Grey Legacy find in Amazing Heroes

In an earlier post (http://www.wayne-wise.com/2011/07/writing-part-5-comics-part-2.html) I talked about my experiences as part of the comics small press, black and white publishing explosion of 1986.


Recently, thanks to digging through the warehouse at Phantom of the Attic Comics where I work I've had the pleasure of looking through a lot of issues of Amazing Heroes. This was one of the premiere magazine about comics at the time, one of the place where you could read articles, creator interviews, and see previews of new series in the pre-internet age. It was bi-monthly publication. This has been an amazing bit of nostalgia for me, and seeing several years of comics fandom and my own experiences condensed into about a weeks worth of browsing issue after issue is a little mind-blowing. It's a great sense of perspective and gives a more concrete timeline than my mere memory allowed for.


So, while browsing I stumbled across the following in issue #116,  May 1, 1987, in the "Coming Comics" section. I had never seen this before.

This is fascinating to me. As I said before, we finished the entirety of Shadowlock #1 and mailed it in, but Showcase Publications went under before the book was ever printed. I couldn't find am announcement for it in Amazing Heroes, so either I don't have the issue or Showcase never submitted one. This announcement indicates the good faith from our publisher that there would indeed be a second issue. What I find funny is that we never discussed issue #2 with our editor at all, other than the contract we had for an ongoing series. While we certainly had plans, we never wrote or drew a single panel for a Shadowlock #2.

A month later, in Amazing Heroes #118, June 1, 1987, there is the following announcement. It pretty much tells the whole tale.

Favorite Comics Part Five: Mage: The Hero Discovered

As I said in some detail recently, I discovered the work of comics creator Matt Wagner through the black and white issues of Grendel. Because I was so enamored of it I picked up the first issue of his next series, Mage: The Hero Discovered without hesitation, even though it looked like a very different kind of project. In the course of my life in comics there have been very few that rank as highly in terms of ongoing influence, or simple enjoyment. Last year, when I had the opportunity to choose the graphic novels I wanted to write about for Salem Press's CriticalSurvey of Graphic Novels, Mage was my first choice. I was thrilled to get that specific assignment. The article is a more academic approach to the topic than I plan on going into here, but if you want to read it go to http://salempress.com/Store/pdfs/Mage.pdf. All of the details of the story and character are covered there.

So, what is it about this series, among all the multitude of comics that I have read, that struck such a chord with me, and continues to do so? Good question, with a lot of answers (or quasi-answers, anyway).

Matt Wagner and I are contemporaries, in terms of age (he's like three or four months younger than I am, if memory serves), if not career. We grew up, obviously reading a lot of the same comics and books and loving a lot of the same influences. I say obviously simply because of the ideas that show up repeatedly in his work.

Let me try to be more specific about something that is probably too big to be specific about. As I've said repeatedly, I learned to read from comic books. There was Archie, and Dennis the Menace, and other “kid-friendly” funny books, but there was a tremendous amount of superheroes as well. This interest in heroic fiction has been a through-line in my reading interests and in what I create ever since. I “graduated” from comics to books pretty quickly. The Howard Pyle version of Robin Hood was one of the first real novels I ever read (third grade, if I'm not mistaken). I can't tell you how much I was into this when I was eight years old. The sense of adventure, the fun, the action, all of it added up to enthrall my imagination. I think it's safe to say that this experience was instrumental in Hawkeye, the archer from the Avengers, being my favorite superhero (and why Hawkeye instead of Green Arrow, the more obvious Robin Hood archetype, is another blog).

I also remember reading tales of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. I also read stories from mythology. I read a lot of historical fiction aimed at kids. And I read Comics. All of these ingredients went into the gumbo of my imagination, so it's evident to me why I have always seen them as connected. Superheroes have always been, to me at least, the 20^th century iteration of myth and legend, of heroic fiction.

So let's jump to the early 80's. I saw John Boorman's Excalibur in the theater in 1981. The imagery completely blew me away and reignited my interest in Arthurian fiction. At this time I was pretty immersed in fantasy fiction anyway, thanks primarily to Lord of the Rings. Even then I knew that some changes had been made to the Arthurian mythos, at least the one I was familiar with. In the film it is Percival who is with Arthur at his death, and who throws Excalibur back into the lake from which it came. While I loved the movie, this confused me, simply because in all of the stories I had read it had been Sir Bedivere in this role (read my ebook Bedivere for my take on the legend). I wasn't as aware then as I am now of how different movie adaptations are from their source material (and at times have to be). I also wasn't as aware of the wealth of Arthurian fiction available. In my mind there was only one story. I had no idea of how the King Arthur tales grew over centuries and had been written by many, many hands, each of which reflected the times they were written in. There is no one core King Arthur story, only a collection of different writings, all of which deal with the same characters, tropes and archetypes. The enduring longevity of these stories, I believe, is because the core issues they deal with remain core issues for people no matter where or when they are from. The eternal issues of duty versus personal interest, what it means to love, the quest for deeper meaning still ring true for people.

Of course, as the world moves on the stories need to grow in ways that still speak to the current world. All enduring myths go through this process (see the book Transformations of Myth Through Time for more on this).

The first comic book series that really opened my eyes to this idea was Camelot 3000 by Mike Barr and Brian Bolland, published by DC as a 12-issue maxi-series. In retrospect this series has a number of problems in terms of storytelling and themes, but at the time I really loved it, and it still ranks pretty highly in my echelon of comics, more for nostalgia of what it meant to me then, in full acknowledgement of its faults. In the big picture, Camelot 3000 was more important to me in firming up my interest in the Arthurian myths than in influencing me in comics. This story showed me how you could take the characters and themes and transplant them to a new setting and make them work. It also introduced me to the story of Tristan and Isolde. While I had heard the name Sir Tristan in conjunction with King Arthur, he was not one of the knights who stood out to me as having his own story. The subplot of Tristan/Amber March was my favorite part of Camelot 3000, and led me to researching the core story, and reading many more variations on it over the years. The romance of Tristan and Isolde has become my favorite of all the Arthurian tales. It resonates with some real-life aspects of my life and speaks to my sense of love and tragedy and sacrifice in ways that are probably too psychologically telling.

But, as much as I liked it, Camelot 3000 was primarily a retelling/rehash of the original stories that brought very little new, other than green-skinned aliens and transgender characters, to the tales.

Then I read Mage. The Arthurian connection was not made manifest in this series immediately, and though hints were sprinkled throughout the narrative, it was only revealed near the very end of the story. When the series began it was more of a tribute to classic superhero origins. Kevin Matchstick, who wears a t-shirt with a Captain Marvel lightning bolt symbol on it, gains superpowers thanks to an encounter with a magician, just like Captain Marvel. It was only later that the magician, Mirth, was revealed to be an incarnation of Merlin. He certainly didn't look like any standard version of Merlin (like the one in Camelot 3000 did).

Merlin by John Buscema,
from a B&W Marvel Magazine

Merlin, from John Boorman's Excalibur,
as portrayed by Nicol Williamson

The wizard SHAZAM looked
more like Merlin than Mirth.

Over the course of the series we saw the tropes of the superhero genre skillfully interwoven with classic Arthurian memes, creating, as a result, something new. This series accomplished what I had always believed... comics as modern myth.

There were certainly no shortage of precedents for mythic characters in comics. But for the most part, prior to this, the mythic characters succumbed to the tropes of superheroes more than the other way around. Thor, for all of the Asgardian trappings, was a Marvel superhero far more than he was ever really a god. Don't get me wrong, I love a lot of the old Thor comics. But at Marvel, the character was stripped of much of his truly mythic resonance in favor of tights and fights. He was an old god in a new milieu, but, for me at least, he never spoke to my personal experience. The same was true for most of the “gods” that appeared as comic book characters (that includes Kirby's New Gods, an overt attempt to create a modern pantheon).

Mage spoke to something more personal. It wasn't a retelling of the Arthurian stories. It was a recognition of mythic patterns in modern life. The fact that the way Kevin Matchstick looked was based on Wagner said that the things that happened in the story were, in some way, fictionalized autobiography. It said that Myth wasn't just a collection of musty old tales from the past that had no relevance to modern life, but that it was something that was still alive, and that with open eyes, we could see these patterns in our own lives.

That idea alone brings a little bit of magic to the mundane (and isn't that what I was looking for in my interest in comics and speculative fiction anyway?).

Not long after that I was introduced to the ideas of psychologist Carl Jung ( I was a Psychology major, after all). The first book of his I read was Man and His Symbols (which is probably the best place for the newcomer to his work to start), and doggone if a lot of these ideas about the nature of myth weren't present in his work as well, long pre-dating either me or Matt Wagner. From Jung I went to the work of mythologist Joseph Campbell. I first heard of him from his famous series of interviews with Bill Moyers that appeared on PBS around that time. These were collected in print form as the book The Power of Myth. There have been very few books in my life that have been more influential. There are lots of books (many by Campbell), that cover the topics in far more exhaustive and academic detail. But, for me, this served to give me a specific framework of thought for a worldview I had always intuited but didn't have the words for. It's still pretty much my default framework for a lot of what I do.

The key idea I took from all of this is what I said in my article about Mage:

“Myth is not just a story, but a roadmap; the goal of one’s life journey is to discover the myth one is living. By being aware of these themes, readers can recognize and discover the hero within any life, including their own. Matchstick does not simply accept a destiny—he agrees to take an active role in creating it.”

And that's what Myth is to me. Since then I have read a bunch of psychology books that deal with this theme. But Matt Wagner was doing it in fiction, in a comic book, before I ever saw any of this. He was taking themes of mythology and folktale and weaving them into his personal life in a way that created art.

There are a lot of other aspects of Mage I could talk about. While writing the Salem Press article I thought of a number of things that deserve looking into in greater detail. But, this has gone on long enough, and those are probably bigger articles (or maybe papers).

Comics History blurbs

Not much to actually post here, but I wanted to redirect people.


While digging through boxes (and boxes and boxes and...) of stuff at the Phantom of the Attic warehouse I have been finding lots of old issues of mags about comics, like Wizard, Amazing Heroes, Comics Interview, The Comics Journal and other lesser known mags. These are a treasure trove of comics history, filled with articles and interviews. Eventually, these will be donated to the Toonseum for their comics research library...


But not before I look through them all.


In addition to the articles and interviews I'm finding all kinds of little tidbits that are interesting to the longtime comics fan. I want to share these and I've decided that months after I set up a Tumblr account, this is what I'm going to use it for.


So head on over to http://www.tumblr.com/blog/waynewise and follow me to see what I find.

Magazine Article

A couple of months ago I was interviewed for an article for a magazine insert in the Observer Reporter, my home county newspaper. The journalist who wrote the article, Tara Kinsell, is an old friend of mine from many years ago. I once worked as a counselor for the Upward Bound program hosted at Waynesburg College and Tara was one of the students involved, so I've known her since she was 14 or 15 years old.

Tara currently works for the Observer Reporter and contacted me to see if she could do an article. She came to my apartment and we spent two or three hours getting caught up with each other, reminiscing about old times, comparing notes on the fates of mutual friends from the Upward Bound days, and oh yeah... she interviewed me about the stuff in this article. It was a great day and I'm really happy with the way the article turned out.

I've pasted images of the article below. All content is copyright by the Observer Reporter (except the images of my stuff).

It's been a Banner Week!

I have several things to share this week.

First up, my ebook Scratch received a four-star review at http://akamaireader.wordpress.com/2012/03/29/review-scratch/

Thanks for the kind words!

Second, I was quoted in the newest issue of the scientific Journal of the Minerals, Metals and Materials Society. Nothing scientific on my part I assure you. I would have guessed that my lifetime chances of ever being quoted in a scientific journal were more infinitesimal than some quantum particles, but I tend to have some sort of probability-altering field at work in my life, so...

Anyway, it came about like this. The author of the piece, Lynne Robinson, writes for the Journal of the Minerals, Metals and Materials Society. In every issue, in addition to abstracts and articles with titles like A Materiomics Approach to Spider Silk: Protein Molecules to Webs and Tailoring Microstructure and Properties of Hierarchical Aluminum Metal Matrix Composites Through Friction Stir Processing (real titles... trust me, I couldn't make this up), they try to include a more fun and interesting piece. Lynne discovered that many of the scientists she worked with were comics geeks (imagine that), who were genuinely interested in the transforming some of the ideas in comics into real life science. Things like Captain America's shield and Iron Man's armor were of specific interest to them. She wanted to talk about how fiction, specifically Comics and Science Fiction, both influence and reflect the development of new technologies. As she wrote the article she realized that she simply didn't have the background knowledge of comics and comics history, so she cast about to find someone who did. She contacted the PittsburghToonseum, and they recommended she talk to me.

I spent about an hour and a half on the phone with Lynne last fall and covered a lot of ground. She was fun to talk to and genuinely interested in the topic. As a journalist, her style was remarkable. She asked really very good questions and zeroed in on some of the most important points in my sometimes rambling style of talking. I'm really happy with the way the article turned out and proud to have been included. There were a lot of things in the conversation that didn't make it into the article (Doc Magnus and the Metal Men, Jack Kirby and the New Gods and how we all carry Mother Boxes in our pockets and have Metron Chairs at home).

Anyway, you can read a PDF version of the article here:

http://www.springerlink.com/content/c705841j56v8h120/fulltext.pdf

And my week didn't stop there.

Last year I was invited to participate in writing entries for an encyclopedia of graphic novels to be published by Salem Press. Salem Press is primarily a publisher of reference books aimed at libraries and universities. The two-volume collection is now available (and it's really expensive in hardback). You can see the ad and announcement for the collection at http://salempress.com/Store/samples/critical_survey_gn_heroes/critical_survey_gn_heroes.htm

Out of literally hundreds of articles they could have chosen, my piece on Matt Wagner's Mage: The Hero Discovered is one of ten free sample entries available on the order page, along with pieces on Watchmen, Sandman and other more well-known books. The editors either really liked Mage or my writing. I'm kind of stupidly happy that they picked my article. The direct link to the pdf of it is http://salempress.com/Store/pdfs/Mage.pdf.

I was planning on writing about Mage in my ongoing favorite comics posts anyway. I still will, in a less academic form than this article.

Lots of good things this week. No wonder I'm tired.

Favorite Comics Part Four and a Half – Grendel

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.

Favorite Comics Part Four – Grendel

I introduced the topic of my favorite comics by saying that I wanted to talk about the ones that were “heart” books, those that resonated with my feelings more than my thoughts. However, as I think about the books I was most into, those that were influential in the way I think about comics storytelling, and more importantly, those that served as some sort of inspiration, I realize that it's a bit more complicated than that. For the most part, this series is still going to be about the “heart” books, but there are a couple of exceptions that have cropped up.

Chief among them, and the one that made me rethink my original goals with these blog posts, was Grendel, by Matt Wagner. Grendel was a book I loved, but it is certainly not one that inspires the warm fuzzies that Zot! or Beanworld do (or several of the others that will eventually appear on this list). Grendel was a book that was dark, and full of pretty extreme violence. You know... the kind of book that I really don't typically read much of these days. Grendel stands apart from most of my favorite books in this way. In general, I'm not a fan of gratuitous violence and graphic gore. But, the key word in that last sentence is gratuitous. If you have read any of my novels, you know that do not shy away from graphic violence if I believe it is necessary for the story. What I'm not a fan of is violence for violence sake, violence as voyeuristic pornography. If violence is part of a story it needs to have a reason.

The violence in Grendel never felt gratuitous, at least to me. Grendel was a meditation on the nature of violence. As dark as the story sometimes became, Grendel was always an exploration of the the theme of violence. It always asked questions. “What are the underlying causes of violence?” “What circumstances would lead an otherwise normal person to extreme acts of violence?” “What is it about darkness that we find so appealing?” “What does it mean to live in a culture that celebrates and indoctrinates us into violence while at the same time desensitizing us to it?”

None of these questions were asked overtly, but they were implied by the narrative.

I first saw Grendel in the early 80's in an ad for four new comics from a new Black and White publisher called Comico. The other three didn't really spark my interest very much at the time, but there was something about this character called Grendel. It was a simple black mask, with white designs over the eyes.

The stripes over the eyes probably reminded me of the pattern of Alice Cooper's eye makeup. But I'm pretty sure that it was the white circle on the nose that won me over. This tiny detail gave the mask a harlequin-like appearance. It was a clown's nose. This mix of the evil-looking eyes with the hint of the absurd worked for me. It was the mix of comedy and tragedy, an iconic representation of the idea of laughter in the face of darkness, and of how suddenly laughter can turn to tears.

Grendel first appeared in Comico Primer #2, an anthology title.

To this day I have never owned a copy of this book (though I have read reprints of the story).

He graduated into his own title, the first run of which lasted three issues. I picked all three of these up at one time.

This series told the story of Hunter Rose, the first Grendel. Hunter was a wealthy and famous author by day, and in the guise of Grendel, the ultra-violent leader of organized crime by night. He had an arrogant swagger. His ruthlessness was coupled with erudition and humor. This was no simple thug. The written complexity and duality of the character met the promise held in that brilliantly designed mask. Wagner was young and new to the business of comics, and his art style was raw and undeveloped. Many of his figures were crude, and his ink line did not have the control he would eventually master. But there was something about it that really clicked with me. As crude as his actual drawings may have been, there was a sense of design, pacing, and storytelling that promised great things.

The series was cancelled after three issues and Grendel next appeared in full color as a backup feature in the pages of Wagner's next series, Mage: The Hero Discovered (about which I will have a whole lot more to say in another blog). Wagner went back to Hunter Rose and began his story again, this time told in a series of art deco-inspired, beautifully designed pages accompanied by text. 

It can be said that this story was not “Comics” per se, but an illustrated story. Whatever you want to call it, we saw the life story of Hunter Rose unfold to its inevitable, tragic conclusion. This story was eventually collected under the title Devil By the Deed.

But that wasn't the end of Grendel. The series came back, in full color with a new #1. In the first story we are introduced to Christine Spar, the daughter of Hunter's ward, Stacy. Though written by Wagner, the art was done by The Pander Brothers. In this story we see Christine, a normal woman, driven to acts of extreme violence by the abduction of her son.

She eventually dons the mask of Grendel and we see the first hint that Grendel is something much larger than Hunter Rose, or any one person. Though never made explicit in any of the many stories that follow, Grendel is the spirit of violence. It is a manifestation of our own darkest nature. In the case of Christine, it starts with a noble motivation: to protect her child. But the line between the warrior who protects and the monster who takes joy in slaughter can be a thin one.

As the series progresses the nature of Grendel changes with it. Christine's lover, Brian Li Sung, is seduced by the spirit of Grendel as well (in an arc drawn by Bernie Mireault), and his tale is more sad than tragic.

Over time the series moves far into the future. In a world controlled by religious fanaticism, madman Eppy Thatcher dons the mask of Grendel to bring down a system that he sees as a corruption of his pure faith. Eppy communes with his visions of Grendel, and like Joan of Arc, believes he is acting on divine inspiration.

More time passes, and the image of Grendel becomes part of culture. Grendel can no longer be contained by a single person, but has become a motivating icon. An elite band of samurai-like soldiers, known as Grendels, arise to wield power. In the last story arc of the original series, Orion Assante rises from their ranks and becomes ruler of the world, The Grendel Khan.

This was followed by Grendel: War Child, a twelve issue series that focused on the young son of Orion, Jupiter Assante, and the war machine/cyborg killing machine designed to protect him, Grendel-Prime.

Each story arc was drawn by a different art team, in order to give each character a look and feel distinct from the others. Over the course of forty issues Wagner expanded his universe and dealt with huge issues. There was a central concept to lead the reader forward, but not a central character. The art and storytelling was, at times, very experimental and challenging. The stories and characterization were complex, and everything had consequences.

Eventually, the concept of Grendel outgrew Wagner. He had introduced an idea that spanned centuries of time. If Grendel was an idea that possessed many people, Wagner decided to allow it to possess other artists. This was an idea he had already established by having different artists on the book. He expanded this idea by introducing a series of miniseries called Grendel Tales, where other writers and artists could take the concept and play in his sandbox.

Fred and I almost had the chance to participate in this, but that's a story for the next blog.

Grendel and all other characters are copyright by Matt Wagner. Check out his web site at www.mattwagnercomics.com