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A quarter of a century ago Grendel was born, in the back of Matt Wagner's semi-autobiographical comic Mage. Back then there were very few creator-owned comic characters and very few grey areas between superheroes and the underground. If you weren't Supergirl you were Robert Crumb. A costumed contract killer and crimelord with no moral sense who has an unhealthy relationship with a little girl and battles a man-wolf was something entirely new.
Wagner, the writer and the artist, has since claimed that Hunter Rose sprang fully-formed from his forehead, like Athena. The character came about because of stylistic contraints; with only a few pages to work with, Grendel needed a space-saving form of narrative to actually tell a story. That's how Devil by the Deed came about. The story of Hunter who garbed himself as Grendel and carved his mark on the world is told in text and illustration in beautiful art deco pages, design taking a much higher priority than conventional comics storytelling. The story itself is very strange, though I won't go into spoiler territory. It appears to me to be all the odder because of the format; because Wagner's concentrating on this new way of creating comics the strangeness of a love triangle between a little girl, a super-intelligent killer and a four-hundred-year-old wolf is allowed to pass unchallenged.
The regular series, which ran for 40 issues, was similarly born of innovation. When a regular series was suggested Wagner didn't see how he could work on one character for so long without getting bored. His answer was to make Grendel a legacy comic, with the mantle of Grendel being passed down through a number of different inviduals, and to make it a comic about a concept. Male violence, self-destruction, the lust for power, implacable hatred; these are Grendel, and we see them enacted against people and society over hundreds of years.
The second innovation of the regular series was that, aside from a couple of Hunter Rose interludes, Wagner wasn't the artist. Each arc (another innovation back then) had a different art team, and Wagner the writer was very much about playing to that team's strengths. The Pander Brothers had lots of fashion and kinetic action to draw, Bernie Minrault did grimy and urban and obsessive, the artists on God and the Devil swapped over depending on the POV character of the issue. From beginning to end, the themes of the comic have emerged from a swirling soup of innovation. Every new arc experimented with new storytelling techniques accompanying strange subject matter, more often than not working superbly. It was a lonely trailblazer, with very little following up its promise.
There have been quite a few Grendel comics since the series concluded: War Child which continued the story into the future and introduced Grendel Prime, two Batman/Grendel crossovers, and the two Black, White and Red series which finally filled in the detail on Hunter Rose. At the same time the original series has been recoloured and republished by Dark Horse with the aim of bringing everything back into print.
Matt Wagner has announced that 2007, the 25th anniversary, is going to be Grendel's year. There's a new manga-paced eight-issue series written and drawn by Matt about an untold chapter in Rose's life. The original, never-reprinted stuff is coming out as Grendel Classics. Devil by the Deed is being republished as a hardback and recoloured in black, white and red, and I'd expect the God and the Devil and Devil's Legacy trades to come out, which puts almost everything on to the shelves. There's never been a better time to get into Grendel.
A basic history here
and a Wagner interview here
and here. |
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