Review: Two Grendel Hardcovers – Devil Child & Devil Quest
It’s generally not a good sign when a series turns from telling stories at the far end of its timeline to filling in the gaps in earlier stories and explaining all the backstory — do I need to mention George Lucas here? — so these two new collections filled me with some trepidation. They’re both reprints of older material — older even than I thought, from 1999 and 1994-95 — but were explicitly returns to even earlier stories.
Matt Wagner’s series of [[[Grendel]]] stories started in 1982, and the main sequence ran from 1986 through 1992 (with a gap near the end caused by the collapse of Wagner’s then-publisher Comico). They started as the story of a near-future crimelord named Hunter Rose who used a mask and electrified pitchfork to terrorize…well, everyone, really. After Wagner wrote the story of Hunter’s inevitable demise, he rethought “Grendel” as a force of evil and aggression that possessed various people through a long future history. With various collaborators (and a number of stories entirely by other hands) and a great diversity of storytelling styles, the Grendel stories all had something in common: a deep, central notion that people are full of evil and corruption, and that life is inevitably nasty, brutish, and short.
Grendel: Devil Child
By Diana Schutz, Tim Sale, and Teddy Kristiansen
Dark Horse, May 2008, $17.95
Stacy Palumbo was the (adopted) daughter of the first Grendel, Hunter Rose, and the mother of the second, Christine Spar. She was a serious but lovable girl in Hunter’s story, and dead by the time of Christine’s. Her unpleasant life in between was backstory in the Christine Spar stories, but here it’s dramatized to wring maximum pathos.
(Think “maximum pathos” is too much? Try this line from the back cover of [[[Devil Child]]] — “The ugly world has no shelter for frightened Stacy, the pivotal link in a chain of evil that extends to the limits of time.” The limits of time, huh? Okay, if you say so.)