What in the hands of any creator could’ve been an entire series, the rise and fall of Grendel, Matt Wagner tells in just 37 pages. Not necessarily by choice though.
Because this was the second attempt to tell the story of Hunter Rose, the first person to take on Grendel’s mask. Grendel had debuted in Comico Primer 2 and then got his own series. This only lasted three issues before financial difficulties at Comico (a recurring problem) put a halt to it. Instead, Wagner reworked the story, considering what had already been published as a “rough draft” and published it as a series of backups in his other series, Mage. And instead of doing it as a straight comic, his new approach was to do it as more of a picture book, with the gimmick being that these were extracts from a book published in universe long after Grendel’s death.
It works surprisingly well. The story is stripped to its essentials while it gives Wagner room to play around with the art layout and composition. Wagner’s art has also improved drastically in the meantime, which helps. Int he earlier series it already had the fluidity that is its hallmark, but it was uneven and clearly a product of a talented amateur. In Devil by the Deed it has matured and is on a par with the work of similar artists like Steve Rude or Dave Stevens. There’s also an ineffable mangaesque quality to his art style which I’ve never been able to quite understand where it came from.
Devil by the Deed was originally published by Comico in 1986 as a collection of those Mage backups, then after Comico’s inevitable bankrupcy, reprinted with a new cover and added pinup gallery by Dark Horse, for which Wagner would create more Grendel stories. The gallery has some great artists in it, including Tim Sale, Guy Davis and Kelley Jones. This is the edition I have.
After the success of the Mage backups, Wagner started a new Grendel series for Comico, for which he wrote the stories but the art was done by others, each new arc having a new artist. The first twelve issues had the Pander bros on art, followed by Bernie Mireault, Hannibal King, Jay Geldhof, John K. Snyder and others, with Wagner occassionally taking his turn as well. The series lasted for forty issues after which a new series, Grendel Tales was planned, which would feature stories both written and drawn by others, but again Comico’s bankrupcy put an end to this. Instead these would be published a few years later by Dark Horse. The first series they published, Grendel: Warchild, was also the first Grendel series I bought.
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