This
is a follow-up to my previous post on the comic book series, Grendel.
Matt
Wagner finished his run on the original Grendel series with
War Child, though both Hunter Rose and Grendel-Prime appeared
in team-up books with Batman in the early 90's (the first one of
which was released on the exact same day that Grey Legacy #1
appeared). He has since created several new Hunter Rose stories in
various miniseries. But, for the most part, the main story of Grendel
was through.
By
the end of the series though, Wagner had created a world with a vast
history, with room for a lot of untold stories. He decided to allow
other creators to play in his universe. Over the course of several
years readers were treated to a series of miniseries called Grendel
Tales. Each story was written and drawn by someone other than
Wagner, but set in the world of Grendel. The quality of these varied,
but there was some stellar work by a number of people who went on to
continue to work in the industry, James Robinson of Starman
fame among them (he's also the writer on DC's upcoming Earth Two
series).
I'm
not going to discuss these in detail, though I will say they are
worth reading if you're into the Grendel mythos. For more info check
out the Wikipedia article at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grendel_Tales#Grendel_Tales.
As a footnote, I'll mention that I had a review of Grendel: Devil
May Care published in the nationally distributed magazine Kulture
Deluxe.
As
I've mentioned before, Fred and I were sending Grey Legacy
mini-comics to Wagner on a pretty regular basis. Matt always wrote
back with encouragement. He was always good at giving newcomers a
foot in the door. Many of his collaborators on Grendel and
Grendel Tales were unknown at the time.
Apparently
our comic impressed him enough that he asked us to submit a proposal
for a Grendel Tales series. We were pretty ecstatic, as you
might imagine. He sent us a copy of the “Grendel Bible,” which contained his guidelines for the universe and the types of submissions he
was looking for.
We
pretty much put everything else aside and got to work. We
brainstormed a lot of ideas and eventually came up with a story we
liked. I'm not going to post the entire thing here (that would take
too much digging through the archives and scanning, and besides, I
think there is still the core of a good story there, even if we took
the Grendel elements out. It may appear in a wildly mutated form
someday). But, in brief...
In
the wilderness and ruins of what had been the eastern United States
an uneasy alliance of humans and vampires begin to follow the
peaceful teachings of a young charismatic mystic named Huck. This
becomes a movement that begins to migrate west and eventually comes
into conflict with the empire of the Grendel Khan. We used the
symbolism of Baptism pretty overtly. Wagner's vampires were subject
to the classic weakness of running water, so as a symbol of pain and
sacrifice this worked really well. The story was an exploration of
the ideas of religion, faith, tolerance for others, and peaceful
coexistence set against the backdrop of a world based on the spirit
of violence.
We
plotted this out as a six issue series. We did a bunch of character
designs. Like most of my collaboration with Fred, a lot of the
specifics are lost in terms of exactly who did what. In general, our
working style was that I tended to come up with the larger
plot lines and themes and characters, and then Fred would refine
them and point out the holes in my story. That's really an oversimplification, and there was a lot of
back and forth brainstorming during this process. The final character
presentational pieces we sent with our proposal were penciled by Fred
and inked by me. I've posted them here, for the first time anywhere...
 |
| This is Huck (named after the Nick Cave song, Saint Huck), our young mystic and the main protagonist of our story. The man in the background is Huck's teacher and the former shaman of their community. |
 |
| This is Huck's older brother (I can't remember his name). He tired of the provincial life and left home to join the Grendel corps in the west. |
 |
| These two are part of the vampire coven who live near Huck's human settlement and become part of the human/vampire coalition. The first is Petra Moon, a former Grendel who had been turned into a vampire. The second is Haller, the leader of the vampire community, and Huck's greatest supporter. |
 |
| These are other vampires of Haller's group (yes, that's a ruined Pittsburgh skyline behind them). |
Our
timing couldn't have been worse. We received a post card from Matt
telling us he had received our materials, and while he liked them,
the copyright to Grendel and Mage were coming under
dispute. I don't know all of the details, but the original publisher,
Comico, had been bought out and the new owners believed that meant
they now had the rights to everything Comico had published. The
original creators for Comico believed that they had always been
published with idea of creator rights in place, meaning they all
owned their own work. This legal battle went on for years and Matt
was unable to publish any Grendel or Mage-related material. The good
news is that in the end, Wagner and the others all triumphed and
regained their rights. The bad news, for us anyway, is that by the
time this happened the comics industry had moved on and there was no
call for new Grendel Tales stories (and we had come to the end
of our Grey Legacy experience and weren't doing comics by this
point either). Matt eventually told new tales of Hunter Rose, and
Mage: The Hero Defined, the second in his proposed Mage trilogy
finally appeared.
We
were disappointed, of course. This is one of the great
“Might-Have-Beens” in my life. But timing is everything, and life
moves on.
As a final anecdote about this... Sometime in the early 90's I went to Mid-Ohio Con in Mansfield, Ohio to shop around my inking samples (this was around the time I got work from Malibu Graphics). Bob Schreck was there. Bob was, at the time, an editor for Dark Horse Comics and Wagner's brother-in-law (he was married at the time to Dark Horse editor Diana Schutz, sister of Matt's wife). He was on the list of people I wanted to show my portfolio to. When he came to the Grendel pages he started laughing. “Hey,” he said, “I've seen these before, in Matt's living room!”
He
was very complimentary of my work, but at the time Dark Horse wasn't
hiring freelance inkers. Ah well...
Both
Matt and Bob have always been very friendly and remembered me on the
few occasions we have met since.
All Grendel related concepts and images are copyright Matt Wagner. The other characters are copyright Wayne Wise and Fred Wheaton.
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