5 out of 5

Hardcover collection of tankobons vol. 27 and 28.

Vinland Saga continues to execute on being equally epic and intimate at the same time; of somehow being terrifically exciting without, or rarely, resorting to action. While it does rely on lead Thorfinn as being somewhat superpowered – extremely skilled in battle; able to take on multiple attackers and flip-flop through arrows and the like – Makoto Yukimura helped to “earn” Thorfinn’s rep with the reader by treating the opening chapters of Vinland more like a typical big screen action book (where the superpoweredness felt more matched to the genre) before turning it into a slowburn drama, and thus it makes it incredibly powerful, narrative-wise, whenever Finn has to summon up those skills. And because his other superpower is in being insanely patient with his peoples, and with the Lnu, both with members eager to turn the others into enemies, it adds story stakes if things are at a point where we wonder if Thorfinn will break.

But that’s also not Yukimura’s game, to turn those into Thorfinn’s struggle: it is about the struggle of people, told through this particular historical lens.

Vinland Saga is also one of the few mangas (or comics!) where a major arc can go on for eighteen parts – this entire collection is the first of those 18 – and not fill me with a bit of trepidation, expecting wheel-spinning; furthermore, maybe only Yukimura can get away with promising me a war, and then I’m not disappointed in the slightest when there isn’t one. …I mean, that’s on me, for somehow misreading the story arc name as “Thousand-Year War” when it’s actually “…Voyage,” but the point remains.

That (actual) title best summarizes the point: in the backmatter, Yukimura talks about how humanity’s story is of a long journey, where our common ancestry splits and goes its separate ways, only to run into each other again, many years later, and finding the others to be strangers. Thus: the Norse peoples have set up their land on Vinland, and have established trade and peace with the local populace, the Lnu Indians; but to each their customs and language are strange. Thorfinn is dedicated to his passivist position, but not at the expense of lives – and this (perhaps inevitably, alas) brings him into conflict with not only the more warlike of his crew, but those amongst the Lnu who are having the same conversations along the lines of “they will attack us eventually, and so we should strike first.”

Yukimura avoids any easy way out in this story. He avoids sacrificing core elements of Cordelia’s personality, or Thorfinn’s, or Hild’s, while remaining true to history, and finding appropriate ways to structure the tale into an endlessly thrilling comic, with some of the best choreography and geography when it comes to establishing the areas, or during dialogue sequences, or during the pointed action sequences.