MYTHCOMICS: GRENDEL TALES: THE DEVIL'S HAMMER (1994)

DEVIL'S HAMMER is one of many spinoffs of Matt Wagner's GRENDEL franchise, albeit one in which Wagner had an ancillary role: authoring a 3-part backup series in the three 1994 issues of this Dark Horse comic. However, I'm concerned only with the primary serial, which seems to be the source of the magazine's title. and was written by Rob Walton and drawn by Bernie Mireault and Kathryn Delaney.

I've had only intermittent encounters with the Grendel Franchise, so I'm sketchy on some of the developments in HAMMER. The events take place in a futuristic setting, when humanity has been conquered by a tyrant known as "the Grendel-Khan." Further, the forces commanded by the Khan include a dedicated array of knights called "Grendels," who view the idea of Grendel as a transcendent principle in their lives.

Christianity still exists in this world, but it's been largely exiled to the rural parts of the country (whatever country it may be) and reduced to the level of medieval monasticism. The story's narrator is a monk named Petrus Christus (Rock of Christ), who lives according to his religion's definitions of good and evil. He suffers a severe trauma when five Grendel-knights massacre an entire city, Ourador, leaving only Petrus alive to tell the tale.

Petrus seeks out a local monastery, regarded by Christians as "the New Jerusalem on Earth," and confers with its abbot, Sebastian Chiesa. This monk also survived an earlier encounter with the five killers, who tormented him by shooting him with arrows targeted to non-fatal parts of his body. As if to do the legendary Saint Sebastian one better, this Sebastian doesn't have the arrows removed from his body, but allows them to remain, "as testimony to Christ's sovereignty over flesh and the devil."
Sebastian counsels Petrus to allow God to punish the Grendels "in the fires of the next world." But Petrus seeks vengeance, and since he's apparently more of a practiced warrior than the average priest, he decides to infiltrate the Grendels by joining their ranks.

With very little difficulty, the monk joins forces with the five slaughterers of Ourodor-- the leader Mahound, Kali (the only female), Klunni, the Lotus, and Bill, the last being the only one who wears a mask like that of the 20th century Grendel. Mahound, whose name is derived from a medieval corruption of Mohammed, claims that he and his fellows stand far above the "dullards" who serve the Grendel-Khan, for only Mahound's group serves "the indestructible power and indescribable joy of Grendel."

Because the Grendels have no current plan to attack anyone, Petrus baits them into attacking the monastery again, while secretly planning to ambush the knights separately. Instead, he himself gets ambushed by the Lotus, who spouts quasi-Taoist aphorisms like, "The mask that is worn is not Grendel." Petrus manages to slay the Lotus, after which the monk experiences a non-Christian epiphany, standing in a baptismal river while a raven bites off one of his ears. (Neither ear is missing when reality as such resumes.)

Petrus then has an extended conversation with mask-garbed Bill, who confesses a loss of faith, partly because he and his fellow killers cannot equal the rapacity of nature. "We could displace the oceans of Earth with gore," he tells the monk, "and the universe wouldn't bat an eye." Petrus leaves Bill to wallow in his existential torment and ambushes both Kunnil and Kali, killing one and trapping the other, Bill shows up, kills Kali, and tries to kill Petrus, suspecting that the latter has become Grendel's new Messiah. The monk kills Bill and rushes to the monastery to head off Mahound. Petrus and Mahound fight, but though Mahound loses, he like Bill believes that it's because the spirit of Grendel has chosen Petrus as his vessel. He also reveals that there's a "truth" that Petrus must learn about the revered abbot.

I won't reveal the nature of that truth here, but suffice to say that it doesn't do anything to shore up Petrus's waning Christian values. Yet even before the revelation comes out, Petrus is apparently possessed by the actual demon-spirit of Grendel. During the abbot's attempt to exorcise Petrus, the former monk speaks of himself in Biblical terms: "I am the eyes and ears of Heaven. My name denotes my office in the celestial court. Neither apostate nor fallen-- you know me, abbot, as Adversary." With these references, Walton is almost certainly evoking the Old Testament version of Satan, who accused mortals like Job in order to test their faith in God. But clearly the reader is not supposed to invest in the hierarchy of God and his angels, and if the Grendel-spirit is real, then it's because it embodies something more profound about the universe than any god, a principle to which Petrus surrenders herself before he too perishes:

There was never anything beyond the darkness. It was the darkness itself, and the darkness only, that I was meant to see.

MYTHCOMICS: DEVIL BY THE DEED (1984)

The title DEVIL BY THE DEED suggests that even though creator Matt Wagner has given his protagonist the name of a famous literary monster, this Grendel should be judged not by his lineage (the original Grendel was the offspring of the Biblical Cain), but by the totality of his deeds, both good and bad. In the history of pop culture, a fair number of features in pulps, movie serials, and comic books focused upon villains. Yet Grendel has less in common with “the Secret Society of Super-Villains” than with the recherché charms of Fantomas, at least in terms of showing the attractions of criminality.

I didn’t follow Grendel when he debuted in the early 1980s, when he seemed to be one of many characters inspired by the vogue for ninjas. I was aware of the character’s strong appeal for fans, but those who followed the character’s first appearances in 1982 were doomed to disappointment when his magazine was cancelled before Grendel’s first story-arc was finished. However, Wagner both recapitulated and completed the original arc in DEVIL BY THE DEED, but with a difference. This time Grendel’s story was distanced through the device of being narrated by a chronicler, albeit one whose identity is not revealed until the tale’s conclusion.

In the BEOWULF poem Grendel is an inhuman monster slain by the titular strongman hero, but Wagner reverses the human-inhuman dynamic. His Grendel is a normal-looking human who alternates between two identities: that of social butterfly Hunter Rose and of his alter ego, Grendel, a  sword-wielding assassin who controls all criminal activity in the unnamed city where Hunter dwells. His one significant opponent is Argent, who rather than having the name of a “wulf”  looks like one, being a near-immortal being cursed to take wolf-man shape. His name, a synonym for silver, is clearly a reference to the association of werewolves and the moon-colored metal, even though Argent does not transform, and is entirely on the side of the angels against this “devil.” Yet despite these tacit references to the BEOWULF mythos, the story that most glosses DEVIL BY THE DEED is the tragedy of Oedipus.

The chronicler of the story, later revealed to be female, starts the story by relating that she meant to write the story of Grendel in order “to clear my mother’s name,” but that she ends by becoming “as enraptured as [my mother] was with the man whose given name was Eddie but who eventually engaged the world as GRENDEL.” The name “Eddie” is never again mentioned, nor does the story reveal any details about Eddie’s parents, aside from the intimation that they had wealth and thus gave Eddie the freedom to develop his “almost limitless brain capacities.” However, the significance of the young man’s name is seen when it’s revealed that “Eddie” became a man by knowing a woman twenty years his senior, a woman with the possibly assumed name of “Jocasta Rose.” The lady with the Sophoclean name allegedly perishes without leaving any records of her presence, save in Grendel’s diaries, as conveyed through the agency of the narrator. By this choice of names, Wagner signals the strong possibility that Grendel’s first sin is that of sleeping not with his literal mother but with a mother-substitute. The young polymath then assumes the name “Hunter Rose” for the rest of his life/fictional existence, at least as far as DEVIL is concerned.  The invented cognomen could mean any number of things, though it may significant that both the name Rose and the flower are most commonly associated with femininity.

Sophocles’ tragedy of the original Oedipus alludes to, but does not emphasize, the fact that the hero has conceived children, now grown, from the bed of incest. Neither Hunter Rose nor his lupine adversary father children, and yet, both of them become paternally protective of a nine-year-old girl, Stacy Palumbo. (Her surname is Italian for a type of dove.) Stacy, an orphan like Hunter, is not aware of the greater conflict going on between Grendel and Argent, but comes to know both of them because at one time or another both law-keeper and law-breaker attempt to leverage information from her adoptive uncle Barry Palumbo. Uncle Barry is then poisoned and his girlfriend goes down for the murder, but some time after Hunter Rose adopts the twice-orphaned girl, she eventually finds out the truth about Grendel, and uses her “inside knowledge” to bring about the destruction of both Grendel and Argent. However, as the narrator—Stacy Palumbo’s own grown daughter—reveals, the wages of sin are still destruction, as Stacy herself succumbs to insanity as the result of her actions.

I won’t discuss the specifics of Stacy’s retaliatory plan here, save to state that, as in many tragedies, it depends on being able to take advantage of familial loyalties. The climactic, mutually-injurious battle of Grendel and Argent is distanced through the agency of the narration, though Wagner is careful to build up the final combat with at least one other Classical reference, in that one of Grendel’s diaries refers to Argent as “my Hector.” I have not followed all of the later iterations of Grendel, so I’m not sure how final his “final fate” actually was. But Wagner does succeed here not just in giving the fate of his supercriminal an elegiac tone, but also giving him a larger significance, ending the chronicle by stating that Grendel “is the demon of society’s mediocrity.” The creators of Fantomas probably would have empathized.