This is part of a series of posts on
Matt Wagner's Grendel
series. There are spoilers for each individual story and for the
series as a whole. I recommend reading the series before reading any
of these posts.
Continuing my series of posts
overviewing the Grendel
series, in this post I will share a few thoughts about what is
possibly my favorite comic story, The Devil's Legacy.
After
my initial reading of Devil by the Deed,
I was wary of any sequel. The
complete life of Hunter Rose is told so well that it seemed there was
no room for more story. A
soon as I opened Devil's Legacy
I was even more worried about the quality since the art this time is
not by Matt Wagner (and in
full color) and the format is that of a traditional comic and not the
storybook format that worked so well in the previous story.
My
fears were, of course, completely unfounded. In fact, I would go as
far as to say that Devil's Legacy is
my favorite Grendel
story arc.
As
Devil by the Deed
addressed our common fascination with organized crime, Devil's
Legacy serves as a criticism of
revenge fantasies in media. After
Christine's son is kidnapped by a
disturbing child-killing vampire who collects eyeballs, she suffers
the seeming incompetence of the police force and steals the Grendel
costume and weapons to hunt the vampire herself.
We've
seen this story dozens of times. “X has been kidnapped, now Y must
find X in time and/or get revenge on Z”. A wronged person (usually
male) takes matters into their own hands for revenge after they have
been wronged. They are given super powers by their anger and are able
to accomplish things no one else could. Be it Jack Bauer, a
Schwarzenegger character, the Liam Neeson character in Taken
and its sequel, or any other of the countless examples in any form of
storytelling media. Clichés are not necessarily a bad thing, far
from it. If I felt they were, I don't think I would be writing a blog
about American mainstream comics.
The
tale here has enough differentiation to remain interesting despite
the familiar setup. Tujiro is a bizarre villain, a vampire in a
mostly (so far) mundane world. Further,
he is a child killer who harvests eyeballs for reasons that are never
explained. Also, Christine both fails to save her son and to kill
Tujiro. And this episode is only the first half of Christine Spar's
story.
The
second half concerns the new duel between Argent and Grendel, the
continuation of Devil by the Deed.
Argent pushes Christine's friends hard, and a police officer named
Dominic Riley brutalizes her boyfriend, Brian Li-Sung.
In
what I consider one of the best single issues of comics, “Devil's
Revenge” we see how the Grendel persona has transformed Christine.
In the issue, originally
appearing in Grendel #9
of the Comico series, Christine stalks and psychologically tortures
her Dominic, harassing and terrifying him from the shadows over the
course of an evening before ultimately taking his life. The only
words in this issue are “And as to the problem with Dominic
Riley...” on the first page and “...eventually I killed him” on
the last.
As
described by Virgil W. Ferguson on the letters page of Grendel
#14: “Just twelve little words, but sandwiched between them was as
neat – and as terrifying – an exercise in urban terror that it
has ever been my – pleasure? - to experience.”
Originally,
the reader sympathized with Christine's quest, with her need for
revenge. Her actions in response to the seeming lethargy of the
police seemed extreme, but worthy of respect and perhaps admiration.
After all, her son was murdered, and cruelly, by a powerful and
hideous monster.
But
Dominic Riley is a different matter. He is simply a corrupt police
officer. He brutalized Christine's
boyfriend, and certainly had justice coming. But Christine's extreme
response is completely over the top, a true “exercise in urban
terror”. She did not
intimidate him, she did not brutalize him, she did not even simply
murder him. She tortured him in a series of well thought out
exercises designed to instill horror, and then, after making sure he
suffered, she finally executed him.
This
is not the Christine Spar from the beginning of the story, or even
the Christine who rose in the Grendel costume to confront another
creature of horror. This is Christine as a sadist, a woman receiving
satisfaction from the pain she causes to another.
She followed the arc with
which we are all familiar, embraced her anger, became stronger than
the monster she was fighting and defeated it. But unlike the
resolution to a Hollywood movie, or the conclusion of a mainstream
comic arc, the violence she embraced did not leave her unscathed.
Things
are engineered thereafter to build to a
final fight with Argent. The resolution mirrors Devil by
the Deed, but
this time Argent dies too. During the battle, it seems Christine
enjoys the fighting on some level, electing to arm herself with “just
the forks”, noting it is
“poetic”.
She embraces the
identity completely: “If you can trample them...Screw them. And now
I see as Hunter must've seen, his entire life. ...Do it. Or they will
trample you. He must've burned inside. As I'm burning.”
No Hollywood ending
here, just horror, violence and death. And as the last few pages
show, there will be consequences for her actions to the people who
loved her.
