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.

So I was googling the other day for Steve Gerber and Val Mayerik’s ill fated Void Indigo series for Epic Comics as you do and found a review from somebody who had started a project to read every comic Epic ever published. What’s more, that’s not the only company Lars Ingebrigtsen has done this for. He has done similar projects for:

• Aardvark-Vanaheim and Renegade
• Eclipse
• Fantagraphics
• Kitchen Sink
• Pacific Comics
• Vortex

As well as projects documenting the work of Elaine Lee and the alternative eighties RAW crowd. Every one of these projects require a level of obsession and sheer graft that’s hard to imagine, making my own pet projects seem reasonable by comparison. Hats off for Lars for doing this. It can be hard to find any discussion of pre-internet comics online, especially from now defunct publishers and he not only reviews them, he also provides context by looking at contemporary fanzine reviews and such. Very helpful indeed when I was interested in why Void Indigo only lasted two issues.

One of his projects deserves a special mention: Kwakk.info, a “research site for magazines and fanzines about comics” which allows you to search the content of a rather large selection of English language comics zines. Again, this has already proven its worth to me because I needed to find some information on Michael Thibodeaux, somebody obscure enough to not have even a Wikipedia page stub. Just knowing where to read an interview or review means I can dive into my own pile of yellowing fanzines to read it rather than having to first flic to all of them to find it.

It took me just one issue to fall in love with Mark Gruenwald’s Captain America. This was the issue.

Part two of the Bloodstone Hunt opens with Cap descending into a subterranean cavern to find the source of an annoying little transmission. Running and diving his way through a series of traps, he comes in a ritual chamber that has the skeletons of “three dead men, one dead woman, one dead dolphin”. Descending even further he finds the source: a crate containing the equally dead Ulysses Bloodstone and a very alive Diamondback. He quickly takes her back to Avenger island, where we just have time to realise John (son of Jonah) Jameson is the new Quinjet pilot before a quick radation meter has been rigged up using Bloodstone’s skull and it’s off to South America to find the first of the fragments of the jewel that gave Bloodstone his powers. They get there, are immediately taken prisoner by an unknown Inca tribe and find Baron Zemo and his stooges — Batroc, Zatran and Machete — all trussed up on a ceremonial sacrifice wheel. Whew. All that and an US Agent backup that has him going up against the Scourge.

That really was the perfect comic for fifteen year old Martin, who never liked a superhero comic better than if it had loads and loads of unknown characters. The whole Bloodstone Hunt was basically an excuse for Gruenwald to do an Indiana Jones style adventure serial set in the more obscure parts of the Marvel Universe, with each issue ending on a cliffhanger, natch. The very next issue they’re off to the Bermuda Triangle, diving into a wrecked airliner (probably the one which got Skull the Slayer his origin), getting into an underwater fight with Zemo’s henchmen and that leading to (of course) a shark attack. The next issue: Egypt and The Living Mummy. Then finally, Tokyo where a yazuka gang has the final piece. Fifteen year old me ate that shit up. Kieron Dwyer’s art didn’t hurt either, nor did M. D. Bright’s on the US Agent backup.

What made it even better, but that would only become apparent in the issues directly after this, is that The Bloodstone Hunt saw the debut of a major new Captain America villain: Crossbones, who later turns out to work for the Red Skull, Cap’s greatest enemy. And who may also share a past with Diamondback, as established in the very next issue. For somebody who until this point had barely read any Captain America stories, as few had been published in the Netherlands, all of this made me fall in love with Cap and especially Gruenwald’s idea of who Cap was. It was his writing that made Captain America my favourite Marvel hero.

Gruenwald of course stayed on the title until it was cancelled under him for Heroes Reborn. You could argue that even at the time I started reading it, he had already written his best stories (Serpent Society, the Scourge of the Underworld, the replacement of Cap by a rightwing zealot), but to me the run from #358 to #386, with first Kieron Dwyer and then Ron Lim on art duty is the classic Captain America.