What an incredibly visceral and primal combination. When The Thing: The Northman Nightmare was offered to me, I simply replied, “When do you need it done?” I couldn’t wait to read the script, and I could only imagine the possibilities. I mean, a dozen guys in the Antarctic with flamethrowers, grenades, helicopters, and two-way radios couldn’t handle it, so how in the world were a bunch of twelfth-century sailors wearing animal furs roaming the world in wooden boats with swords going to fare against it? The 1982 John Carpenter film was so good at showing us how poorly humanity reacts under pressure to things we do not understand, and how easily we can go from suspicion to mistrust to outright paranoia. This causes us to make desperate decisions. Now I had a chance to draw a group of short-tempered berserkers under that same kind of pressure. And with all that, maybe, just maybe, I would get to draw a Thing monster that was part Viking. What a great mash-up.
I chose to use a more realistic style with this story, and I wanted to use real people as models because I thought more natural actions and expressions would be more engaging. The only problem is that I didn’t know a whole lot of people who look like Vikings. So at that point, I had to either make friends with death-metal musicians, or just make things up. Thankfully, some guys on the Dark Horse staff (Patrick Thorpe, Jim Gibbons, and Aub Driver) volunteered to help me out…and they looked like Vikings. In fact, I think Aub (the one who posed for the “Hord” character) might actually be a Viking. Of course, I didn’t have any authentic Viking-period clothing so I had those poor guys put their dignity on the line and dress up in layers of Old Navy pullovers and bed sheets while wielding yardsticks. After all the photos were taken, I had to Vikingize them by adding beards, tattoos, scars, and fur pelts. I wanted each Viking to look distinctive, so it was an incredible challenge to keep all of their nuances and details consistent.
One of the more difficult things that I had to deal with in this story is the lack of shadows and darkness. Most of the events take place in the daytime, and everything is covered in snow. On top of all that, most everything is on fire in the last part of the story. There are very few interior shots, not many shadows, and only two pages feature a nighttime scene. There just wasn’t a lot of inherent, visual black-and-white contrast in the story. For an artist whose work is based on creating contrast through placement of blacks, this posed quite a challenge. I had to rely more on line quality and the abstraction of detail to create visual separation (most notably in the fire scenes), and basically put in blacks that weren’t present in the photographs. It did get me to rely less on the visual information in the photographs, though, which is something I’m always striving for.
That being said, The Thing was always a unique horror experience for me. It made me think about how easy it is for such awful terrors to hide in the seemingly familiar. The sight of the horrible mutant Thing monster convulsing and imperfectly turning into a warped human form was repulsive when I saw it on the screen, but I also felt…pity. This wasn’t a person transforming into a werewolf or a vampire like in other horror movies. There was no allure, no dark elegance there. It’s just a person turning into…a horror. There is still humanity present, being swallowed up by something unknown. It’s that human presence that conjures sympathy, and the thought of how malleable and fragile our humanity and individuality are can be very terrifying. I figured as long as I kept a human presence in the monster when I drew it, the reader could feel that kind of terror, too.
—Patric
