The Devil Inside

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.

Being only three issues in length, The Devil Inside's brevity belies its importance to an understanding of the Grendel series. In Devil by the Deed and Devil's Legacy we saw two characters embrace the Grendel identity and achieve incredible power and respect through brutality and strength.

Hunter Rose was an incredible personality who bent most of the North American underworld to his will. Christine Spar was able to transform from a widowed writer into a warrior who overcame two literal monsters in the form of Tujiro and Argent. But the story of Brian Li-Sung found in The Devil Inside is different. It is petty and small scale. Brian will not achieve any remarkable feats, he will not overcome a powerful nemesis or make a significant impact on the world. In this way, he is the most relatable. If Hunter Rose is Scarface, Brian is the kid wearing the Scarface t-shirt.

 

Notably, this is the story that reveals the supernatural nature of the Grendel entity, and its possession of its avatars. The depiction of this demon here, as a nagging influence that causes petty snide comments and a general attitude of disgust with the world and those with whom one should find comfort, such as the also grieving Regina, calls to mind the demons described in C. S. Lewis works such as The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce. The demon is not all conquering and fearsome, it serves its purposes gradually by confusing, harassing and undermining its victim. Much later, in Behold the Devil, its physical form as little more than an imp is also telling.

The murders committed by Brian continue the trend of those committed by Christine. When she psychologically tortured and then killed the police officer who brutalized Brian, it was an extreme overreaction meant to make the reader uncomfortable. Certainly, the reader disliked the officer, and the tension of wanting him to be punished and also wanting Christine to be better than a vindictive murderer made for one of the most intense issues of comics this reader has ever seen. Brian's murder of the racist security guard, who has not committed any violence, is even more clearly an extreme case of Grendel victimizing an undeserving person.

And, of course, the final battle the series leads to ends with a whimper, as Brian is easily shot dead. This is a shorter post about one of the shorter stories in the series.

Next up: Devil Tales

Devil's Legacy

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.

Next up, The Devil Inside.

Devil by the Deed

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.

When the crime lord Whitey Bulger was captured, I saw a woman from his neighborhood on a news program. She seemed like an average, middle-class, middle-aged respectable woman. But it was clear from the interview that she admired Bulger. When the interviewer asked her about his crimes, his murders, she said “That was his profession. Every one has a profession.”

It seems unthinkable that someone would make an excuse for a stranger guilty of multiple profit driven murders, and yet, here we see it clearly. And the attitude is common. Remember how regularly you could spot Scarface t-shirts among teens and young adults a few years back?

Back to Bulger, crime novelist Dennis Lehane gave an excellent interview about the man with Steve Inskeep of NPR in which he explained the fascination quite well:

INSKEEP: Well, what do you think it says about us, collectively, that we, the public - or at least Hollywood types and people in Boston - are really, really fascinated by a character like this?

LEHANE: The gangster story is a fascinating story in general. It tickles something in us that we believe that we don't speak of, which is this idea that maybe the whole thing is rigged. Maybe this faith we have in governments, maybe this belief we have in the electoral process, maybe this belief we have in this idea that some people are better than others is all a lie, and that a gangster, at the very least, is upfront about this. I mean, anybody who can tell me the difference between a gangster and a feudal lord, I'd like to meet them, because I can't find it.

I found this observation incredibly insightful, and it colored my reading of the entire Grendel cycle. As the series transitions from Hunter Rose to the far future and from crime and horror to political drama (and back again) I will refer back to this idea of organized crime as feudalism.

As for Devil by the Deed itself, it is enough that we know that many of us admire criminals, at least on some level, and in this world there is enough admiration for Hunter Rose that a biography is being written many years later. Hunter Rose is handsome suave, sophisticated, witty, intelligent, and, it seems, a gentleman, at least when he isn't wearing his mask. He also has that quality our modern values demand in any character on either side of the law who warrants our admiration: he never hurts, and is indeed protective of children.

We also see his opponent, Argent, as a grotesque, violent, asocial monster. From this and future stories it is clear that Argent is not loved by the public, despite being the only creature seemingly able to pose a legitimate threat to Grendel and his operations.

The story is told through a combination of imagery and text more akin to a storybook than a comic. Even with its fantastic elements, the story has an air of believability given by the strong voice of the fictional author writing the biography that makes up the text. It seems there is a society that lived through the events described herein, and now, with enough time, has returned to them with curiosity and fascination.

We know this is truth. In our own world, the Italian mafia in the United States barely remains in existence, yet is continually used in fiction of all types in modern and period pieces. New non fiction accounts are also common. We may not want to hear about the suffering caused by modern organized crime affecting our lives in the current day, and often ignore the distressing news about gang violence in our major cities and the ongoing drug war against the narcos in Mexico, but a flashback to the romanticized days of ethnically European gang warfare in the United States is a constant source of interest. It is true that in the Hispanic community in the United States narcos are glamorized in song and other media, but the general public still reacts with disgust. For the purposes of our discussion of Devil by the Deed we will ignore the ethnic element to our tolerance and admiration for criminals and assign the largest factor in their acceptance by the general public to time.

So, despite his reign of terror over New York, we are to marvel at his accomplishments. Despite being the murderer of the orphaned Stacy Palumbo's guardian, we are to admire his affection and care for her. We empathize with, or, at least, can understand, his jealousy of Argent's relationship with Stacy. Ultimately, it will be Stacy who leads to his death at the hands of Argent, and then she herself will meet a grisly fate in a mental institution.

And the one writing this history, the one the most fascinated by it, is the direct descendant of Stacy, Christine Spar. Despite a life directly affected by the violent history she describes, she ends the text of Devil by the Deed with open appreciation of Hunter Rose's abilities, ultimately describing Grendel as “the demon of society's mediocrity.”

Next: Devil's Legacy

*UPDATE* Reading Order for Grendel Dark Horse Omnibuses by Original Release Date

I have been really into Grendel since I picked up Devil by The Deed and Devil's Legacy at a used bookstore. I tried to find the rest of the series individually to no avail, so I recently got the Dark Horse omnibuses of the series. 

I had held off buying the series this way because they go by chronological order instead of by publication date, which seems absurd. It's like cutting up a novel or a movie to make all the flashbacks come first.

So anyway, here is the correct reading order for the omnibuses based on release date with page numbers. Most info comes from Wikipedia. I hope someone else finds this useful:

"Devil by the Deed" Vol. 1, p.7-44

"Devil's Legacy" Vol. 2, p.65-376

"The Devil Inside" Vol. 2, p.379-456

"Devil Tales" Vol. 2, p.459-549

"The Incubation Years" Vol. 3, p.7-116

"God and the Devil" Vol. 3, p.119-392

"Devil's Reign" Vol. 3, p.395-562

"War Child" Vol. 4, p.7-270
"Devil's Riddle" and "Devil's Masque" (Batman/Grendel I, not included in the Dark Horse volumes)

"Devil Quest" Vol. 4, p.473-528

"A Grendel Primer" Vol. 4, p.531-538

"Devil's Bones" and "Devil's Dance" (Batman/Grendel II, not included in the Dark Horse volumes)
"Black, White, and Red" Vol. 1, p.47-232

"Red, White, and Black" Vol. 1, p.241-424

"Devil Child" Vol. 2, p.9-62

"Past Prime" (Greg Rucka prose novel) Vol. 4, p.274-469

"Behold the Devil" Vol. 1, p.427-596

"Sympathy From the Devil" Vol. 1, p.235-238

I plan to write a longish post about Grendel at some point after I finish. I'm in the middle of God and the Devil now, and I'm loving every page of this series.

*UPDATE*
Changed the list above to include the Batman/Grendel stories. Although they are not included in the omnibuses, they are written by Matt Wagner so it's worth trying to find them to include in a read through. The trade collecting all Batman/Grendel stories is out of print but I was able to find a used copy for under $10 with shipping. I just finished "War Child" last night, and said trade arrived just in time for me to continue the series. Woo hoo!