​​​Grendel
Critical Survey of Graphic Novels
Grendel
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: 1983First 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.
Grendel. (Courtesy of Dark Horse Comics)
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
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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
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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, upperclass 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.
Critical Survey of Graphic Novels
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 powerhungry 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 1619. 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.
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• 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 4150. 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.
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• 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
Grendel. (Courtesy of Dark Horse Comics)
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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.
Critical Survey of Graphic Novels
• 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,
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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.
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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.
Anna Lohmeyer
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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.
See also: Batman: The Long Halloween; Watchmen;
Mage