Grendel (graphic novel)

AUTHOR: Wagner, Matt

ARTIST: Bernie Mireault (illustrator); Tim Sale (illustrator); Matt Wagner (illustrator); Patrick McEown (penciller); Arnold Pander (penciller); Jacob Pander (penciller); John K.Snyder III (penciller, inker, and cover artist); Jay Geldhof (penciller and inker); Rich Rankin (inker); Jeremy Cox (colorist); Matthew Hollingsworth (colorist); Joe Matt (colorist); Chris Pitzer (colorist); Kurt Hathaway (letterer); Steve Haynie (letterer); Bob Pinaha (letterer)

PUBLISHER: Dark Horse Comics

FIRST SERIAL PUBLICATION: 1983-

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 1986-2009

Publication History

Grendel began in 1982—when illustrator Matt Wagner had barely reached his twenties—with a single black-and-white story in Primer, issue 2. The longest run of Grendel was published by Comico Comics. After the first three issues, Wagner left Grendel temporarily to pursue his other early project, Mage (first published in 1984), but he returned to the character as a backup feature in that series. In 1986, these backup stories were collected into Devil by the Deed.

Devil by the Deed was a best seller, and Comico approached Wagner about an ongoing series. The series lasted forty issues before Comico went bankrupt in 1990. Grendel was picked up by Dark Horse Comics, and the series was finished with issues forty-one through fifty. Grendel was not dead, however. With the help of a wide array of artists, Wagner continued to revisit and reimagine various moments in the Grendel legend for years, including two Batman/Grendel crossovers and a number of miniseries and recaps. For the twenty-fifth anniversary of Grendel in 2007, Wagner released a new, nine-issue series, Behold the Devil. At that time, Dark Horse also released a colored print of Devil by the Deed and Grendel Archives, a collection of the first Grendel issues.

Plot

By Wagner’s account, Grendel’s title character was inspired by a lecture on the great villains of world literature; Grendel possesses the cruelty and cunning of some of literature’s darkest characters. First the alter ego of the chic Hunter Rose, the character becomes a spirit that possesses and haunts numerous individuals. Freed from the restrictions of belonging to one body, Grendel has been man, woman, avenger, lunatic, and guard during the many years of his story. The trademarks of the character are a black-and-white mask and a cold and violent intensity.

Grendel is born in Rose in Devil by the Deed. Driven by the death of his lover, Rose becomes a sleek criminal mastermind and clashes with the wolf Argent. Their hatred for one another is deepened by Rose’s adoption of Stacy Palambo and her waning affection for Argent. The final battle between the two characters ends with Grendel dead and Argent paralyzed. Revealed at the end is that Christine Spar, Palambo’s daughter and a journalist with The New York Times, has written the story.

In Devil’s Legacy, which takes place shortly after the events of Devil by the Deed, Spar’s son is kidnapped by the vampire Kabuki dancer Tujiro XIV. Turning to the most potent source of power of which she is aware, Spar steals the first Grendel’s mask and electric fork and tracks Tujiro to San Francisco, where she confronts him and kills his entire Kabuki troupe, which is actually a front for a slavery ring. When Tujiro disappears, Spar vows to lay aside the Grendel persona and returns to New York. There, angered by the brutality with which Argent and police detective Captain Wiggins have interrogated her friends, she dons Grendel’s mask to avenge her loved ones and to end Argent’s obsession with Grendel. This fight between Grendel and Argent leaves both dead. Spar passes on her writings on Grendel, this time to her boyfriend, Brian Li Sung.

The next story line, covered in The Devil Inside, traces Brian’s transformation into Grendel. Disgusted by New York City, taunted by a Kabuki mask hanging in the theater where he works, and drowning in his own anger, Brian finds himself drawn to the cool and decisive violence of Grendel. He puts on a homemade mask and becomes the killer. Brian soon recognizes that he cannot separate himself from Grendel, so he goes after Captain Wiggins, sacrificing his own life to rid the world of Grendel.

Issues 16 through 23 represent a period of development in which the author explores the Grendel concept to see where the idea could go. These issues largely follow Captain Wiggins, listen to his stories of Hunter Rose, and chronicle his breakdown, in which he kills his wife.

The Grendel series fast-forwards to the year 2530 in God and the Devil to a world in which religion is essential and where the Catholic Church exerts incredible social and political power over a number of corporate “systems.” The church is led by Pope Innocent XLII, really the vampire Tujiro XIV, who is building an elaborate, Babel-like tower at the new Vatican Ouest in Colorado while the large majority of citizens live in poverty. With the police force working for the Vatican and fear of a second Inquisition silencing dissenters, stopping Innocent is up to Orion Assante, a rich, upper-class citizen, and to the newest Grendel, a drug addict named Eppy Thatcher. While Assante works to uncover Innocent’s true intentions concerning the tower, Grendel subverts the sanctity of church occasions with his madcap pranks. In a subplot, Innocent turns Pellon Cross, the head of the police force, into a vampire; Cross escapes, creating an outbreak of vampirism. Assante discovers that the tower hides a weapon that can blow up the sun. His private army, Grendel, and the vampire hoards descend on the Vatican, where Assante blows the tower up before the “sun-gun” can be detonated.

Devil’s Reign takes place immediately following God and the Devil. In this story arc, the Church has collapsed and, with it, the rest of America’s systems. Spurred by the culpability he feels for America’s condition, Assante uses his wealth and resources to unite the systems and, eventually, to merge the country with Australia and South and Central America, creating UNOW. Threatened by the growing superpower, the Japanese kidnap Assante’s longtime political partner and lover, Sherri Caniff.

Certain that the African government is responsible, Assante moves to attack that country and, eventually, world war breaks out. Long nicknamed “Grendel” himself, Assante is certain that he is possessed by the devil and seeks out Eppy Thatcher to learn the secret of his survival. During sessions with the crazed Thatcher, Assante recognizes that the solution to this world war is to use Innocent’s sun-gun technology to create a weapon more powerful than one created with nuclear technology. The sun disk is made and used against Japan, and the entire world surrenders to UNOW. The world enters an imperial age, with Assante as its leader. His final undertaking is to produce an heir, a plan that leads him to marry Laurel Kennedy and impregnate himself when she is unable to bear children. Jupiter Niklos is born and remains hidden away from the political arena after his father’s death.

In a continuation of the God and the Devil subplot, vampires have been isolated in Caesars Palace, in Las Vegas. There, they go underground; Cross plans the rise of a vampire race and spreads the word through his “gospel.”

War Child tells the story of Grendel-Prime kidnapping Jupiter Assante. After Orion dies, his power-hungry and unstable wife takes control of the government. Unbeknownst to her, her husband had built a cyborg and charged him with the protection of his son. Grendel-Prime sequesters Jupiter in the wilderness, carrying him safely past radioactive zombies, pirates, biker gangs, and First One and his vampire followers, until Jupiter returns to claim his rightful position.

Volumes

•Grendel Archives (2007). Collects Primer, issue 2, and Grendel, issues 1-3. Concentrates on the story of Spar, in which she assumes the role of Grendel to save her son from Tujiro, a Kabuki vampire.

•Grendel: Devil by the Deed (1986). Collects the backup stories from Mage, which chronicle the life of Hunter Rose and his assumption of the Grendel persona. The volume uses long prose passages instead of thought or speech balloons, introducing the novelistic narrative style used occasionally in the series.

•Grendel: Devil’s Legacy (1988). Collects issues 1-12. Spar takes up the Grendel costume and fork. Introduces Grendel as a malicious force that can inhabit different individuals.

•Grendel: The Devil Inside (1999). Collects issues 13-15. Brian Li Sung is Grendel, who had been Spar’s lover. He attempts to murder Wiggins but is eventually shot by him.

•Grendel: Devil Tales (1999). Collects issues 16-19. Captain Wiggins tells of Grendel, relaying, among other tales, the story of Hunter Rose.

•Grendel: God and the Devil (2008). Collects issues 24-33. This is the first volume not to focus entirely on the Grendel character. It connects Grendel overtly to the devil, as Thatcher uses the identity to oppose the twenty-sixth century Catholic Church.

•Grendel: Devil’s Reign (2009). Collects issues 34-40. The Grendel mask is known throughout the world. This volume returns to long prose passages to make the story of Assante’s rise to power read like a history. This history is interspersed with more traditional comic spreads that recount the history of the underground vampire contingent.

•Grendel: War Child (1993). Collects issues 41-50. Features the cyborg Grendel-Prime, who kidnaps Assante’s son, Jupiter.

Characters

•Hunter Rose, the protagonist of Devil by the Deed, is a genius novelist and New York City crime lord whom Grendel first inhabits. He is young and debonair, part of the high-society party crowd, and has dark hair streaked by Grendel’s signature white shock at his right temple. He is apparently without human feeling, except for his attachment to Palambo, an orphan he adopts.

•Argent plays the antagonist to Grendel in both Devil by the Deed and Devil’s Legacy. He is an anthropomorphic wolf, more than three hundred years old, and has long ears and gray skin. Once an Algonquin Indian, Argent was cursed. A secondary result of the curse is Argent’s great hunger for violence. Rejected by society, he has channeled his rage into fighting criminals. His brutality and appearance are found repulsive by many characters.

•Christine Spar is the second embodiment of Grendel. The single mother is successful, athletic, and fiercely protective of her son and her friends. She purposefully chooses the darkness of Grendel in order to protect the ones she loves.

•Tujiro XIV is a vampire Kabuki dancer who kidnaps and kills Anson Spar. He is a chilling figure, with perfectly smooth white skin and empty, mesmerizing eyes and a penchant for preserving an eyeball from each of his victims. In God and the Devil, he reappears as Pope Innocent XLII, the leader of the Catholic Church, who plans to blow up the sun.

•Brian Li Sung is Spar’s boyfriend and the third person to embody the Grendel mask. Brian is a quiet, gentle, and handsome stage manager who has a relationship with Spar. Disgusted with his own emotional weakness and anger, he succumbs easily to the violent spirit of Grendel, but he has the moral fortitude to reject that violence at the end.

•Captain Wiggins is the detective who works with Argent in Devil’s Legacy and who chases Brian in The Devil Inside. He is blond and trendy, and one of his eyes has been replaced by a fake eye with lie-detector capabilities.

•Orion Assante is a wealthy member of the upper class who opposes Innocent XLII. With a square jaw, broad shoulders, and eloquent speaking ability, he is a commanding presence. With his great resources and single-minded determination to overthrow the Church’s power, he makes a clear choice for national leader after the fall of the Church.

•Eppy Thatcher is a factory worker who is certain God hates him. The son of deeply religious and abusive parents, he has given up on religion. Thatcher is thin and has wild gray hair and the dark sunken eyes of a drug addict. He powers his delusions, in which the devil uses him to defeat God, with the drug named “Grendel.” Under the influence of this drug, he is quick and strong and his speech is laced with puns.

•Pellon Cross is the leader of the police force hired by Pope Innocent XLII to kill Grendel. Cross is a daredevil and has a flying motorcycle, a ubiquitous cigarette, and a steel plate covering half of his head. After he is turned into a vampire, he is called “First One” and becomes a messiah figure for vampires. He is able to bleed, unlike most vampires, and his blood lust is insatiable.

•Grendel-Prime is the cyborg warrior responsible for protecting Jupiter Assante. Once a human member of Assante’s army, he was turned into a cyborg for the protection of Jupiter. His black body armor, inhuman strength, and devotion to duty make him the most superhero-like of all the Grendels.

Artistic Style

Given Grendel’s long publication history, the series has used multiple artists with diverse artistic styles. The Hunter Rose stories are both written and pencilled by Wagner; while the black-and-white incubation issues are rudimentary, by the publication of Devil by the Deed, the signature art of the Hunter Rose stories was introduced. The art of these stories is heavy with elements of design, and the pages are covered with bold, elegant Art Deco shapes and lines. Though the art was originally colored in an orange and purple palette and recolored by Bernie Mireault in 1993, a red, white, and black palette has become the standard for all the Hunter Rose stories, emphasizing the crime-noir atmosphere, past-tense narration, and graphic design elements.

Though Wagner remained the writer of each generation in Grendel’s history, he frequently invited other artists to reimagine the world, writing his stories to the strengths of each artist, the result of which is the subtly different mood of each Grendel. Arnold and Jacob Pander’s New York is high style with pop-art lines and colors that match Spar’s fashionable career and shameless acceptance of Grendel.

When Mireault took over illustration with the Brian Li Sung story arc, Grendel’s story became one of psychological panic. Empty background spaces in The Devil Inside are highly patterned, and the lines are short and interrupted, creating a frenzied atmosphere. The collaborative team of John K. Snyder, III, Jay Geldhof, and Mireault emphasize the grandiosity and excesses of the Church in God and the Devil with airy, page-high panels and bird’s-eye views.

In the Orion Assante story line of Devil’s Reign, Tim Sale uses muted colors, captioned panels, and simple backgrounds to illustrate a historical narrative that keeps readers at arm’s length. However, rich colors, page-high panels, and speech balloons in the vampire story line invite the reader into the world’s crumbling decadence. Patrick McEown’s illustrations contain fewer full-page designs and more traditional panel flow than some other Grendel volumes, which complements beautifully Wagner’s claim that he wanted to return to adventure comics with War Child.

Text is also an important element of Grendel’s art. In particular, Devil by the Deed and sections of Devil’s Reign are written almost entirely without speech balloons. Instead, a third-person narrative unfolds in lengthy passages of text. The art of the two volumes is snapshotlike, and the combination of art and text lends historical significance and mythic status to these Grendel stories.

Themes

The blurred line between good and evil is the central theme of the Grendel stories. Though Grendel is the protagonist of his own story, he is not the hero, nor are his antagonists always villains. For example, Argent is brutal and hideous, but he works to bring criminals to justice. The supervillain of the Grendel comics is utterly evil, and yet attractive, whether that attraction lies in his stylish life and his freedom from conscience or in Spar’s honorable intentions. Even when Wagner moved away from the “Grendel-inhabits-next-person” formula and focused on Grendel as a study of society, the moral ambiguity in “good” characters, such as Assante, is still evident; readers still find pleasure in “degenerate” characters, such as Thatcher, and power still corrupts, no matter its end. Grendel refuses to provide the typical superhero/supervillain dichotomy.

While the formula of Grendel possessing an individual makes the earlier stories expressive of individual struggle, a shift to commentary on religion and government in later volumes cannot be ignored. Absolute institutions such as Vatican Ouest’s megachurch or Assante’s regime often ignore the very individuals they claim to serve and reject those that fit outside the system. Grendel offers little escape from these institutions, as one gives rise to the next, despite the actions of various individuals. Readers are often asked, through the rhetorical questions of characters, to consider their own culpability in supporting these systems.

Impact

Wagner’s many influences include specific titles such as John Gardner’s Grendel (1971) and Michael Moorcock’s Elric stories (1972-1984), but equally influential to his work was the exciting atmosphere of the comics industry during the 1980’s. When Grendel first appeared, the rebel movement toward independent publishing gave birth to independent publishing companies such as Comico. Though Wagner has worked with DC, Grendel has remained independent and is one of the longest-lived characters not owned by DC or Marvel.

Like many artists at the beginning of the Modern Age of comics, Wagner looked to break away from the conventions of comics at the time, and one significant break is Grendel’s experimental use of text. The comic’s history includes text that is narrative, some that is interior monologue, some that is speech, and some that is caption. The experimentation with text seen during the 1980’s led the way for the multilayered narratives of comic memoirs such as Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006) or Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (2000), and Grendel took full part in this experimentation.

Further Reading

Bachalo, Chris, and Joe Kelly. Steampunk: Manimatron (2001).

Loeb, Jeph, and Tim Sale. Batman: The Long Halloween (1996-1997).

Moore, Alan. Watchmen (1986-1987).

Wagner, Matt. Mage (1984-1997).

Bibliography

Farrell, Jennifer Kelso. “The Evil Behind the Mask: Grendel’s Pop Culture Evolution.” Journal of Popular Culture 41, no. 6 (December, 2008): 934-939.

Pinkham, Jeremy. “Matt Wagner: The Devil and the Need.” The Comics Journal 165 (January, 1994): 46-72.

Wagner, Matt, and Diana Schultz, ed. The Art of Matt Wagner’s “Grendel.” Milwaukie, Ore.: Dark Horse Books, 2007.