Also in the "bring in the lead character right at the end" stable is Thor: Vikings.  This is a rare example of Garth Ennis writing a superhero and doing it more or less straight.  Granted, Thor's a mythological character rather than a straight superhero, but Marvel's version is a pretty watered down one.

That may perhaps be one of the themes of this series.  The Vikings weren't terribly nice people.  Thor, on the other hand, seems to live by a moral code on loan from Camelot.  Quite how this guy ever fitted in as a Viking god is a little difficult to fathom, and while a few writers have tried to explain it away over the years, I've never found any of them convincing.

Ennis' set-up has a bunch of Vikings leaving Norway in 1003 after deciding that the king is becoming too much of a nuisance to their affairs - these guys are so thoroughly unpleasant that even the other Norwegians don't want them around.  (That in itself sets up some justification for why Thor wouldn't like them either.)  They set off for the New World in the hope of finding new hunting grounds where they won't be interfered with, but thanks to a curse from their victims, they find themselves stuck at sea for a thousand years.  So it's 2003 when a ship of zombie Vikings turns up in New York, shrugs its shoulders, and sets about killing everyone in sight.

This is really the origin story of the Vikings, but it's entertaining enough in its own right to pull it off.  It's surprisingly light on jokes, considering Ennis' love of black comedy.  Instead, Ennis and Fabry play it absolutely straight, pour on the graphic violence, and generally spend an issue making it absolutely clear that these are the baddies.  It's not deep, it's not clever, but it is great reading.  Extremely violent, admittedly, but then if you've got a bunch of Vikings assaulting everyone with bloody great cleavers, so it should be.

Not likely to go down in history as an indispensible Ennis/Fabry work, but very readable if you like the sound of a violent zombie Viking miniseries.  They're great storytellers, and that's the bottom line.

Rating: B+

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