Grendel: Devil's Legacy

Written by Matt Wagner
Art by Arnold Pander, Jacob Pander, Jay Geldhof, and Rich Rankin

I really wish I'd taken the time to track down issues of Grendel and read the classic series in order years ago.  Instead, my approach has always been piecemeal - an issue here, an issue there, and I extended that into my reading of the trades.  At this point, I know I've read way more than I haven't, so I don't see the need to invest in the omnibi that Dark Horse has released, although it would be nice to revisit the series in chronological order.

Devil's Legacy first ran in the first twelve issues of the Grendel series at Comico starting in 1986, and followed up on the first Grendel story, featuring Hunter Rose, that appeared in Mage before that.

Legacy is the story of Christine Spar, the daughter of Hunter Rose's adopted daughter, Stacy Palumbo.  When this book opens, Christine is a reporter, living with her young son Anson in Manhattan.  They, with Spar's friend Regina, attend a kabuki theatre presentation, and meet the show's star, Tujiro, who comes off as kind of creepy.  We see him snatch a hair off of Anson's head.  Later, the boy gets up in the night and walks off, meeting one of Tujiro's associates, and he's never seen again.

Spar, of course, reacts badly to this, but begins to piece together that this kind of thing often happens in the wake of Tujiro's appearances.  She steals Hunter Rose's mask and fork, and flies off to San Francisco to try to track down the killer.  We get to watch as she takes on the guise of Grendel, and it begins to affect her sense of self.  We also learn that Tujiro is not human.

There's a lot more going on with this story though, as the old conflict between Grendel and Argent, the werewolf figure that runs the police in New York, rears its head again.

Wagner's always been a great writer, and I feel like this is where he began to hit his stride.  He fills this book with strong character work, as we get to know Christine, her friend Regina, and meet Brian Li Sung, a stage manager who falls into Christine's orbit.  The depth of their emotions for one another, considering the rather short timeframe of this story, do ring false from time to time, but I like how Wagner uses their relationship to set up the next chapter in Grendel's history.

This series was drawn by the Pander Brothers, and mostly inked by Jay Geldhof.  The Panders are a bit of an acquired taste, especially since I can't think of another book that is more visually tied to the 80s than this one.  All the characters, men and women alike, have massive shoulders that could only be caused by excessive padding, and the general design of the clothing just screams out that this is what people in the 80s thought that the future would look like.

It works for this series, bringing to mind the fashion drawings of that timeframe, but it does not always make for pretty comics, especially when the Panders are inking their own work.  Still, this is a solid comic, and I'm a bit surprised that I'd never read such a seminal chapter of the Grendel chronicles.