"Grendel is important because it provides a release for Matt's dark side," said Wagner's editor and longtime friend, Diana Schutz. "Whereas Mage offers a more personal, more positive approach to the world, Grendel really does reach into those icky corners that we generally try to hide -- but which also need confronting."
In March, Wagner and Dark Horse are revisiting one of the original Grendel series, published in the mid-'80s by the now-defunct Comico. Grendel: Devil's Legacy was the first series Wagner wrote after he killed Rose, the series' main character. It might seem that the demise of a comic book's main character would point toward certain death for most titles, but Wagner's superior storytelling abilities not only pulled him through a tough spot--they also pushed the young writer to a new level of thinking about his characters. It was with this series that Wagner first realized that the spirit of this character he had created was bigger than he'd ever imagined. This was when it became clear to Wagner--and to his fans and industry peers--that Grendel had, indeed, become a legacy and that Wagner had years of great Grendel storytelling in his future.
Shawna Ervin-Gore: At the time you sat down to write Devil's Legacy, had you already written the story in which Hunter Rose is killed?
Matt Wagner: Yeah. In fact, when the original publisher asked to me expand upon the material, it was almost a joke, because I knew--and they knew--that the main character was dead for most of the narrative. Most of the narrative for Devil by the Deed takes place as the two main characters are mortally wounded and wasting away on a rooftop somewhere.
And then I got this idea to transform Grendel into a generational character, when I turned my thoughts to how would I turn this story into a series with monthly installments. I knew I had to come up with a way to keep it interesting for myself, and the only way I could see doing that was to continually reinvent it. So that led me to the generational aspect of this character, where the persona tends to move--in the early stories--from one host body, you might say, into another. Eventually that evolved into a large social strata, which provided a wider tableau.
SE-G: So the ongoing series was sort of a tool to let the mythology take hold?
MW: Yes.
SE-G: Was it difficult for you to work under the conditions you created for Hunter Rose? He's such a defined character and such an enigma, it seems like it would be a challenge to write around that .
MW: With Devil's Legacy, the resultant answer to that was to create a character who wasn't so much of an enigma. Even though Christine Spar goes over the edge, you almost understand her motivation.
SE-G: She's a lot more human from the start of Devil's Legacy than Hunter Rose was in any story.
MW: But she moves into being inhuman, especially around chapter nine, which became sort of an infamous issue, in terms of what she does. And I won't spoil that for new readers, but it's intense. And you're with her every step of the way, but by the end you have to realize how horrible what she does to this person is.
SE-G: She's really able to remove her own humanity in order to exact this revenge she's after, and I think that shows her link to Hunter Rose. It's almost a psychic lineage, as opposed to a blood line.
MW: Yes.
SE-G: And I've read enough Grendel to know that you never get a good look inside Hunter Rose's head.
MW: You couldn't really. He's so inhuman.
SE-G: How do you feel about Hunter Rose? Do you like him?
MW: That's funny. No, I don't like him. I used to like him and now I don't (laughs). I go through periods of liking him and not liking him. I knew at the beginning that I wanted to make him so attractively awful, and that comes across very well, I think.
SE-G: He's also strangely moral.
MW: Yes, he's strangely moral and also as self-centered and amoral as I think anyone could be. Greg Rucka has just finished writing Past Prime, which is the Grendel illustrated novel, and when we first sat down to discuss it, I assumed he would be writing a Hunter Rose novel. After reading the material, he claimed he couldn't write a Hunter Rose novel. He thinks I'm the only person who could write a Hunter Rose novel. In fact, he called Hunter my "Athena"--that he sprang fully-formed from my head.
SE-G: I can see that, because it's tough to imagine Hunter Rose's development at various stages. He is such an intense character when he's first introduced--such a prodigy and so focused--that it's extremely difficult to relate to him.
MW: I can't either. His character transforms from one persona to another persona through various stories, and as a result, you never witness any real growth. He becomes this character in a series of huge leaps as opposed to a series of smaller progressions.
SE: In a way I think that's very effective.
MW: It certainly adds to his status as a mythic character. I'm constantly amazed at how popular Hunter Rose is as a character within this tableau and just as a comic book character in general. Until recently, the only real story featuring him was a 48-page comic, Devil By the Deed. That was expanded upon in the Batman/Grendel crossovers, but basically Hunter Rose's vast criminal adventurers are hinted at, and you really don't spend much time in his life. The narrative, like the character, jumps from high point to high point.
SE-G: Did you realize, while you were in the process of creating Hunter Rose, what kind of character he was or how big he would become?
MW: Not even for myself. The more I examine him, the deeper and more evil he becomes.
SE-G: It seems like it would be very intimidating to write a Hunter Rose story, because automatically, that character controls the story.
MW: Which is why I end up writing a lot of what I call "spirit stories," which often involve the story of a creature as a secondary or even tertiary character. The spirit--or Grendel--is actively felt throughout the tale, but he's not actually on stage all that much.
SE-G: How does Christine Spar work into this pattern?
MW: Well, she's on stage all the time. In Devil's Legacy you are constantly with Christine.
SE-G: And we see everything she thinks and feels because of the narrative approach you take with her journal entries.
MW: She's also such a tight and in-control character that to have access to her thoughts like that lets you see exactly how vulnerable she is in this story.
SE-G: Did you find it difficult to write first-person from a woman's point of view?
MW: I took that on as an early challenge. I'm often setting those kinds of things up for myself. "I wonder if I can do that?" With each of the Grendel story arcs, it's always sparked from something that's happened to me. I was dating a woman at the time who had a two-year old child, so I got to see all these protective urges up close, but it was distant at the same time because it wasn't my kid. That was the spark of the Christine Spar story, although certainly this woman never had her baby kidnapped by a vampire to meet a horrible end. That's where the comic-book part comes in.
SE-G: Let's talk about that vampire. I think this is really interesting, because this guy isn't just a vampire--he's a kabuki vampire. And as influential as Japanese culture is in the world right now, this seems like a great time to revisit this story. How did you come up with the kabuki element of Devil's Legacy?
MW: At that point in my career and in comics, there was a lot of effort put toward explaining costumes, and part of what attracted me to the kabuki look was that it looked like a superhero costume. So that gave us the excuse to have this great-looking character who didn't wear gauntlets of steel . . . or tights. In addition, I knew I wanted to do a vampire story, because I wanted to play off the werewolf aspects of Argent. I didn't want to do a European vampire, since I knew vampires are a common myth throughout the world. And that led me to the Asian myth, which is where the furry body comes from, and the cat transformation.
SE-G: It makes for really creepy visuals, more so than your typical sort of suave European vampire guy.
MW: Oh, yeah. As a result of this being a vampire story combined with the fiery anger of maternal loss, this becomes a very lurid story with a very lascivious style of art. The art really evolves throughout and she becomes more horrid looking as the story progresses. Even though Christine is very stylish and sleek, she becomes postively demonic. She starts to become Tujiro.
SE-G: The art is highly stylized to begin with, but there are a lot of great subtleties, too. The Pander Brothers pencilled this, and it was originally published in the mid-'80s. What do you think of the art now when you look at it?
MW: I'm really happy we have the chance to go back and re-color it because, since the advent of computers, a lot has changed. When I look back at the original series, I think of it as sort-of "proto-Image." There are all these sleek, impossibly proportioned people, and everything bursts out from all sides of the panels. It all adds up to being a precursor to what is a dominant theme now.
SE-G: If our readers haven't seen the original series, it looks almost like an episode of Miami Vice because of the colors--there is a lot of hot pink and teal blue . . .
MW: (laughs) It does. And now we can add all the bells and whistles with computer coloring that we initially couldn't have. Her sleek figure will look even more sleek, and we can make the vampire eyes all glowy and cool.
SE-G: And the Panders' art in this series is so angular, it'll be nice to see it rounded-out with better color technique. The original colors were very flat and made the art appear even more angular than it was.
MW: It's weird to look at this series now and compare it to their more recent work. A lot of what they do now is extremely organic. Their characters almost look like growing plants.
SE-G: What was it like working with Jacob and Arnold when they were so young? I think they were something like 18 and 20 when they started this project.
MW: It was cool. There was always something unexpected popping up in a panel. At that young age, they were quite auteur-ish and they really wanted to take more control of the book than I was willing to give (laughs). But that made for a good batch of innovation on their part. They were particularly proprietary about issue nine, because the script for that issue was basically all plot and no dialogue. It relies very heavily on their storytelling, because I didn't even break it down into pages. I just wrote out the story of what happens and left it up to them to pace it. They really took that to heart, and I think that issue shows itself as being the most "Pander Brothers-y" part of the run.
SE-G: That's when all hell breaks loose and she really begins to torment her victims.
MW: (laughs) That's when you realize she's never coming back. You want her to, but she's taken it too far. You keep wanting her to work this vengeance thing out of her system and everything will be all right.
SE-G: It's a real turning point in the story, too, because up to this point, everything's been paced very methodically, and the readers get Christine's constant narration . . .
MW: And then it just becomes frantic as hell.
SE-G: And throughout, the art is, in the best sense of the phrase, very "comic booky."
MW: Very much. With everything I've done, I've never been a person who's been ashamed to say I make comic books. I always try to do something different with how I interpret things, and I always try to bring in outside sources, but I never bring in an outside source at the expense of what it is that I love about comics. As far as I'm concerned, "comic book-y" is great.
Read Grendel: Devil's Legacy. The first issue of this digitally remastered 12-part series will be available March 22 for $2.95 from Dark Horse Maverick.