games as not my favoured tribe. I find it a bit sad that these people should be out finding life, not living narrowly within their digital version of it; but maybe that’s because I’m an older bastard and was lucky enough to travel and see the world in the pre-surveillance days.

The Dark North (Volume 1), however, was a great and welcome surprise. Comprising of five stories that meld classic Norse mythology to fateful and modern-day road-trips, I found this collection of work unsettling and in many ways beautiful.

This is a coffee table book for those who look north for stories and not south. This is ice, not sand, darkness, not light. It is made by people who live by opposites, people born out of the aurora borealis, but who also spend discomfiting, different days.

The five stories here are wide-ranging, the first begins to be an American road trip, the driver following ghosts down and up a highway, lost in the quest. Wonderfully illustrated, it is like watching performance art in the Arctic circle, it is a great introduction to the other four stories.

These are less accessible to print addicts like myself, the art more gloomy and intense, where the power of Thor and the myths of local tales are wielded to overcome the reader.

This project came out of Kickstarter and the successful funding meant the dreams of the collective of individual were realised, Volume 2 is on its way and I will not only be reviewing it, I shall be reading and looking at it with great interest.