The Matt Wagner Newsarama Interview!

[VivatGrendel.com]

GRENDEL: THE INTERVIEW 1 - INTRODUCTION

<sup>Author's note: Sometimes you just get ambitious, and sometimes, ambitious plans are forced upon you. And sometimes, it's a combination of both. As a comics reader, I first discovered Matt Wagner's Grendel when it started in Mage, back when I was in high school (Matt loves it when I remind him of how old he is). Simply put, it blew me away. My issues of Mage, and later my copy of the Devil by the Deed collection traveled with me through high school and college, and are lovingly dog-eared with faded spots on their covers due to about a jillion re-readings. I even did a really bad Hunter Rose riff in a story for a sophomore writing course - for which I still feel the need to apologize to my professor.

I followed the character as Wagner explored, left for a little while, but came back with War Child and then went back and caught up. Once I got into the comics news biz, I say without any hesitation that one of my total fanboy moments was first talking to Matt, and then later, getting to be pretty good pals with him. Somewhere, in one of our hundreds of conversations, I mentioned that, someday, I wanted to do "the" Grendel interview with him - start at the start, and cover it all. I think I said it, semi-seriously, due to an awkward silence in the conversation that I felt I needed to fill. Anyway - that was years ago.

The bastard never forgot it. Never.

Long story short and many missed deadlines later, here we are - the start of "the" Grendel interview. We get it all rolling today with an overview of Matt's opus to date, and in the coming weeks (with breaks), we'll be going through it all. If you've got a copy of Devil by the Deed, you may want to re-read it for tomorrow's installment.

Vivat Grendel.

Matt Brady</sup>

THE ROOTS

We all have demons.

All of us.

Everyone.

And probably, there's no time when these inner demons are closer to the surface than at the cusp of adulthood, when the passion of the teenager must be tempered as the adult emerges. Looking at it clinically, it's a cruel period in life, one where the individual has the desire to change the world, and is full of idealism and fist-to-the-sky anger, but realizes that the rest of the world isn't looking for a savior, or even really, someone to tell them they're wrong. That anger - that passion…it's like a drug. It enhances those late teen years, bringing everything into sharper focus, making every moment just a little bit longer, every emotion just a little sweeter. Cast your mind back - yes - you can remember the fire, can't you?

That was the raw fuel that Matt Wagner used to create Grendel. With Wagner himself just touching 20 years old when he created Hunter Rose in 1982, Grendel began as a simple noir story of a criminal genius, eager to utterly rule the underworld, while at he same time, living a double life as a novelist. Whereas Wagner's Mage was autobiographical, Grendel was an outlet for the raw fury, the passion of youth - that fist-to-the-sky anger. Where Mage's Kevin Matchstick was reactive, responding to the challenges that an unknown destiny placed in front of him, Hunter Rose was proactive - changing the world to make it fit his vision. Matchstick showed morals, Rose had none. As Matchstick was pure in his "everyman" nature, Rose was pure in his evil. Mage allowed Wagner to look inward, Grendel allowed the young artist to look outward.

"It's all summed up by the final line of the Devil by the Deed - which is also, narratively, the final line of Christine Spar's biography of Hunter," Wagner says. "'He is the demon of society's mediocrity.'

Now, if that's not an unfiltered expression of teen angst, I don't know what is!"

THE EARLY YEARS

Grendel, along with Argent the wolf first appeared in 1982's Comico Primer #2, which was followed by a three-issue black and white miniseries. Long out of print, these early Grendel appearances had become something of a legend due to their rarity; allowing tall tales to be spun about them, namely, that Wagner himself kept them out of print, due to his embarrassment over the work.

"That couldn't be further from the truth," Wagner said about the stories. "That's like saying I'm ashamed that I was once 13 or that I was once 22 or that I was once 31. I'm not. That story was later retold, re-done, and finished as Devil by the Deed. I just feel that it would be a little sleeperish to reprint my early, incomplete work, just basically for the sake of a buck. That work represents my very first efforts in the world of professional comics. The early '80s were a heady time for comics, with the first wave of independent publishers just beginning to see the light of day. Some readers will be shocked by how basic and somewhat naive this stuff now appears, but others will see it as the fledgling efforts in what has proven to be a lengthy career, not only for myself but also for the character. If you're familiar with how far the narrative concept of Grendel has eventually progressed, it stands as a true testament to the power of creative growth that such a vast saga could have been spawned by these humble seeds."

As Wagner said, the first Grendel story was absorbed and re-told as part of Devil by the Deed, a color backup which ran in Mage issues #7-#14. Devil by the Deed was later collected as its own standalone by Comico in 1986. A testament to the power of both the character and the creator, Devil by the Deed still stands on its own as an example of exquisite design and storytelling, as Wagner eschewed traditional word balloons for a blend of text and panels, all contained within elaborate frames that gave the story an art deco/noir feel. The look of Grendel in the early '80s took the bar of independent/creator-owned comics and raised it, and made Wagner's contemporaries sit up and take notice.

The story, on the surface, was a simple one - a young boy, "Eddie" is all that is given, finds life to be meaningless as his abilities (both mental and physical) far outstrip any challengers that come his way. Drifting in despair, he meets and falls in love with Jocasta Rose who somehow touched him as no individual ever had, or ever would again. Jocasta died, but instead of leaving Eddie rudderless, he emerged as two new individuals: "Hunter Rose" and Grendel, novelist and elegant crime boss, respectively.

While Rose was the toast of society, Grendel was its scourge, and as such, the target of the man-wolf Argent. As Hunter Rose, he adopted Stacy Palumbo, the young daughter of a slain mobster. While Stacy captured Rose's heart, she also befriended Argent, and one night, in a fit of pique, she tipped off Argent to Hunter's secret life. The two enemies met on a rooftop for one final battle, one which left Argent paralyzed and Grendel dead - and unmaksed.

Simple story, no?

No. Oh, no, no, no. If Grendel was in the hands of any creator other than Wagner, it would have been a notable, but ultimately forgettable story, not one that still carries on, 25 years later, and has spanned hundreds of years in its own universe.

Devil by the Deed was merely the beginning.

LIFE AFTER HUNTER ROSE

Something about Grendel took hold in Wagner and wouldn't let go. As he once explained it, Hunter Rose's story started as a crime story, but changed into something much larger which, for Wagner, became a study on the nature of aggression.

The ball began rolling when Wagner was asked to expand upon the original Grendel material (which he would do later in Grendel: Black, White and Red, and Grendel: Red, White and Black), but was somewhat stymied by his lead character no longer being alive.

"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," Wagner said. "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."

Publishing-wise, Devil by the Deed begat the ongoing Grendel series, which ran for 40 issues. Character-wise, the Hunter Rose Grendel begat the Christine Spar Grendel, who moved both the name and the costume forward. Spar was the daughter of Stacy Palumbo, and biographer of Hunter Rose/Grendel (it was revealed that she was the author of the text in Devil by the Deed at the close of the story, and the text itself was in fact, hers).

Christine's story spanned the first 12 issues of Grendel, and chronicled her descent into the world of Grendel after her son was kidnapped and murdered by a Kabuki vampire, Tujiro XIV. While she found vengeance against Tujiro, Grendel's presence had attracted the aged Argent, as well as Police Captain Wiggins, a…peculiar man with a cybernetic eye. While Christine's path took her down the path her "grandfather" trod decades earlier, this time, when Grendel and Argent met in battle, both were left dead when the smoke cleared.

Grendel did not die, however. Christine's boyfriend, Brian Li Sung took up the mask, if only briefly, as his psyche had been shattered by Christine's death. Brian's story ran from issues #13-#15 of the series, and ended when he was shot dead by Wiggins.

From there, Wagner chose to drop the "pass the mask" approach he'd been taking on the series, letting Wiggins come forward to relate two different stories about the Hunter Rose Grendel in issues #16-#19. And then, in issues #20-#23, things really got weird. Wiggins again was the focus for issue #20 which followed his descent into madness. For the next three issues, Wagner explored the growth of the idea of Grendel as time marched on, moving the timeline of the series to a point where he would have complete freedom to create a new world - one shaped and inexorably linked to Grendel.

GRENDEL GOES WORDWIDE

Grendel #24 marked the beginning of the second era of Grendel, one where religion, politics, and science fiction all jockeyed for position in the backdrop. Wagner's first exploration in this new world was God and the Devil, a story pitting an insane Eppy Thatcher who was dressed as Grendel (and fueled by a designer drug known as "Grendel") against Pope Innocent XLII.

"This storyline sprang from the fact that I didn't see a way to just keep handing the Grendel onto a new persona over and over again without it getting repetitive and boring...a trap that I saw so many regular series falling into at the time and one that I was determined not to fall into with this one," Wagner said.

"Thus, the idea was to cast the net even further, to expand the Grendel identity into a more far-reaching identity, something that would have global effect. So, God and the Devil is set several centuries after the death of Brian Li Sung. The third World War has occurred and the earth's crude oil supplies have been contaminated beyond use. Solar power, world-class entertainment and designer pharmaceuticals now form the basis of the new economic order. The memory/archetype of Grendel is now a global phenomenon, a character whose presence in popular culture has reached mythic proportions."

For a social structure, Wagner took his cues from history - that is, when there is a great upheaval, a change that strikes at the core of society, making the world unrecognizable in a way, religion moves to the forefront. In this world, separation of church and state is precarious at best, according to Wagner.

"Yet even the religious order is fractured and at odds with itself," Wagner said. "Each continent now claims its own Vatican and Pope. The leader of Vatican Ouest in the States is the despotic Innocent XLII, whose dreams of global domination are tinged with hints of a sinister origin. Opposing the machinations of this theocratic monster is the civil aristocrat, Orion Asante, head of one of the few excommunicated families that have still manage to thrive in this restrictive society. Into this mix, enters the mysterious figure of Grendel, himself, a seeming wild card in the power play of epic proportions."

As God and the Devil progressed, Innocent XLII is revealed to be Tujiro (from a few hundred years back) who sought to block the sun with the weapon he was building into his tower, making the world a paradise for vampires. Both Orion and Eppy prevailed, which led to the collapse of the church

…and the bulk of society.

GRENDEL TAKES THE WORLD

With the structure of much of Western society gone, Wagner began the ambitious Devil's Reign arc with Grendel #34, which would close out the series at #40 in 1990. In the story, Wagner placed Orion Assante in the role of world leader, a man straddling a tenuous peace between the Americas, Asia and Europe. The peace finally collapsed, as tenuous peaces often do and global war was the result. Clutching victory from the jaws of defeat, Assante vanquished all his enemies and turned his nickname of "Grendel" (given to him for his role in bringing down the church) into an honorific, and declared himself Orion I, the first Grendel-Khan. His elite soldiers were "Grendels," and to be such was an honor only few men could hope to achieve. Hunter Rose's original Grendel mask became commonplace throughout the world. Grendel, hundreds of years after Hunter Rose, had conquered the world.

And with that, Wagner put the Grendel series on hiatus.

In 1989, Just prior to the end of the ongoing series, Wagner, along with co-writer and artist William-Messner Loebs and John Peck produced the three-issue Silverback miniseries, which told the tale of Dream Picker, a Native American who went on a vision quest, and would come back as Argent. (Of the chances of ever seeing a Silverback collection, longtime Grendel Editor Diana Schutz said at the just wrapped San Diego Comic-Con that the original films of the miniseries are long gone, and the comics themselves would not reproduce well if they were scanned and used in a collection, thus it appears that this segment of the Grendel stories may be lost…well, lost to those who don't own the original issues.)

It was almost as if Wagner had explored every angle of Grendel, and taken the character to its ultimate conclusion.

Almost.

WAR CHILD

Following issue #40 of Grendel, Wagner had an idea of how to return to the characters and world he'd created. His plan was, as usual, ambitious, and would span 10 issues, and include…everything. Seriously - everything and the kitchen sink. Motorcycle gangs, zombies, vampires, monsters, pirates, radioactive mutants, ultimate weapons - and angry gorillas. It was to be Wagner's last hurrah on the series, and he was as he said, looking to take the series out with a real blast.

But business got in the way.

Before Wagner's final arc could begin, Comico, the publisher of Grendel since its inception, went bankrupt, and the rights to the character were caught in a legal web that took Wagner two years to pull free. Finally, in 1992, Grendel: War Child launched at Dark Horse.

Throughout the series' ten issues, Wagner spun the tale of the kidnapped Jupiter Assante (the ten year old son of the now-dead Orion). Assante's kidnapper - Grendel Prime, a Cyborg built by Orion I which would perform exactly what it was doing: protect Jupiter from the political machinations and corruption of palace life until he was fit to assume (and usurp if need be) the throne as the second Grendel-Khan.

War Child spanned ten years of story-time and finally culminated with Jupiter, Grendel Prime and a small army overthrowing the last, corrupt remnants of his father's government in a most spectacular fashion. Jupiter I took the throne, and Grendel Prime disappeared into the wilderness.

Just because Wagner had (apparently) told his last Grendel story didn't mean that he was done with the idea. No - the argument could be made that, following War Child, Wagner became more philosophical about his creation. After all - he was older now, no longer filled with the remnants of teen angst, and thus Grendel was something different to the creator who was now well into his '30s. Whereas the message behind the earlier Grendel stories was one of teen-fueled anger and angst, Wagner's latter works, which delved into the adult blend of politics and religion, seemed to suggest a more pessimistic and pragmatic view of the world, that is - everything goes to nuts. "Grendel" may conquer the world, but Grendel cannot hold the world. Khan after Khan, as Wagner and others would explore, faced assassination, overthrow, corruption and betrayal. To put it in Conrad's terms, the sepulcher may have been white for a while, but still, it was always a sepulcher.

In 1993, Wagner decided, it was time to let some friends come over and play.

GRENDEL BRANCHES OUT

Grendel Tales was a concept that Wagner was looking to begin in the final issue of the Comic Grendel series, but was delayed due to the bankruptcy. Finally, in 1993, Grendel Tales began - the concept was simple: in miniseries written and drawn by various creators, the world of Grendel would be explored.

The miniseries were fascinating glimpses of both the world Wagner had created as seen through the eyes of soldiers or others just living amongst the Grendels; as well as how others interpreted Wagner's creations and world. There were eight Grendel Tales projects altogether:

Four Devils, One Hell by James Robinson and Teddy Kristiansen (1993)
Devil's Hammer by Rob Walton (1994)
The Devil in Our Midst by Steven T. Seagle and Paul Grist (1994)
Devils and Deaths by Darko Macan and Edvin Biukovic (1994)
Homecoming by Patrick McEown (1994)
Devil's Choices by Darko Macan and Edvin Biukovic (1995)
The Devil May Care by Terry Laban and Peter Doherty (1995)
The Devil's Apprentice by Jeffrey Lang and Steve Lieber (1997)

Throughout the various miniseries, Wagner would occasionally contribute a painted Prime story, Devil's Quest. Set hundreds of years after the conclusion of War Child, the tale featured the disillusioned Grendel Prime seeking to contact the soul of Hunter Rose. The story was darkly comical in a way, showing the cyclical nature of power, and the inevitable corruption that it yields. Set the furthest in the future of any Grendel stories, Devil's Quest ends with the assurance made to the reader that the world will never be free of the devil's grasp - and with it, corruption, greed and the throat-clawing desperate fight for power.

Also amidst the collection of friends who played in this era of Grendel was Greg Rucka, who wrote 2000's Grendel: Past Prime, which picked up years after War Child, and years after the assassination of Jupiter I. Past Prime told of Susan Veraghen's quest to find Grendel Prime after he wandered into the wilderness. Veraghen was a lost, disillusioned former Grendel who hoped that Prime could once again give her something to believe in. Together, the two aided each other in continuing forward. The novel featured spot illustrations by Wagner.

MEETING THE BAT

At the same time as Wagner was branching out with Grendel Tales, he also introduced his characters to DC Comics' Batman in two crossovers, Batman/Grendel I (1993) and Batman/Grendel II (1996). The first of the two was written and drawn during the Comico days, but held until 1993 for release, once again, due to Comico's bankruptcy.

The first crossover featured Hunter Rose meeting Batman in Gotham City and seeing if he could best the Dark Knight in a match of wits; while years later in story time, the second tale of the two characters sent Grendel Prime back to Gotham (its stories tied in to Devil's Quest) as the Cyborg sought to steal the true skull of Hunter Rose, which was on display in the city. There's some tie in to Devil's Quest in the second, for those who are looking for it.

In a nice mirroring, Batman broke Hunter Rose's arm in the first meeting, and Grendel Prime returned the favor in the second.

LATER YEARS OF GRENDEL

In 1998, Wagner decided that the time was right to once again return to Hunter Rose, and in two miniseries, Grendel: Black, White and Red (1998) and Grendel: Red, White and Black (2002), he told short stories - all illustrated by various artists - of hitherto unknown adventures of the original Grendel and his world.

The stories hit fans like a sledgehammer.

After all, it had been a good 15 years since Hunter Rose's original exploits, and safe to say, time had softened Hunter in the minds of many fans, and the criminal mastermind was easily romanticized. Wagner's stories brought Rose roaring back as a savage, sadistic, amoral and calculating criminal.

Dipping into the past also prompted Wagner to turn over the reins of the world to another writer again, this time, to his long-time editor Diana Schutz who explored the psyches and lives of Stacy Palumbo and Christine Spar in 1999's Grendel: Devil Child. The story clearly demonstrated to fans that Stacy was not the innocent foundling, rescued by Hunter Rose, but rather was as much a schemer and conniver as her "father" was - clearly poisoned by her time spent too close to the Devil.

BACK TO HUNTER

The two Hunter Rose miniseries, Black, White and Red and Red, White and Black were apparently enough to prime Wagner for more from Hunter Rose, as evidenced by this summer's Grendel: Behold the Devil, which promises to tell the tales of Rose from his "recently discovered" journals, long thought to be lost. So once again, Grendel returns to life under Wagner's pen, marking the start of the character's second quarter century, which brings up the question that the creator has always been hesitant to answer: is it Wagner who can't let go of Grendel, or Grendel who can't let go of Wagner?

Tomorrow - we start off this journey with Devil by the Deed.

[VivatGrendel.com]

GRENDEL: THE INTERVIEW 1 - DEVIL BY THE DEED, page 1

^{With apologies for missing our initial start date of yesterday due to technical difficulties, we're going to get rolling with our series of conversations with Matt Wagner about Grendel. Today, Hunter Rose in his initial outing, Devil by the Deed. As a sidenote, at least a passing familiarity of that story is probably needed for fully getting into the conversation.
Newsarama: Matt, take us back to that first moment of inception of Grendel. Was he always Hunter Rose, or did he start even more raw than that?}

Matt Wagner: Whoa! After twenty-five years, I've gotta confess that any questions about the creative origins of this character are gonna be answered based on some pretty hazy recollections. I was fairly young at that point and those were heady days in many regards-not the least of which was the fact that the cultural landscape was changing on so many fronts. Much like the blossoming punk and independent music scene, comics were approaching a stage of empowerment for the individual creator. Suddenly, it didn't seem a foregone conclusion that one had to sell one's creative soul and all artistic ownership to either of the big two publishers. A real do-it-yourself mentality was taking hold in both music and comics. I was still in college when I first began the gestation process on what would ultimately become Grendel. I've already acknowledged that the novel Grendel by John Gardner was a major source of inspiration, a narrative that told the familiar Beowulf legend from a POV that was sympathetic to the monster. I knew that I wanted this, my first endeavor at professional comics, to center around an anti-hero.

I suppose another big source for this inspiration were the Elric novels by Michael Moorcock. Unlike the heroes of traditional fantasy fiction, Elric's character portrayed a certain sympathetic amorality. He was downright evil by many perceptions and yet the reader always sided with him, even in the face of acts that were hard to understand or support. So, I knew that I was searching for my own dark demon to dress up in a more attractive fashion and style. I remember being home for Christmas break one year (this probably would've been 1981) and sitting in my parents' family room, working on the designs for what would ultimately become the iconic Grendel mask. As with a lot of people, I'd always found circus clowns to be pretty damned disturbing rather than funny and cute so I was trying to design a clown mask that would seem haughty and demonic-something that would appear scary to a victim or opponent, yet also seem to have a mocking, sardonic quality to it. A lot of those initial designs had many more elements that drew on classical clown makeup but I kept pairing those down until I hit the one we're familiar with today. On this final design in fact, the clown trappings had transformed into something more diabolical. The expressive slashes often used above and below the eyes now seemed to evoke a pair of tusks and horns and the traditional button nose now seemed to echo the gaping emptiness found on a skull.

NRAMA: And this was before you had created the character, fully?

MW: Yeah, I suppose the mask-and therefore Grendel--came first. Before Hunter. Which, I suppose, was somewhat indicative of what was eventually to come-ultimately, the series is about the eternal concept of Grendel, not its various human incarnations.

NRAMA: As was touched on in the introduction, I think it's always interesting to point out that Grendel was something that was probably fueled by you as much as you were fueled by it. Looking at the original Hunter Rose story from the standpoint of knowing that you were 18-20 when you created it, it makes more...sense in a way. In a manner of speaking, Devil by the Deed is post-adolescent fist-shaking at the world, isn't it?

MW: Oh, absolutely! It's all summed up by the final line of the graphic novel-which is also, narratively, the final line of Christine Spar's biography of Hunter.


"He is the demon of society's mediocrity."
Now, if that's not an unfiltered expression of teen angst, I don't know what is! So, sure, I was portraying a fantastical version of the way I myself saw the world in so many ways. I grew up in a pretty rural setting. I was smart and culturally intrigued in a world that didn't really support those qualities or interests. Luckily for me, my parents were very encouraging of my developing creative persona and so I was able to grow and advance in an environment that, otherwise, probably would've killed any such ambitions. Plus, I was an only child so I'm sure I felt quite a "me-against-the-world" sort of vibe through most of my youth. Not that I was such an utter loner. I always had friends and was pretty social.

But, let's face it, who doesn't feel like the rest of the world just doesn't understand you during those painful adolescent years? By my late teens/early twenties, it just seemed like so many of the people I encountered in my day-to-day life were dronish and defeated by their very existence. I felt like life held soooo many exciting possibilities and couldn't understand why simply everyone didn't share this same "carpe-fucking-diem, baby!" attitude. And, isn't that really the same sort of juvenile mentality? "I get it, why doesn't anyone else?" Trouble was, I didn't realize that wasn't really a very unique outlook on the world. Its how many, many young people feel but I suppose that's also why I was able to communicate it so effectively-albeit in a grossly exaggerated fashion-- through the character of Hunter Rose.

NRAMA: Mage is known as your main autobiographical work, but how much of you made it into Grendel? Would it be fair to say that while Mage caught your larger life story, albeit recounted in a mythic format, Devil by the Deed was an autobiographical piece of you as well?

MW: Well, in those early days, I think it's fair to say that both Mage and Grendel were autobiographical to a degree. They continued to be so but in vastly divergent fashions. Mage tends to delve deeper and deeper into my own persona whereas Grendel, as I said earlier, usually involves my perceptions of the world around me. I've often said that Mage is me gazing inwards and Grendel is me looking outwards. Thus, each stage of the evolving Grendel saga was spawned by a different turn of events or some sort of environmental change that I was going through. We can get into this more specifically later on but, for instance, just before I came up with the Christine Spar storyline I was on the tail end of a years-long love affair involving a young woman with whom I had an on-again-off-again relationship. After a period of several years apart, we ran into each other on the streets one day and were soon wrapped up in each other once again. The difference being that, this time around, she'd had a child in the interim (not mine), which threw a whole new factor into the equation. So, for the first time, I got to see up close and personal that fiercely protective and sometimes even psychotic state of mind that is maternal love.




NRAMA: Again, going back to the inception - why Hunter Rose, the way he was?

MW: A lot of factors contributed to that, I think. First, he was clearly an adolescent wish fulfillment for me on so many levels. I wasn't slender and urbanely stylish. I wanted to be a writer but wasn't yet. I was, at that stage of my life, always drawn to women who were more worldly and experienced that I. I had even tried my hand at fencing but wasn't very good at it. So, obviously, Hunter was the exceptional "me" that I wished was true on some level, while Kevin Matchstick was more of the "everyman" that I more fully embodied. Additionally, Hunter's persona as Grendel was based on a variety of pop culture characters that I had heard about but to which I had actually had very little exposure.

NRAMA: But there were other influences, right? You've said before that there were at least a couple of comic/pulp influences that touched Hunter…

MW: Right. Fantomas was a French pulp character who exemplified the sophisticated, uber-criminal mastermind. He was often pictured wearing a tux and small domino mask. Kriminal and Diabolik were super-criminals featured in Italian comics, both of whom wore skin-tight costumes and strode a hazy line between good and bad. Undeniably outside the law, they still maintained their own twisted set of ethics, a hook that allowed readers to empathize with their nefarious activities. That dichotomy of purpose and action really appealed to me on so many levels.

The last factor that I think makes significant sense is the time period in which I was creating this character. The early eighties and the aftermath of the entire disco era created a certain sense of sophisticated danger that led to the rise in popularity of what is now referred to as the Criminal Chic. The idealistic unity of the '60's had been sandblasted away by the drug-fueled excesses of the '70's, leaving society with a feeling of isolation and disillusionment. I find it not surprising in the least that Hunter Rose and Hannibal Lecter both made their debuts in the same year. The '80's saw a cultural desire to return to a certain sense of worldly class and sophistication, coupled with a latent emotional wrath. The prevailing attitude seemed to be, "I am scholar and a gentleman but it you attempt to fuck with me in any way, I will obliterate you with a mere flick of my wrist." Well, that was the fantasy anyway. And that was, certainly, Hunter Rose.

NRAMA: You said earlier that the mask of Grendel came first. When did Hunter join him?

MW: Yeah - the mask absolutely came first, along with an idea of a costumed rogue who took what he wanted and dealt out his own form of perverted "justice" with a supple swish of his blades. But if you take into account that Hunter was born out of my own unfulfilled desires then I'd have to say that they arose fairly simultaneously-climbing over and on top of each other like a pair of garden vines. After all, the urge to create a character such as Grendel sprang from my own state of mind at the time even as Hunter was lurking in the many layers of my subconscious persona. In the end, I suppose its impossible to tell where one started and the other began. Not so with the latter stages of the character. By that point, I was actively trying to create new variations on the theme but, in almost every instance I think, a person's first attempts at literary narratives are performed from a certain base instinct rather than as a calculated construction.

NRAMA: Let's spread out this blanket to cover a little more of the world you were creating with Hunter. While many readers can easily grasp Grendel as well as Hunter, why add in Argent as a centuries old Native American man-wolf? After all, with Hunter/Grendel, you had a crime drama with a unique twist. Add Argent in, and now...it's something very different, as there's no ignoring the supernatural elements of the hunter.

MW: You know, I was just asked about this the other day-the fact that Grendel so freely mixes and matches it various genre influences in a way that would leave make many other authors cringe. I suppose, in a way, that's always been a creative strength of mine; I'm something of a genre buster. I don't feel bound by any specific narrative rules of engagement. I'm a storyteller, first and foremost, and whatever story I feel compelled to relate, that's what I put down. It's true of Mage as well; part fantasy, part mythology, part superhero, part comedy, part tragedy. It's a bit all of the above and totally none of the above.

Again, I don't feel any of the standard boundaries either appeal or apply when I'm trying to come up with a tale. If a motif suits my purposes, I use it. And, obviously, the point I was trying to achieve with Argent was an absolute counter-balance to Hunter. Whereas Hunter is handsome, suave and even darkly likeable, Argent is physically wretched, emotionally tortured and downright despicable in so many ways-even though he's fighting on "our" side. So far as the Native American legendry goes, I was simply trying to mix things up a bit and not go with the standard European werewolf concepts. By making Argent's shifted-shape a permanent curse rather than a recurring condition, I was able to deny him even one more of the attractive qualities enjoyed by his opponent. After all, Hunter can take off his mask when he needs to. By making Argent's curse the result of yet another tragic love affair, I connected the two antagonists in a fashion that neither of them expects and to which only the reader is actually privy. It makes their final rooftop confessions to each other all the more ironic and bittersweet.

NRAMA: So he was always set up as a man-wolf from the very beginning?

MW: Yeah, I think so. Again, hard to remember that long ago…but I was trying to make him Grendel's polar opposite in both appearance and demeanor. Plus, I was probably trying to refer back to my source material, Beowulf. If my title character was gonna be Grendel, then his opponent should "Be A Wolf".

NRAMA: Uh…

MW: I know that sounds a little obvious and trite but, hey, sometimes that's how an unfettered young mind just seems to work!

NRAMA: Looking back on what Grendel has become from this point, 25 years later, hindsight could give readers the idea that Grendel would be involved with the supernatural was your plan all along - after all, you had Argent, and then, four to five years later, Tujiro showed up, and Argent's inclusion made him easier to swallow…

MW: As I said, it was more that I was simply a genre bustin' fool at that point. It never occurred to me that; this is a crime noir/pulp story structure so I can't possibly have any supernatural elements. I just thought having a dark, slinking werewolf to counter-balance Grendel's art deco elegance was just fucking cool! So, it kind of worked the other way around. Once I had Argent on deck, the inclusion of other supernatural elements just seemed a foregone conclusion. In the case of Tujiro, I wanted another mystical threat to act as the catalyst that would re-ignite the Grendel persona long after Hunter's demise. And again, I was looking to present this vampiric character in a manner much removed from our Euro/Hollywood clichés. Of course, I had no idea I would later use the vampires as such a continuing influence in the world of Grendel yet to come. I readily admit that I've been making all this up as I go along and that's really part of the joy of working on Grendel after all these years. There are still surprises in store for me as well as for my readers. In fact, we'll see another as-yet-unknown supernatural factor in the new Grendel series, Behold the Devil.

NRAMA: Back to Hunter for a moment. You've explored his character more in the years following Devil by the Deed, in Red, White and Black, Black White and Red and others - was he always doomed to be Grendel? Did he have no choice at all in what his destiny was to be?

MW: HA! Well Hunter would certainly say that being Grendel was his choice and his choice alone. In his own mind, his actions are absolutely deliberate, completely self-generated and utterly unique. In many instances, he rejects the very concepts of fate and destiny as being the emotional refuge of the ordinary and the weak.

NRAMA: Yeah, but…

MW: Right - if that was the case, would he have ever really met such an end as he did? In many instances, it seems that destiny plays a ferocious and unforgiving role in the lives of the various Grendels. And yet, nearly every one of them embodies a persona who struggles to defy the pitfalls and trappings of fate. I'd have to say that the one exception to that description is Brian Li Sung who was dragged into his role as Grendel almost against his own will. In fact, its that fractured innocence that lets him eventually defy and, for a time at least, manage to defeat the Grendel influence even though he pays for that victory with his own life.

NRAMA: Hey now - no jumping ahead. But in that vein of destiny, who was Hunter Rose before he was Hunter Rose? Back when he was only Eddie...?

MW: Even though I explore a bit of Eddie's past in the various Black, White and Red tales, I still leave him a bit undefined. I wanted him to remain a bit of a cypher. As a result, we haven't yet and never will learn his true last name. He tells us that his existence was bland and unengaging, that his parents were ordinary and uninspiring but we never actually see much of what he finds so exasperating and trite. This, again, is an attempt to connect him to all of us, to imbue this freakish prodigy with enough vagaries that he still retains something of the Everyman. Haven't we all, especially in our adolescent years, felt these same longings and frustrations? The difference lies in the fact that Eddie never gets over these narrow-minded outlooks. What we do see is that there definitely was something wrong with his psychology from the very beginning. He seems to bear a sociopathic disconnect from nearly everything and everyone he encounters, even his own family. He shows little remorse for any living thing and discovers early on that he doesn't mind humiliating and scaring the bejesus out of those he considers his enemies. All of these characteristics, of course, come to the absolute forefront once he is transformed into Grendel.

[VivatGrendel.com]

GRENDEL: THE INTERVIEW 1 - DEVIL BY THE DEED, page 2

NRAMA: Okay - instead of his deep past, let's touch on his clear transformative period. We've all had first loves, and first lovers too - but not many of us took their names, and used the affair to create an entirely new persona as Eddie did after Jocasta Rose. Was it something about her specifically that "turned" Eddie, or was she just the woman who was there at the right time when Eddie was ready to break the soil and flower?
MW: Eddie was a man starving in a societal desert and Jocasta was the first and only gourmet meal he'd ever had. She was the catalyst that sparked him into motion whereas, up until then, he'd only been going thru the motions. I've had some speculations from fans that Jackie was, in fact, a latent Grendel herself and while there is some merit in that thought, she never exhibited the violent tendencies that were so bubbling under the very thin veneer of Eddie's personality. And, for some reason, her influence while they were together seemed to have kept those homicidal impulses in check.

Some may ask what, then, did she actually see in her young lover? If he was so internally damaged and potentially so dangerous, what attracted her to Eddie in the first place? You have to remember that when she first meets Eddie, Jocasta already knows that she is dying. His breathtaking performance on the fencing strip is what first causes her to seek him out but it's very fact that he is so young, needy and malleable that gives her the impetus to take him as a lover. She's a single woman, still in the prime of her life, fiery and opinionated and she knows she'll soon have left little if any impact on the world around her. In Eddie, she sees a chance to make her final mark and, oh boy, does she! So, in a sense, she's acting very selfishly, a fact that Eddie never seems to realize. You've also gotta remember, Eddie's really not like all the rest of us. Never was.

NRAMA: After Jocasta there was no other (yet seen) for Hunter. Why the celibacy? Was he, as some have suggested, gay?

MW: WHAT?! Some people think Hunter is gay? All because he never takes another lover after his first fiery affair (with a woman, I might add)? Since when are gay people supposedly celibate? That supposition is not only really, really wrong-headed, it's based around an outlook that considers homosexuality aberrant. Without getting into what I find a very tiresome political debate, I don't in any way agree with that thought. In turn though, I do find the idea of celibacy to be fairly aberrant and, again, not connected in any way with homosexuality (unless you count a seemingly large contingent of Catholic priests-sorry, couldn't resist!).

Look, in Jocasta Hunter found the wellspring of liveliness for which he had thirsted his entire life. Once she died, and he realized that she had known all along that she was so imminently doomed, he became something far more than and, at the same time, something far less than human. He became the stuff of legend, albeit admittedly dark legend. When Jocasta dies, the last vestiges of Eddie's humanity dies along with her…but the spark she lit continues to burn and eventually becomes a raging conflagration in the persona of Hunter Rose. Once Hunter becomes Grendel, there's no room in his over-stuffed ego to include affection for anyone else. In fact, the one person who does crack that hardened shell manages to ultimately shatter his world altogether.

NRAMA: Speaking of Hunter's mind, for years, you really resisted revisiting Hunter, aside from the Batman crossover, but then, dove deeply into him in the two miniseries. Why? Was it an issue of the readers didn't know things about Hunter, and you wanted to show them, or was it more than you yourself didn't know things about Hunter, and by writing the short stories, were able to find them out?

MW: Well, I always knew that I'd return to telling some of the many tales that made up the vast and complex tapestry of Hunter's blazing-comet-trail career as Grendel. It's obvious from the story structure of Devil by the Deed that there are many stories that occur "between the panels".

Truthfully, if I'd continued his adventures in the much less sophisticated fashion in which they were began (in the original black and white, recently re-release as Grendel Archives) I might have told far more of these stories in my initial go-around with the character. Of course, that might've also resulted in there never being any continuation of the story beyond Hunter's arc. The very fact that I later had to rethink and revamp this narrative into a series of four-page installments as a back-up feature in Mage forced me to skip over many of Grendel's dark and dangerous deeds. Devil by the Deed focuses mainly on the emotional highlights of Hunter's life, the remaining spark of humanity that Stacy elicits in him and his eventual downfall as a result of that. In fact, much like L'Morte d'Arthur, Devil by the Deed is really about the death of Grendel. So, yeah, there was a lot of area that I knew I could still cover when it came to my seminal creation. To an extent that was, as you said, for the reader's benefit and to an extent it was for my own. But I always find that sort of criteria to be one of the ripest conditions for narrative success-when the creator and his or her audience are both delighting in the tale that's being spun.

NRAMA: But still, with the two miniseries that focused on Hunter, you were walking somewhat of a tightrope. With his only history being that told third person by Christine when she wrote Devil by the Deed, he'd become something of a folk hero among his fans. Yeah, he was bad, but he wasn't that bad when viewed through romanticized hindsight. But now - it was almost as if you really wanted to show readers that no, Hunter really is an asshole, a horrible fucking person, and the last man you'd ever want to admire. Was there any reluctance on your part to look at him that closely?

MW: I didn't bear any reluctance but I certainly had a more mature outlook on the character. You mentioned that he was, "…bad but not that bad." How so?

NRAMA: Well, given the time period between the two, the view of Hunter was, as I said, romanticized. But that aside, Devil by the Deed was…it was almost a black and white original version of say, Double Indemnity, where the miniseries were Brian DePalma remakes. The violence of Devil by the Deed was largely off camera and stylized, whereas in Black, White and Red…well, you yourself said there was a reason to add in the "Red." In those miniseries, you grabbed readers by the collars and made them look up close at Hunter and his activities. Bit of a shock, in a way…




MW: Yeah, but c'mon… he killed people for profit, for power and for the sheer thrill of the hunt. Repeatedly. How is that not really fucking bad? Again, the various conceits upon which the character is based-the fact that he's suave, debonair, handsome, witty-obviously just seem to work. Maybe a bit too well. Throw in his contempt for the truly contemptuous act of pedophilia and you've got a character that utterly lives up to the anti-hero moniker, an absolute beast that beguiles you into cheering him on even as he's spreading terror and destruction all around him. Seems I achieved what I initially set out to achieve.

But, coming back to the character after so long, I thought it was very important to stress his malignant actions as just that-evil fucking shit. Yet I didn't do this at the expense of what makes him such an attractive persona. The reader still gets a thrill out of Grendel's witty demeanor and his oh-so perfect and casual violence. But, this time around, I wanted readers to maybe reconsider their own fascinations with violence. One of my favorite Hunter lines of all time is from "Rat on the Devil", which was drawn by Darick Robertson for the Red, White and Black series. Argent has just spent some time absolutely terrorizing a reluctant police informant, brutally torturing him into submission. Just as the poor schmuck, who by this point has lost quite a bit of blood and even a few fingers to boot, is about to finally spill the beans-SHHKT!-Grendel's fork slices out of the darkness and kills the guy. As he retracts his weapon, Grendel taunts Argent; "Aww…look at that Argent. Your little stoolie…he broke!" Now, that line is absolutely arrogant, undeniably cruel and still downright funny! All are elements that make up the complex character of Hunter Rose. I suppose that's why I find it so easy to come back to him again and again-he's a deep, dark well from which to draw the waters of inspiration.

NRAMA: While you showed him as a true evil throughout, but still he makes, by his own admission, a mistake by taking Stacy from the party after her father is dead. What was this move on Hunter's part? A bit of youthful impulsiveness that still was able to squirm through Grendel's lacquered veneer?

MW: It's always been implied that Hunter's sees some greater potential in Stacy in much the same way that Jocasta saw a greater potential in him. The big difference being in that their relationship isn't sexual but there is something definitely creepy about the whole scene.

NRAMA: Speaking on behalf of, I'm sure, the larger audience, agreed.

MW: Does Hunter have such a hatred of pedophiles before he takes on Stacy as his ward? Or is that a side-result of longings for which he feels ashamed and for which he can find no outlet? In some ways, Hunter even views Stacy as Jocasta's reincarnation, which is why he never doubts or suspects her dedication to him and which ultimately, of course, leads to his downfall. That's one of the main points of Hunter's tragedy. If he could have truly left his humanity behind, he stood a solid chance of achieving the dark immortality he sought to effect. But, the very same sort of spark that ignited him also, eventually, burned him to the core.

And I should point out that kidnapping Stacy was his one big mistake that we know about.

Behold the Devil unveils a truly lost tale of Hunter Rose-a section of his private journals that had he had deliberately torn out and, seemingly, destroyed. Even Christine Spar was never able to uncover what occurred during this missing portion of his private narratives.

NRAMA: Speaking of Christine, while she was your narrator for Devil by the Deed, had you planned from the start of that story that Grendel would continue? If not, when did that realization strike, that Grendel's story was not done?

MW: That was a very rare instance for me in that the motivation was, initially at least, sheerly commercial. As Mage was nearing the end of its run, the original publishers asked me if I could ever conceive of continuing Grendel as a monthly series. I realized that this was gonna be kinda hard in that the title character died at the end of the Devil by the Deed. I started searching around for ideas on how to extend the story and struck upon the idea of Grendel being a generational character, one that would change and reinvent itself over the course of its (hopefully) long publication history. This not only provided me with a vast canvass on which to paint but also allowed me to keep the entire process continually interesting to myself as a creator. There is no way I could ever see myself staying on a run of any character or narrative for years and years and years without the option of changing, progressing and evolving both the story and my own creative muscle and spirit. As the next Grendel storyline lead into the next and the next after that, I realized that I was very lucky to have hit on this formula and that I suddenly had the opportunity to turn what had started out as a mere expression of my own juvenile angst into a creative bonfire that might burn for years to come.

NRAMA: At least 25 so far…

That said though, in terms of continuation, skipping over Stacy threw me when I first read it. Why wouldn't Stacy become the next Grendel? While Devil by the Deed showed only an inkling of her...impetuous nature, the stories since have shown pretty clearly that, even if she wasn't Hunter's biological daughter, she certainly was on the same page as him in terms of mean fuckers. All she needed was just a little push. What kept her from putting on the mask?

MW: Certainly, a lifetime of incarceration might've had some influence on her ability to carry on the legacy, yeah?

NRAMA: Okay - a bit, but still…

MW: One of the core factors of Hunter's success was that he was able to disappear from his former life and reemerge from that chrysalis of anonymity as an entirely different person. He had the ability to both hide and parade his dual existence with impunity. Stacy lived her life in a fish bowl of publicity and media scrutiny. She was still a very young child when utter tragedy began turning her into a monster and she never had the necessary maturity nor the unobserved opportunity to live up to her evil heritage. Her daughter, though, had more than enough smarts, motivation and was filled with enough unrequited rage to oh-so fully adopt the devil's mantle.

NRAMA: Wrapping up this portion - given all that came from the very first Grendel story, the question always hangs there - did Hunter create Grendel, or did Grendel appropriate Hunter?

MW: You really think the Devil will ever let us mere mortals in on the secrets of his ways? He's not tellin' and neither am I!

Tomorrow: The Devil's Legacy

[VivatGrendel.com]

GRENDEL: THE INTERVIEW 3 - DEVIL'S LEGACY 1/2

<sup>And today, we start our conversation with Grendel creator Matt Wagner focusing on Devil's Legacy. The story was the opening arc of the Grendel series, and featured Christine Sparr, the daughter of Stacy Palumbo, and the author of the original Devil by the Deed book about Hunter Rose.
When Christine's son Anson is taken by Tujiro - a kabuki vampire - it's as if a door opens, and Grendel walks in. Devil's Legacy was Wagner's means of moving the Grendel story forward while clearing the decks somewhat to given him a fresh canvas on which to paint again once this story, and The Devil Inside were complete.

This section will take up two days, and we'll touch upon The Devil Inside on Tuesday</sup>.

Newsarama: Matt, we've talked about all of your work holding at least some element of autobiography, and here - even though you said that the continuation was at least in some part, commercial in nature, with Christine taking up the mask and fork. Along with that, Devil by the Deed had strong elements of building and maintaining an empire - a young man's quest to rule the world; and the motivating action of Devil's Legacy was the taking of a child. Obviously, not autobiographical, but, dating things here…you would've been a father of some young kids then, right?

Matt Wagner: Well, yeah, everything I do does have a shred of the autobiographical in it. It's the old adage of "I paint what I see," albeit often pushed to somewhat dramatic extremes. In the case of both Devil by the Deed and Mage, I was definitely wallowing in a somewhat myopic version of the world. I knew that, if I was gonna successfully expand the world of Grendel beyond its initial concept, then I had to break out of that mold and depict concepts, realities and viewpoints that were not necessarily of my own experience. Eventually, I pushed that concept so far that I was writing the schizophrenic ramblings of a messianic psychopath (Eppy Thatcher). But, for the sequel to Devil by the Deed, I decided to not reach quite so far away from my own knowledge and simply take on the voice and identity of a woman narrator.

NRAMA: And the parent aspect? Was it about that time, or do I have the stats wrong on the back of the Matt Wagner comic creator card?

MW: Nah - you're wrong about the parenthood aspect of this being of my own understanding. I was still quite a few years away from becoming a dad myself. That element came from an long-running and ongoing romance that I was part of in those days. For years, I was involved in an on-again/off-again love affair with a woman whom I had met in art school. We had a very tempestuous moth-and-flame sort of relationship that would flare on and then burn out, time and time again. Anyway, after several years of the off-again stage of our times together, I happened to run into her on the street just by sheer happenstance. Almost immediately, we got sucked back into each other's lives only, this time, there was one incredibly vital difference-she now had an infant daughter since I had last seen her

NRAMA: Daughter?

MW: Nope, not mine. As always with us, this latest stab at togetherness was doomed to failure but, during this final stint as lovers, I got to see up close and personal the fiery, unreasoning and nearly psychotic protective maternal instinct. I'd never known anyone with a young child before (certainly not intimately) and so this was a pretty eye-opening experience for me. I decided to use that primal mentality to spur the actions of my second incarnation of Grendel. Again, the hazy line between good and bad has always been a characteristic of the title. Hunter was charming and likeable, but a monster underneath. Christine's motivations are heartfelt and almost justified, but her actions take their toll on her psyche and she ultimately descends into homicidal madness.

NRAMA: I probably know the answer to the first part of this, that is, your talents were in demand throughout the industry, but with Devil's Legacy, why didn't you draw it, and how did you end up with the Pander Brothers?

MW: Actually, it wasn't like that at all. Yes, I was in demand but that wasn't why I chose to not draw the first arc of the ongoing Grendel monthly.

After I completed Mage; The Hero Discovered and, as a result, Devil by the Deed, I was at the pinnacle of a very sudden ascendancy in the industry. You've gotta remember that, prior to things really starting to creatively click for me during the several years it took to produce this material, we were just young art school drop-outs whose dreams usually exceeded their abilities. My initial efforts on Grendel (in its earliest black & white incarnation) were most often critically scorned and considered amateurish at best. Next thing I knew, I'm hot new commodity that everyone seemed to adore and the opportunities at my disposal seemed limitless. I mean, that year, Mage was second only to Dark Knight and Watchmen in regards to industry award nominations-and not by much.

NRAMA: So that took its toll?

MW: Hell yes. I knew enough to be scared as shit of such adulation. Not scared of the possibilities and, again, the opportunities this presented to me, but scared of the smug complacency that this sort of praise could easily have triggered in myself. I was pretty young and had never before experienced this sort of acclaim. It was oh-so possible for me to just swallow my own hype and think that I was absolutely the shit. Everyone, it seemed, was patting me on the back and telling me that what I was doing was juuuuust right. Again, luckily for me, I didn't buy it.

I kept telling myself, "It was only two years ago that everyone thought you sucked." Things couldn't have changed so much--so completely--in that short amount of time. I thought, obviously, I must still have a loooong way to go, artistically. So, with that in mind, I determined to buck the trend and not do what everyone might've expected of me. Instead of immediately following up Mage with its promised sequel, I decided to concentrate on only writing Grendel. I had just completed two very different story-lines that featured two very different art styles-at the same time! I wanted to force myself to expand my outlook even farther. By turning the art chores on Grendel over to another artist(s), I would force myself to look at things differently; in effect, to see through other creators' eyes to a certain degree.




NRAMA: And that's where the Panders came in…

MW: Yeah. In the middle of Mage's fifteen issue run, I had done a well-publicized cross-country promotional tour. A crew of my buddies and I piled into a tricked-out touring van and hit the rode for a little over two months. We drove over 13,000 miles and stopped to do 26 signing appearances. Quite an experience, let me tell you! Anyway, it was-coincidentally enough-during my stop in Portland, OR that I saw some work by a local artist displayed on the walls of the local shop at which I was signing. These were just character drawings of popular super-heroes done by Arnold Pander who, as it turns out, used to work at the same shop. I was struck by their highly stylized visual flare and the primal energy that seemed to pulse in the figures' musculature. I asked the store owner for the artist's contact info and simply stashed it in my traveling gear. It was almost a year later that I contacted Arnold and asked him to submit some samples for the gig to draw Grendel. He was totally enthused and informed me that he wanted to work as a team with his older brother, Jacob. They whipped up two pages of try-out material and we hired them immediately.

NRAMA: I have to list myself as one of those readers who found the change in art jarring, but by the end of the storyline, there was no one else that I could have imagined drawing that story. Was there every anyone else considered, and what made Arnold and Jacob "click" for this story in your mind?

MW: As for other artists, not that I can remember, no. Again, I loved Arnold's high-fashion vibe and thought it'd perfectly match what I had in mind, story-wise. I mean, his stuff almost looked like what I'd imagine you'd get if the late Patrick Nagel (who did the cover to Duran Duran's Rio album) took a shot at drawing super-hero comics. And, yeah, there are many guys out there who you can think of as "girl" artists. You know…dudes who draw really sexy, really believable, really spectacular action babes. They even draw all sort of different types of beautiful women. Yet still, I can't think of anyone who added that wild sense of power and fury to their portrayals of extraordinary females. Arnold and Jacob were unique because of the personality they were able to inject into Christine that went beyond just sheer sexual attractiveness. Chris was a sexy chick in black leather and yet she looked like she could eat your nuts for breakfast. That dichotomy was crucial to the character and-MAN!-they pulled it off in spades!

NRAMA: While we're laying groundwork - a kabuki vampire? Is this another way of your fear of clowns showing itself [laghs]?

MW: Well, yeah, I said earlier that I'd always found clowns to be fairly disturbing. But that's not really what inspired the character of Tujiro. On one level, I wanted to continue the supernatural threat as an element of what made Grendel tick. Hunter had a werewolf so I decided to give Chris a vampire. And, as I might have mentioned earlier, I didn't want this vampire to be of the traditional, cloaked, Euro-romantic style. I knew that vampire legendry wasn't exclusive to Eastern Europe-many, many societies tell tales of ghosts and spirits who survive by consuming the life-force of the living-and so I did a bit of research and found an interesting nugget about Chinese vampires. Their bodies were supposedly covered with fur and I thought that was not only a neat element that was a distinctly anti-Anne-Rice-type vampire but it also gave the monster some sort of further connection to Argent.

NRAMA: Where are Tujiro's roots? A Chinese Kabuki dancer who's a vampire? You explained the vampire, but where did the rest come from?

MW: I often get ideas from very disparate sources and, in this case, it was from an on-flight magazine-one of those airline-produced travel journals that are always stuffed into the seat pockets on a plane. I forget where I was headed to or returning from, but I happened to flip through this rag and found an article on Kabuki actors/dancers. I was immediately entranced by the ornate costumes and strict and secretive nature of this artform. The Kabuki players appeared elegent, ethereal and, above all, dramatic! Plus, their costuming covers their entire bodies…a perfect way to hide a torso pelted with fur. At that point, Kabuki wasn't so well known in America and so I just latched on to this ornate and outlandish motif as the perfect dressing for my latest super-villain, or…I guess I should say…super-antagonist. In the pages of Grendel, it's often hard to say exactly who the villain truly is.

NRAMA: Let's talk tone - with Devil by the Deed, you were going for noir with a bloody (yet art deco) twist. With Devil's Legacy…you could tell me this was occurring in San Francisco while, at the same time, Harrison Ford's Dekker was running around in Blade Runner's L.A. Why the changeup to science fiction?

MW: Part of that was a consequence of the sheer narrative time frame. I necessarily had to move the story so far ahead chronologically and so found myself faced with portraying a world set in the not-too-distant future.

NRAMA: And in the future, we'll all have flying cars!

MW: [laughs] Yeah, we will. And part of it was, again, to stretch my limits as a story-teller. I'd never done a sci-fi story before-in truth, I was still an utter fledgling in many respects as an author-as so I thought this would be a good approach towards expanding my somewhat limited horizons. That's always been my approach to my craft in general and Grendel in particular; what can I do to push this into a realm that I hadn't considered before? Admittedly, sometimes my reach exceeded my grasp, but I feel those sort of valiant failures are as important to the growth of a creator as the all-out successes.

NRAMA: Just broad strokes - do you ever look back on the trail Grendel has woven through its time, and just shook your head? I mean - saying that you'd follow up a taught, psychological noir thriller about an uber-man criminal with a story about a human slaving ring led by a Kabuki vampire…er - Just on the surface, that's probably not where people thought you were going to go. Not saying it's bad, after all, it did lay the foundation of Grendel tripping in and out of the fantastic, which allowed for the romp that was War Child, but man - the subject of this story seemed to be a risk. What pushed you in this direction? Was it you challenging yourself as you said before? The confidence of the '80s? The drugs?

MW: HA! It was the drugs. Definitely the drugs!

No, seriously, you really seem consternated about the flamboyance of, particularly, this storyline.

NRAMA: Well, I'm not going to stay up nights because of it, but really - following Devil by the Deed where everything was so measured and precise with this, where, as you said, there was manic energy and a wildness just under the surface, thanks to both Chris and the Panders…

MW: I guess I have to chalk this up to the atmosphere of the '80s comics boom and the general sense of creative freedom that permeated everything. I never once stopped to consider what I should or shouldn't do in regards to where Grendel ought to go. I just saw a wide-open gestalt that beckoned for me to huff and to puff and to absolutely blow the fucking door in! I've said it before and I'll say it again…I've always felt that my job is to take my readers to a place that they hadn't considered on their own, down a path they wouldn't have chosen on their own. So, if Grendel took a sudden narrative turn that left people intrigued, invigorated and mystified…hey, I considered that a good thing! My biggest concern was in not repeating myself. Sure, this storyline had to rely upon and continue from the Devil By The Deed scenarios but I really, really, really wanted to make sure that Christine was not just a pale imitation of Hunter. And, let's face it, Hunter's a pretty damned hard act to follow!

Check back on Monday, for part two of Devil's Legacy.

[VivatGrendel.com]

GRENDEL: THE INTERVIEW 3 - DEVIL'S LEGACY 2/2

NRAMA: As the story gets rolling, how far are we away from Hunter's death, and how does society see Grendel/Hunter? Are there any modern-day analogues that you can think of or use?

MW: Devil's Legacy takes place about 25 years after the event depicted in Devil by the Deed. And, it's really funny that you should ask for a contemporary comparison as to how that world would see Hunter because I've tried and tried to come up with an appropriate likeness that fits. And I just can't. I've often tried to refer to how the names "Hunter Rose" and "Grendel" would be perceived by that world's inhabitants-especially when trying to convey how topsy-turvy the term eventually becomes with the advent of the Grendel military class in the future-but there's really no accurate simile. I mean, following his death, those names confer a certain hideous grandiosity. As such, the first name I always think of in comparison is Hilter-but that's not quite right. Hunter wasn't a political nor military leader. That also leaves out Osama Bin Lauden, Attila the Hun, Pol Pot, etc…

Well, then you try to think of a more solitary criminal, like Jack the Ripper or Jeffrey Dahmer-but that's not quite right either because he wasn't a typical psychopath. He didn't wallow in inflicting pain nor have any inclinations towards torture (for its own sake) nor cannibalism nor any of the other neuroses we think of in regards to this kind of over-the-top serial killer. So then, I try applying his persona to some infamous gangster-which is, generally speaking, closer to the target-but even that kind of fails to live up to the legendary terror that Grendel's presence evoked. I suppose you could link it to the infamy of John Dillinger during the thirties but most of those depression-era crooks were just that-small time thieves whose exploits where over-dramatized through yellow journalism. And, as a result, many of them enjoyed something of a "Robin Hood" sort of popularity, a daring rogue at odds with the forces of corrupt authority. No one in Grendel's world ever thinks of him as any sort of likeable scoundrel. Well, then what about the various underworld bosses-Bugsy Seigel, Meyer Lansky, and the like? Close, but still no cigar. Not many of those thugs, once they attained power, ever dirtied their hands with direct violence. Grendel uses his masked identity to personally and repeatedly strike terror like some kind of dark, avenging angel.

So, no…I can't think of a corresponding analogy for how this world saw Grendel in the aftermath of Hunter's death.

NRAMA: Well, regardless, the world still was thinking of him…

MW: Right. It was certainly fascinated by his heinous achievements-as, I think, we in the "real world" would certainly be as well-but his name still invokes a sense of danger and dread. That world breathed an audible sigh of relief at Grendel's death. They had little idea of the vast legacy his evil would eventually spawn.

NRAMA: Also, at this time, how formed was the larger idea of what "Grendel" was in your head? At the time of Devil's Legacy, were you wanting readers to view it as an infectious spirit, in a sense, something that, when touched, you were immediately "infected" with it? After all, Christine barely opened herself to any other possibility before grabbing for the mask and fork…

MW: Well, I knew I wanted to take it forwards. Ever forward. But that's all I knew. Sure, I'd love to sit here and say that I had this grand master plan all conceived from the very beginning but it just ain't so. I made this stuff up as I went along. That's not to say there wasn't a driving force of logic behind the madness but it really was a case of…okay, what I do with this next? When I was in art school, we were constantly given assignments that forced us to exercise our creativity with just the materials at hand. In effect, we were asked to make something outta nothing…or next to nothing. Now, certainly, that wasn't exactly the case with Grendel-obviously, I always had the previous storylines to consider-but that experience did train me to shape and form ideas as I went along, to make art on a continual level of innovation and reinvention. In answer to the second part of that question, yeah, there's periods of this sprawling epic wherein I thought of Grendel as a distinct entity, "The demon of society's mediocrity," as Christine puts it at the end of Devil by the Deed. But, just like every other aspect of this narrative, I soon found even that concept too limited, too specific…in the end, too boring. So, to my mind, Grendel isn't a who or a what but, rather, a "why?"

You mentioned that Christine doesn't wait too long before resorting to pretty extreme methods in response to her son's kidnapping. Part of that comes from her being somewhat "tainted" by the presence of Grendel that had run ramshackle over the course of her entire life. In fact, writing the book-Devil by the Deed-was obviously an attempt to somewhat exorcise that omnipresent demon from her life. But what really ignites her reaction is the tightly bottled up rage that makes up so much of her character. And…that makes her so very different from Hunter. Hunter wasn't a creature governed by rage. In fact, when he finally does succumb to a state of unfettered fury, he loses. He dies as a result. In Christine, it's another matter altogether. Her rage is what empowers her even though, eventually, it also consumes her. Its in those qualitative differences that I see Grendel as a great big-maybe the biggest-"why?"

NRAMA: Your narrative here with Chris - it's something you rarely see today, but was commonplace for the late '80s thanks to both you and Miller and others - the narratives, almost a journal - style narration. Obviously, given that Chris was a writer, it was a logical move, but did you want readers to consider that Chris was writing all of this down? Why journals rather than just captions? Were you already thinking ahead, that is, Brian needed something to read?

NRAMA: Is that sort of narration outdated at this point? I still use it all the time…guess that makes me "old school"! Anyway, you're right to note that Chris was a writer and that just gives her one further connection to Hunter. Really it comes back, once again, to the question of "why?" With Hunter, the "why" was based around a Machiavellian philosophy-dominate because you can. With Chris, the motivation was more like-strike back because you must. As a result, I felt you needed to see, read and feel Chris' heartache and fury in a much more palpable sense than Hunter's "above-it-all" arrogance. As you point out, it's only recently that I've felt more comfortable showing the inner workings of Hunter's mind through depicting his own log entries. That's partly because he's so much more than human. If you notice, I'm always careful to never-ever-show Hunter's actual prose writing. That's because he writes better than it's realistically possible to write. He certainly writes better than I can write and maintaining that mystery helps create the necessary distance to show his superiority. But with Chris, yes, the reader absolutely needed to observe her, as you put it, descent into madness. She seems perfectly normal and well-adjusted in the beginning but gradually, the cracks in her sanity begin to etch their way into her own journals. Journal writing and note-taking are part and parcel of being a writer and so it makes perfect sense that Chris would keep an active log. Yeeeeah…at times it veers from the present tense to the past but that's just a side result of this type of narrative. I actually kept those switch-backs to a bare minimum I thought. In fact, if you go re-read her last entries-which run through chapters 11 & 12, you'll see that she, in fact, wrote her final thoughts and farewells before engaging with Argent in their final battle. And, really, the journals-both Hunters' and then, ultimately, Christine's-are the real Devil's Legacy. Neither Chris nor Brian would've succumbed to Grendel's influence if they hadn't been able to look so directly into the heart of the beast.

NRAMA: Speaking of her transformation then, Chris morphed perfectly into Grendel, but did she embrace Grendel or did Grendel embrace her? After a time, the loss of Anson seemed to become secondary to the duel that was shaping up between Chris and Tujiro…

MW: Yeah, after a bit, you begin to wonder if she even remembers her son at all, don't you? All of a sudden, it's less about his loss and more about her retribution. And the saddest thing of all is that she doesn't even realize it. She's so convinced of her own "rightness", of the fact that the rest of the world are idiots and dullards that she doesn't even realize that's she's crossed the line and become the very thing she'd tried all her life to avoid-Grendel.

NRAMA: I think it was also interesting that the narrative, at least for me, showed me, clearly, that Chris wasn't Hunter, and no matter how hard she tried, she wouldn't be Hunter. There was too much human in there. Sure, she was confident in her actions and her motives, but she wasn't…Hunter. Was that something that you were trying to express throughout as well? That anyone other than Hunter was going to be a pale echo of the original?

MW: Not so much a pale echo as just…different. As I mentioned, part of what humanizes her is the reader's ability to see her thoughts in a very direct manner. Again, with Hunter it helps to keep that distance. Chris brought a heart to the character that was all-but absent in Hunter's tale. And, even though most people would think that Brian is one of the weakest Grendels in fact, he's one of the strongest. He's the only one-the only one-who, through his own self-sacrifice actually manages to defeat Grendel, for a while at least. We all know the devil can never die. And the Grendel who had the most influence on the character was the one who never prances around in a variation of the black-and-white costume-Orion Assante. And don't forget what the character "Orion" was in Greek mythology. He was a hunter.

NRAMA: There ya go - jumping ahead again… Back to Chris' story - in Argent's eyes, was the return of Grendel, in some form, inevitable? He seemed many things, but not really…surprised…

MW: Sure. By the time they finally meet on that rooftop at the climax of Devil by the Deed, Argent has come to think of Grendel as his antithesis-even though he's survived centuries of his brutal, tortured existence before ever meeting the man/demon he comes to consider his nemesis. Since Hunter dies and Argent suffers paralysis, the wolf feels that his own existence has been unfulfilled. In his mind, he should have died in that same battle. Those two opposing forces should have exterminated each other but he was left invalid, his rage and purposes unrequited. So, when Chris finally takes on the persona of Grendel, Argent immediately senses it. Again, at that stage I was thinking of and treating Grendel as a supernatural force that would emanate some sort overall aura that Argent could detect. You can tell by his demeanor at that moment that he not only expected this resurrection-he's almost happy about it.

NRAMA: Exactly - that was one of the words I was digging for there. Grendel's return wasn't somehting that Argent was looking towards with any kind of dread…

MW: Not at all.

NRAMA: That said, and given the whole "no one knows you better than your enemy" thing - Argent understand the entire concept of Grendel better than Chris does, doesn't he?

MW: Well, he's certainly got more real experience with the concept than she does. But it's important to note that Hunter wasn't able to kill Argent. Christine does. Again, its due to her rage, which is her driving force. Hunter's rage unseats him while hers is sufficient to go toe-to-toe with the wolf's latent fury.

NRAMA: At this point in the story - by the end of Devil's Legacy, how much did you know about Tujiro, both his backstory, as well as his story yet to come?

MW: Like most of the Grendel mythos, I felt a lot of this out as I went along. Tujiro became more and more fascinating to me as the story progressed. He's a creature of absolute decadence, consumptive hunger taken to a fantastic degree. By the time of his final appearance in the series, I knew we'd be seeing him again. I didn't have that futuristic role quite figured out yet and certainly didn't know the corruptive heights to which he'd ultimately climb.

NRAMA: As Chris moves closer to Tujiro throughout the first part of the story, explain what's going on - she's becoming less Chris, and more Grendel, of course, but at the same time, there's some Tujiro himself blended in, isn't there? The hunter is becoming the prey?

MW: Well, she's constantly on the move-like, as a performer, he is. She's adopted a flamboyant outer persona, a "secret identity"-like he has. She even, eventually, lays a trap-like he has obviously done time and time again. One could even say the she's found a victim to feed off of-Brian, a fact that leads him down a path of d**nation all his own. This has long been an ongoing theme in Grendel; the fact that, eventually, violence consumes the perpetrator and turns them into the thing they hate the most.

NRAMA: How much were you art directing the Panders throughout this? They were pretty d**n young, and there's a definite evolution from the first to the last issue…

MW: Not very much. As you mentioned, they were both quite young, I think Arnold was only 19 and Jacob was 21. So, of course, you're going to see an evolution in their work. People don't seem to actually realize the tremendous amount of drawing that goes into a single issue of a comic. When you've got a series that runs a dozen issues or so, like Legacy, it pushes artists in directions that they hadn't initially considered. In the case of the Panders, their highly stylized angularity started to meld into something with a lot more ferocity and kinetic energy, which, as luck would have it, fit the psychological aspects of the story to a "T".




They also started to discover their more maverick natures and wanted to have more and more of a hand in the final look of the book. About halfway through the run, they really started to bristle under the necessary collaboration with an inker. I say necessary because this was a monthly title and there was just no way, at that early stage in their careers, they were going to be able to handle the entire art chores on their own. I really like a lot of what Jay Geldof brought to the table in regards to how the final look of the series but, again, the Panders were just starting to really spread their wings and wanted to become more independent. And that worked out well in the end because it encouraged them to really blaze their own trails from there on out and, if you look at their careers over the years, they've certainly produced an eclectic body of work.

NRAMA: Speaking of someone the Panders obviously had fun with - Wiggins. Talk about his origin…what fed and inspired him?

MW: That's a great question because it gives me a chance to talk about process just a bit. As I've spoken of before, I've always preferred to work in the plot-and-dialogue method of comic book writing. That means, as opposed to writing a fully finished and detailed "full script", I instead write a fairly specific page-by-page plot that includes all the action that takes place on that page as well as some choice snippets of dialogue. Instead of offering the artists a set-in-stone "screenplay" style of manuscript, I leave all of the visual pacing and layout up to them. Then, once the pages have been fully penciled, I then provide the finished script, dialogue and captioning, based upon the finished art. Working this way often inspires me to discover personalities quirks, syntax and speech patterns, metaphors and symbolisms that I hadn't necessarily considered during the plotting stage. Seeing those characters and situations that, until then, had been just abstract concepts to me now given concrete depiction opens up a whole new stage of creative fun and freedom and, to my mind, helps keep the entire process fresh and invigorating. I've always felt like this style of writing lends itself to a true collaboration and, as I mentioned earlier, collaborating was the experience I was seeking by opening the visual aspects of Grendel up to other artists. Not only did I want to learn how other creators would visually interpret what I had in mind, I also-to this day-feel a certain moral obligation to afford them this sort of freedom. If I wanted to have the sort of iron-clad control over the story's layout and design that is established by a full script then I feel like, as an artist, then I should just draw the d**n thing myself. Now, obviously, someone like Alan Moore takes the polar opposite approach in how he addresses his scripts and his collaborators-and to truly wonderful success-but, again, that's just not the experience that I've been looking to create for myself.

That said, the creation of Wiggins was an example of the wonderful creative accidents that present themselves through this form of working together. As I remember it, I hadn't described anything about the cop who's conferring with Argent in those early chapters of Legacy. I think I originally pictured him being more stereotypical in both appearance and the role he would serve. Well, lo and behold, once the pencils came back, the Panders had depicted this toss-away cop as a very distinct and intriguing character-he almost looked like David Bowie-and, even stranger, they had, for no apparent reason, given him a prosthetic robot eyepiece!

NRAMA: Really? That ended up playing a role in the story - and in Brian's story…

MW: Well, I took that bit of creative fun and ran with it. Eventually, Captain Wiggins became a major player in both this storyline and the next and the next beyond that. All due to the great surprises that can lie in store from working in the plot-and-dialogue style!

NRAMA: As you saw it and plotted it, when did Christine lose control to Grendel? She seemed to bubble to the surface after the battle with Tujiro, when she journaled that Grendel was dead, but then…when Brian was beaten - Grendel was her first response…was she lost?

MW: Certainly, when she sets up the fight with her adversary by luring Tujiro to Brian's apartment, she's pretty much gone over the edge at that point. I mean, wouldn't she certainly know that the resulting battle could absolutely trash the place-the home of a man she's grown to really care about? And yet she doesn't care. She's all about the confrontation at that point. Afterwards, she seems to think that her purpose has been achieved and that she can now just lay her violent and extreme actions aside.

But, you're right, once she's again confronted with personally experiencing the world's latent brutality, she immediately takes on the persona of Grendel once again. It's like she's an addict by that point. She's hidden her "stash"-the fork-away but she sure still knows where it's located and makes a beeline to get her fix once the longing strikes her.

NRAMA: The follow-up to Brian being beaten - a totally silent issue. Talk about your idea behind that…

MW: This brings us to the juncture where she's totally, irretrievably, lost.

NRAMA: You locked the readers out of her head in that issue…

MW: Right. And again, up until that point, she's been acting out of a sense of shattered maternity. Her response to her son's kidnapping, while certainly extreme by any measure, is at least understandable to some degree. Her motherly grief has caused her to do violent, outlandish things in order to have some sense of retribution. But once we see her spend an entire issue methodically tracking, terrorizing, torturing and ultimately murdering someone-also out of a sense of retribution, but this time not quite so sympathetic in its appeal-then we know that she's finally gone insane. She's lost her last shreds of humanity and has fully become Grendel. And thus, the silent issue gives us full confirmation of that fact. It's almost like she's not herself anymore. Her wordy explanations and examinations are gone. She's now a creature of casual violence and the only captions that do appear in that issue only serve to verify her heartless actions. On the first page, as she begins the hunt; "As to the case with Dominic Riley…" On the final page, as she's looming over her victim's bloody, mutilated corpse, "…eventually I killed him."

I was always really proud of that issue as it so absolutely fulfilled the narrative goals I had in mind. Annnnd…it's yet another example of the joys involved in the plot-and-dialogue style of writing. As we had spoken of earlier, the Panders were really coming into their own, artistically, and so I gave them a bold challenge with that issue and they absolutely stepped up to the plate and hit a home-f**king-run. Unlike any of the issues we had done previously, the plot for this chapter included no page delineations, meaning I didn't break the plot down into its normal page-by-page descriptions. Instead, this time around, I simply wrote out the course of events in one long, unbroken narrative and left it up to the Panders to carve it up, pace and delineate the action as they saw fit. And again, they pulled that off beautifully.

Tomorrow: The Devil Inside

[VivatGrendel.com]

GRENDEL: THE INTERVIEW 4- THE DEVIL INSIDE

His was, arguably, the most tragic of all Grendel stories. Brian Li Sung - the lover of Christine Spar. Their time together was brief, but together, they burned brightly. While he played a key role in The Devil's Legacy, Brian has his own chance to touch the devil in The Devil Inside, a collaboration between Matt Wagner and Bernie Mireault.

Unlike Hunter Rose and Christine before him, what made Brian's story even more tragic is that he didn't seek out Grendel - Grendel found him when he was still deeply mourning Chris, and at his lowest.

Newsarama: Moving forward, let's talk about the hand-off to Brian. As you've figured out, I'm pretty hooked on the plotting of the larger picture here, so when did you realize that Brian would be next in line? Was he "marked" as such from the first time he showed up in your head and rough plots, or was it more organic as Chris' story flowed, that her lover would be the one to follow down her path?

Matt Wagner: No, I wouldn't say that I knew right off the bat that Brian was doomed to be the next Grendel. Again, I tend to let a story develop and flow in a fairly organic fashion. Now, I did know that Chris was gonna die (c'mon…it's a Grendel story…almost everyone dies!) and I also knew that, aside from her journals, I needed a character that would act as her emotional conduit-someone she could talk to, share the pain of her experiences with, and anchor to help her cling to her slipping sense of humanity. And, as the story progressed, it just seemed obvious that Brian would inherit the mantle. Part of this was just a result of proximity…he was the closest thing Chris had to a real friend by the end and so that's who she chose as the third recipient of Hunter's private journals-those seemingly damned logs of evil incarnate. Everyone who came into possession of the journals ultimately came into possession by Grendel. So, in that sense, I guess you could say that Brian was doomed from the moment he met Christine. Poor fucker.

NRAMA: And again, it's a new story, and a new tone. Whereas Devil's Legacy was a sci-fi psychological thriller with elements of action-adventure thrown in, Devil Inside was…brrr…claustrophobic in comparison. Was this a creative response to the scope of Legacy?

MW: Absolutely! You remember that I said part of working with other artists was to experience different points of view? Well, I didn't want to limit myself in any way with that endeavor. If you look at the Panders stuff, it has a certain similarity to at least the high design aspects of Devil By The Deed. In reality, the two styles are quite, quite different but the transition wasn't jarring. With The Devil Inside, I wanted to strike a real chord that would resonate. I wanted to show the entire world that they would never know what to expect out of Grendel next. Y'know, I was really intrigued with the oh-so controversial ending of the Sopranos series finale. One of the reviews I read claimed that this was David Chase's way of reminding the viewer that this was his show and that it was never gonna conform to the limited expectations some might have of it. Well, I'd have to say that The Devil Inside was my version of that. It was me saying, "Look, this is going to be a book that takes its artistic credos seriously. If you're willing to take a journey through the unexpected, then climb on board." Also, by this point, I already knew that I was going to have to break the cycle of immediacy that this story arc was completing. If this was a book that I wanted to keep bold and unpredictable, then merely having the "next-person-in-line" take up the Grendel persona was quickly gonna become pretty goddamn trite and…ACK!…predictable!

NRAMA: Art-wise, why Bernie? How did you two meet and what led you to thinking that he would be a good fit for this chapter of Grendel?

MW: It all started when Bernie sent me some hate-mail.

NRAMA: Really?

MW: Actually, it was a very genuine and good-spirited letter that told of how he used to hate me. See, our careers started out at about the same time and we seemed to often exhibit the same sort of aesthetic ideals (specifically seen in Mage and Bernie's fledgling title, Mackenzie Queen). Even so, everything seemed to be working out just fine for me and I seemed to be getting all the acclaim and professional breaks while Bernie continued to labor away in relative obscurity from his studio in Montreal. He told me of he used to always attack my work to his friends, lambasting my drawing and layout, etc…until one day one of these friends replied, "Why do you have such a problem with this guy?" Well, that comment apparently hit him like a ton of bricks and, once he sat back and reassessed his opinion, he decided that he was just wallowing in sour grapes. As a result of that he sent me this letter along with copies of his latest efforts, an everyman superhero story title The Jam. Jesus, I was sooo taken with The Jam. Absolutely loved it. And, yeah, I saw the simpatico attitudes that Bernie and I shared and so I immediately decided that he was the right artist for the next story arc. If I really wanted to make a definite change with every narrative break, then this was the guy for that task.

NRAMA: And how did that work?

MW: As it turned out, it worked in spades; the change threw a lot of people for a loop. Since there'd only been one other art team aside from me on the book, I think most readers assumed that this sort of style would be the norm for some time to come. In fact…HA!-I love this story…we even received a petition via the book's thriving letters column, Grendel's Lair, that read, "Dear Diana, Bernie's gotta go!" It was written in pencil by an obviously very young hand and then it was signed by, like, ten or twelve kids underneath. Bernie and I used to laugh and laugh over the image of these kids with a lemonade stand set up on the corner, but actually it's only there to lure other kids over so they give them the schpiel and get them to sign on to the "Dump Bernie" campaign. He kept that letter pinned up on his bulletin board for years.

Well, needless to say, Bernie simply thought he was cleansing his conscience with that letter. He never expected me to call him up and offer him a job! Even weirder, it was shortly after this that I fell in love with a gal from Montreal. I ended up eventually moving there to be with (and ultimately marry) her. As a result, Bernie and I grew to be good friends and eventually even shared a studio together. Small fuckin' world…in comics, anyway.

NRAMA: Certainly is. And the Grendel creator universe has remained tight over the years, it seems…

MW: Pretty much, yeah.

NRAMA: As you said, a lot of what was seen in Legacy was the product of the times in a fashion - and I'd assume the same stands with this? Given both the story and Bernie's approach, Devil Inside stands as a sibling to Arkham Asylum, Big Numbers, and other…experimental…works of the time…

MW: Yeah, but I wouldn't say I was necessarily influenced by those books, per se. I think it was more of a creative synchronicity.




NRAMA: Or the zeitgeist - style was moving in that direction - a Bill Sienkiewicz/Dave McKean gone mad almost as a reaction to years of George Perez and Romeo Tanghal; and John Byrne and Terry Austin's precise linework…

MW: Yeah - maybe there was some of that, but there was a certain aesthetic élan that was running through comics at the time. Mainstream borders were being broadened and boundaries were being broken. Plus, those were paranoid years so far as the global political scene was concerned. Reagan was still in power and the Cold War, still in effect. America's shady involvement in the so much of the international scene was just coming to the forefront. It made us all take a dark turn and with good reason.

NRAMA: Going into Brian's head at the start - where were the cracks that allowed Grendel in? At the end of Legacy, sure, he was in mourning, but by the start of Devil Inside, he was vulnerable, damaged, ready to be taken over. It was quite a change from the first time we say him in the earlier issues, when Chris met him…

MW: Brian was always out of his league when it came to Chris and the world she embodied. I first conceived this idea after my initial trips to the West Coast. I grew up on the mid-East Coast and spent a lot of my early adult years in urban environments. So, I was fairly shocked and intrigued when I first went west and got to see what "left" coast cities were like-specifically San Francisco. I had always imagined urban living to be tough and gritty. "Sophisticated", I found, meant one kinda thing in New York and quite a different kinda thing in SF. Not to say that west coast cities are all bright and cheerful and sunny but there is a certain dispositional difference. I tried to imagine what it would be like to take a San Franciscan and strand them, alone and unfulfilled, in the midst of Manhattan. Add a little Grendel to that mix and you've got the makings of The Devil Inside. So, yeah, Brian seems pretty stable when we first meet him and then quickly goes over the edge but you've gotta remember what he's been through by the end of Legacy; he's seen and experienced a level of violence that would shake most people's grip on reality. Additionally, he's also learned that vampires and the supernatural are seemingly real. He's held the torn and bloodied body of the woman he loves as she lay dying in his arms. He's pretty much been through the ringer and then…Chris sends him a posthumous letter that tells him where she stashed Hunter's journals. And that, as they say, is all she wrote-literally and figuratively.

NRAMA: That was kind of morbid…

Okay - onward - the layouts. There's no denying that you're very creative when it comes to design and layout, but this - the Wagner/Mireault collaboration…it's above and beyond, like a third creator between the two of you. Can you recall who was responsible for what in terms of the notes and "Grendelspeak" appearing at the bottoms of the pages? It seems that if this wasn't something you were asking Bernie to do, it might've come off as something of a wicked surprise when the pages started coming in…

MW: No, that was my idea. I knew quite a bit more about what I wanted to do with this story from the very beginning than I often do. Of course, it was only three issues long and so that made such assumptions quite a bit easier. I knew Brian was doomed because that's often the nature of a ghost story which, let's face it, this truly is. I also had the idea for the dual and eventually dovetailing narrative voices from the very start. What can I say? You're right. That collaboration just really, really worked. In a long litany of exciting and often quite seamless artistic teamwork, The Devil Inside stands out in the crowd.

NRAMA: Big question time, and don't get the implication wrong, but…when re-reading this, about midway, I started on a parallel track in my mind - that "Grendel" wasn't in this story at all, that this was just Brian, totally fucked up, creating a personality in his head as his mind tried desperately to hold together the shards of his psyche, almost that he fooled himself into thinking that "Grendel" was real. I have a feeling your probably going to disagree…but still, that said, Brian was a pretty damn weak host for Grendel, at least. You'd think it would be more discriminating…

MW: No, of course I don't take that the wrong way. That's exactly what you're supposed to feel. Here again, there's a certain ambiguity that plays throughout the entire Grendel series. Most often it's a moral ambiguity but in this case it's narrative as well. Yeah…is the Grendel "force" a real thing or is Brian just gradually going totally fucking paranoid and insane? He certainly could have developed a pronounced schizophrenia which allowed/compelled him to become two different personas that express themselves in two completely different voices. Then again, if vampires are real (and a werewolf) why can't Grendel, in fact, be a demonic entity that is alive and active? That hazy reality only accentuates and underscores the story's whole neurotic atmosphere.

But, I absolutely don't agree that Brian was one of the weakest hosts for the Grendel experience. As I mentioned earlier, he's the only one who resisted the urge to become Grendel. Certainly, he's not the ass-kicker that both Hunter and Christine were. I even made a point to have him be a student of Tai Chi which is a much less aggressive martial discipline than Chris' kendo and whatever form of attack tickled Hunter's fancy at the moment. In the end, Brian's moral clarity and strength was what triumphed over the evil legacy that consumed two individuals that, yeah, on the surface appeared to be so much stronger than himself.

NRAMA: Yeah - even though he died in the end, as with all Grendels, he did it on his terms…

MW: Right.

NRAMA: This was the first time you'd really put Grendel out there as its own entity in such definitive terms. What had led you to this point with it, rather than something that people just picked up along the way, say, like wearing a Che t-shirt, and doing something Che-related?

MW: What, y'mean like being in the Legion of Superheroes?

NRAMA: [laughs] Well - not quite like that, but still, you flirted with the idea in Devil by the Deed and Legacy, but in Brian's story, you pulled Grendel out, and sat it by itself in a way. If you bought the conceit that there was some living entity attacking Brian, this was the first time to see it acting on its own, rather than seeing and hearing it through the lens of its host.

MW: As I said, that sort of obviousness is something that I never wanted to bring to the book. If you look at the succeeding issues, even defining Grendel as such a distinct entity was obviously something that didn't sit too well with me as time went on. The Incubation Years are actually narrated by "Grendel" but, after that, the description returns to a certain state of vagueness. And like I said, even in The Devil Inside, there's a elusive quality to the concept. You asked why Grendel would chose such a less-than-competent vessel as Brian after such a legacy of shit-kickers. Well, who's to say that Grendel had any choice in the matter? Who's to say that Brian didn't, in fact, chose it?

NRAMA: Point taken. Probably, at this point for people who are maybe taking a shortcut they shouldn't in the greater work, we should point out that this thing was "Grendel" - not the malevolent spirit of Hunter Rose, right?

MW: Yeah, if we're speaking literally here, this is not the spirit of Hunter Rose. Hunter is dead and gone. If there really is a Grendel force, it's not Hunter returned from the grave. In fact, centuries later, the zenith of the Grendel saga-Grendel Prime-goes on a fruitless quest to contact what he thinks is the soul of Hunter Rose. He fails.

NRAMA: As a creator, were you able to write this story without in some ways "becoming" it? Reading it is a rough enough experience, but writing it - seems like it could really fuck someone up…

MW: As we spoke about a bit earlier, everything I write has a touch of the autobiographic in it. I wasn't actively depressed and lonely when I wrote this tale but I'd certainly been through periods like that in my life. When I first dropped out of art school to begin a career as a comic artist, I still hung out with most of my school chums. Well, the difference was, they were still in school, still going through the same social interactions while I was stuck at home, alone in my apartment all day. It was a pretty isolated existence and I found myself going out during the day, haunting video arcades or even going to movies by myself just to not be pent up in the same aggravating and restricting space day after day. It was a pretty pathetic time in my life and, luckily, I made it through okay. Mainly because I wasn't totally alone; I did have friends. We hung out in the evenings and that was great. But my fiction has always been a way of expunging the things in my life that might consume or take me down. Grendel is certainly, by any accounting, a dark and dismal narrative full of fucked up characters and exhibiting a cynical sense of doom.

But, you know me…and most people who also know me would agree…I'm not a fucked up creature in real life. I'm fairly upbeat and congenial.

NRAMA: Well, the way you can laugh about some of Hunter's more vicious attacks is off-putting at best…

MW: [laughs] There's that, but on the whole, I lead a pretty balanced life and I think that's all possible due to the fact that I have a variety of creative outlets that enable me to explore different mindsets, letting me in the end choose the ones that I think are healthiest.

NRAMA: With Chris, we spoke of specific "points" when she was lost to Grendel, when she could've pulled back perhaps, but with Brian…there really wasn't any point along the way where he could've pulled away was there?

MW: Not until the moment that he did, in fact, resist. And that moment results in his death. Hunter's death resulted as a loss of his self-control. Christine's too, but in a different sense. Brian's death results of his taking control, of his resisting the devil inside.

NRAMA: The reveal - when Brian learns that there's something else "in" his head, and it's been writing on the reverse sides of his logs…why not show anything? We've seen some of Grendel's comments along the way, but they only kinda sorta are what Brian talked about. Was this a case of whatever the reader "saw" in his head was going to be 100x worse than what you and Bernie could put there?

MW: Well, no…they're not supposed to be direct translations into "Grendelese". They're only supposed to vaguely relate to what the rational Brian has written. The rantings of a madman don't often directly correlate to what's going on around him. And, yeah, that only makes it all the spookier.

NRAMA: The removal of the mask that Brian saw as Tujiro…thematically, he didn't need it anymore did he? But literally, Wiggins had all he needed from it? He was spying on Brian with it, right?

MW: Hmm…that's an interesting interpretation. I take it you're referring to the how the mask's eye seems to flash on occasion (specifically in the final scene)?

NRAMA: Right.

MW: No, that's supposed to be Brian's paranoia getting the better of him. Wiggins doesn't need to spy on anyone he's interrogating. Remember, he's got a lie detector built into his prosthetic eyepiece. He knows Brian's lying and is confident that, sooner or later, he'll get his man. Again, Brian's an honest guy at heart. He pretty much sucks at this cloak-and-dagger stuff. In fact, that's why lie detectors even work in the first place. Everyone lies occasionally but almost no one lies incessantly. Generally speaking, people tend to live their lives truthfully and breaking that routine is what causes the tiny variations in pulse and other auras that give them away. It's only a true sociopath that lies like it's second nature. Hunter was reeeeally good at it.

NRAMA: Brian's acceptance of Grendel - it meant that he was going to die, and he knew it, but at the same time, it meant something different for Grendel, right? As it said, he would live forever…he saw Brian almost as a catapult of sorts…

MW: Sure, the fact that yet another person had fallen prey to the Grendel identity meant that it was no longer just an abstract anomaly. It had now become a trend, a shared human experience that would only grow exponentially as the years rolled along. "Grendel" knew that Brian was destined to be its last literal avatar for quite some time to come-centuries, as it turns out. But this world would feel the influence of Grendel in a gradually escalating fashion.

As I said earlier, I knew that this "next-guy-in-line" approached to the character was going to run out of juice and so I decide to really go for broke and push this into realms that no one, and least of all myself, had ever expected. And it was all based on a stray comment that Bernie made to me one day. Since Grendel had emerged during his run as something of a conscious force, he pondered aloud whether I thought Grendel could ever take over a whole crowd. And that really got me to thinking…

Fuck that, I decided.

I'll have Grendel take over the whole goddamn world!

NRAMA: Jumping ahead…

MW: Sorry.

NRAMA: Brian's fall and Wiggins' triumph. I'm sure you got letters - what was the reaction from readers to both that and the whole story? I'm guessing that some of the leters started off with "Hey asshole,"…

MW: Yeah, it was certainly a shock to a lot of people, most immediately to Bernie himself. I remember him calling me after having first read the plot to the final issue and saying how stricken he felt. After going on this journey with Brian, he felt somewhat connected to the character and was really saddened by his loss. He said he felt his chest suddenly grip up as if he had been shot himself. I'd like to add a last bit of praise here to Bernie's really stellar job on this story arc; the oh-so subtle and powerful death scene at the end was all a result of his masterful visual pacing. I seem to remember that my original plot read something like, "With no warning, Captain Wiggins draws his gun, turns and shoots Brian-dead." Bernie took that sentence and stretched it into such a powerful scene; a single, fragile moment hangs suspended over several pages and the suspense is so thick that reader really feels that so much more than a single life hangs in the balance. When the fateful shot finally comes, it's like eternity has been shattered. Brilliant.

NRAMA: With this story, we're left with the idea of Grendel as an entity, therefore, it possessed Hunter, Chris and Brian, for lack of a better term. Why was Hunter able to "control" it so well, compared to the others, who were consumed by it? Did Hunter give it everything it wanted?

MW: Oh sure. Hunter was everything a demonic force could possibly want; absolute capacity with zero remorse. What a delicious combination…

Tomorrow: Devil's Tales

[VivatGrendel.com]

GRENDEL: THE INTERVIEW 5- DEVIL TALES

And with issues #16 through #20 of the Grendel series, Matt Wagner once again changed his game. He was coming out of Brian Li Sung's tragic encounter with the Devil, so where else to go…except for a crime mystery from the Hunter Rose days, as recounted by Wiggins?

Yeah, it makes about as much sense as everything else he'd done in the series to date, so why change now, right?

The two stories were called "Devil Tracks" and "Devil Eyes" and each ran two issues. They were - unsurprisingly, wildly experimental.

Newsarama: With issue #16, you took a break from moving things ahead and forward, and allowed Wiggins to…indulge himself and spin a couple of yarns. Why this changeup from the linear progression of Grendel to Grendel that you'd had going?

Matt Wagner: Well, I explained this earlier to some degree. The other significant factor is that it was becoming boring.

NRAMA: The moving things forward in a manner of the readers then could guess who the next was going to be?

MW: Right. I could only see that sort of one-after-the-other progression going on for so long before it would inevitably reach a certain repetitive banality that, again, just seemed to fly in the face of everything I'd already achieved with this series. Plus, let's face it, Hunter seems to be too big of a character to really stay dead (metaphorically, I mean-he's not gonna rise…no Grendel zombies). I do keep coming back to him, don't I?

NRAMA: He keeps pulling you back, yeah. But why Wiggins, and why at this point in his life? What made him a compelling POV character?

MW: Wiggins had an arrogant nonchalance that I thought would make him an intriguing narrator. I mean, look, he doesn't write stories about the Grendels he did know. He imagines stories about the Grendel he didn't know. In fact, aside from the fact that we know Tommy Nuncio was the rat Grendel used to set up Argent, we don't really know if either of those stories have any validity. Could be he's just making that shit up as he goes along. Which would certainly fit his character to some degree wouldn't it?

NRAMA: Yeah - that would. With selecting Wiggins at this point, had you filled in any other details of his life? Had he, as others had before him, used Grendel to advance his career, made money, etc?

MW: Sure, and he wouldn't be the last. I never really figured out much about Wiggins' personal life other than I always imagined that he lost that eye in a patrol incident when he was quite a bit younger. I figured he scrimped and saved and maybe even made a little scratch on the take until he could afford that prosthetic lie detector and that's how he finally made detective rank.

NRAMA: So his knowledge of Hunter Rose - that's all bullshit?

MW: Right - he would've been too young at that point. From appearances, he's not that much older than Christine…ten years at the most. Which means he still would've been just a kid when Hunter was alive. And, you've gotta remember, Christine's book was a huge best-seller and the definitive source on all things Hunter so he did have access to the specifics of that life. Plus, as I said above, we've no way of knowing how much "fictionalizing" Wiggins was doing when he wrote his Grendel tales.

NRAMA: Wiggins was good, but obviously he was no Argent. Prior to his forthcoming downfall, did he conceive of the idea of Grendel as anything more than three demented people dressed in costumes?

MW: No, I don't think he saw it as an inevitable progression. And, at the time he writes these stories, he thinks the lineage has been stopped. After all, it's been some years since he shot Brian and there's still been no reemergence of the character. He's obviously got no idea of the fate that ultimately awaits him.

NRAMA: What called to you in regards to Hunter's era, to the point that you revisited his time as Grendel twice?

MW: Again, Hunter is a giant magnet of a character. He just keeps cropping up. Sure, part of that is commercially motivated. After all, he's a popular version of Grendel whose story was told in fairly short order so, if I can continually think of different ways to approach those adventures, why not return to him? But he's also just a larger-than-life personality who dominated not only his own world and the world to come, but also the contemporary reality of the comic itself.

NRAMA: At this point, were you still reluctant (as you've talked about in later years in regards to the Hunter-centric miniseries) to get into Hunter's head, or even, just get too close to him, hence the "world of Grendel" approach to these two stories?

MW: Well, yeah, I still felt intimidated by Hunter's absolute superiority but I also wanted to show his effect on the world. By featuring him in ostensibly traditional crime dramas that were written about him so long after his death, the reader gets a feeling for exactly how far his influence has extended into that world. His name and persona would carry a dark resonance to those who read Wiggins' stories even as it did for those millions who bought copies of Christine's book. Plus, I just wanted to see if I could tell a compelling Grendel tale wherein the title character doesn't even show up onstage very often. Despite that fact, Hunter's malevolent presence is so very sharply felt throughout both narratives.

NRAMA: Along with the pull of Hunter's era that was irresistible for you, what was it about this story that made it something that you had to draw?

MW: In the first place, it had been some time since Mage had concluded and I wanted to get my hands dirty again. I wanted to draw and I wanted to draw something that in no way resembled either Mage of Devil by the Deed. I was also just stating to get into crime fiction at that point and wanted to play with some classic noir motifs. In the first case, the story takes the form of a police procedural. In the second, it's more of a taut psychological thriller. In both cases, I tried to make the art reflect the narrative tonality of the story.

NRAMA: Talk about the style you employed here - another challenge to yourself? I remember there was a lot of feedback about this at the time, and even today - it stands as one of the densest comics produced in the modern era…

MW: The first storyline was, again, a police procedural. As such, I wanted the art to resemble the building blocks of the case that the main character is slowly piecing together. The visuals are dense and often repetitive as, I'd imagine, the plodding aspects of putting together a complex criminal investigation must be. The second storyline deals more with the slowly crumbling mental state of one individual and herein I utilized only tall vertical panels that paced their way across each and every page. The effect was meant to feel like the inevitable ticking of a clock. Those vertical panels are almost scenic slashes that just keep happening and happening to where the reader almost feels like they're viewing a landscape flash by from the windows of a moving train. As time goes on, the speed starts to increase to the point where a crash is inevitable. That was my intent anyway. On that second storyline, I also included Wiggins' jotted story notes, depicted in slap-dash fashion at the top of every panel. This was meant to evoke the ominous flavor of Brian's demented journals and provide a certain foreshadowing of how, just by writing these stories, Wiggins was somewhat opening himself to the dark sway of Grendel's influence.




NRAMA: Was there anyone you were looking at as inspiration for this? I remember being struck by it then, and even today, it's an approach to multi-layered stories that you just don't see that often…

MW: The story-telling was all my own. I've always just had a knack for telling tales and decided early on that I was gonna challenge myself in that regard. So, the innovative narrative structures you see there and, really, throughout the rest of Grendel, were just me trying to stretch my limits. I'd been taught that art was a journey of self-discovery and that it was only through venturing into areas that seemed daring and innovative that you advanced and grew.

So far as the specific rendering styles of the art, I had two major influences. The obvious one is Harvey Kurtzman for the second storyline. I'd recently become enamored of his loose, carefree and expressive drawing style and thought it had a lot more artistic merit than for which even he gave himself credit. I'd read somewhere that Harvey often lamented his lack of draftsmanship and polish. But I thought his work was evocative and full of energy. It almost looked like his hand couldn't keep up with how fast his mind was working. Again, that second half was meant to emulate some of the psycho thrillers that were predominant in the '50's and Harvey's line work had that unstructured freedom that was popular in both design and illustration in those days. So, I thought his art style to be a fairly apt influence for that storyline.

The other influence won't be as familiar to American audiences. I was living in Montreal at the time I did those books and, through the local French bookstores, had access to a lot of European comic albums. There's French comic artist who's mainly known for his somewhat stark erotica named Alex Varenne. Alex's work had a thick, chunky use of ink-work and he also often utilized dot-screen gray tones. I dug how his work looked on paper, how it really appeared to embrace its own casual approach. It had the same sort of "non-fussiness" that I found so attractive in Harvey's work.

In those days, I was becoming more and more intrigued by the ability to produce art in a very bold and decisive manner. There's an old adage that the Samurai artists of ancient Japan used to treat painting like a sword battle and that each stroke of the brush had to be just as deliberate and deadly as the slice of a sword. After the highly polished look of both Mage and Devil by the Deed, I was looking to break up my perceptions of my own art and seeking out a new approach to drawing. Around that time, I even filled a sketchbook with life drawings that I forced myself to do entirely with a Sharpie marker-no penciling first. I remember thinking at the time (and still do to some extent) my internal response to the sort of fan who fawns over your work and gushes, "How long did this take you to do?" And, of course, the answer they wanna hear is a world-weary but gruffly satisfied, "Ten years of my life!" I always wanted to be able to say, "Took me ten minutes." Now, that would be impressive!

In fact, that first storyline took me a traditional amount of time to produce, mainly due to the sheer number of panels on the page, but I really hit that sort of stride I was idealizing in the Kurtzman influenced story. Each of those issues only took me a little over a week to draw and ink.

NRAMA: And Grendel himself - a very deliberate break in the structure…he can't be contained and is larger than life…

MW: Yep. Grendel is the 800 pound gorilla in both of those stories, the dark god risen from the underworld whose very baleful presence only serves to disrupt and destroy the lives of those he encounters.

NRAMA: By this time, you're artistic style was changing, as the back-ups of Mage and your other work was showing, yet when Hunter appears, it's in a strict Devil by the Deed style. Why'd you go that route?

MW: That might have been sheer instinct and something of an attempt to pull people back to the more familiar narrative world that I'd already established. I don't remember making a conscious decision to render those scenes in a style that was reminiscent of Devil by the Deed. It stands to reason that Grendel's appearances should have conformed to the various styles I was using for the bulk of those issues. Still, for some reason, I just naturally drew them the way they appear. I think it was some unconscious effort to separate Grendel even further from these events that happen in the tiny corners of his world. His wake leaves a bold and bloody path as he casually crushes the various insects in his way.

NRAMA: And the topic here - the backstory of one of Devil by the Deed's pivotal scenes - in fact, the element that it could be easily argued, that led to hunter's death. How did you land with that story? Was that scene the nucleus here, and it grew from there, or did this story start linearly, and the scene of Argent crashing through the roof (and Tommy's involvement) was happy coincidence that came up as you were writing?

MW: Well, again, I wanted to anchor this a bit in the Hunter adventures that had already been published. Obviously, in reading Devil by the Deed, there's a litany of Hunter's adventures as Grendel that take place between the panels, as it were. I've since returned yet again to Hunter's world and portrayed many, many of those tales in the various Black, White & Red series. In fact, I'm working on still another such yarn right now, an all-new eight issue series that premieres this fall-Behold the Devil. But this wasn't an attempt to imply any sort of important resonance beyond the fact that I needed a touchstone to refer back to the earlier narrative and Tommy Nuncio is one of the only non-main characters mentioned by name in Devil by the Deed. He ends up dead and stuffed in the trunk of a car just like a discarded Kleenex once Grendel was finished with him. It seemed like a good idea to fill that gap and show how he got there. The greater part of that tragedy is that, his death is almost an afterthought for Grendel-an attempt to blow off some steam from the tension of his slowly decaying relationship with Stacy.

NRAMA: Both stories started with guys overhearing things in bathrooms…any particular reason for that hook? Symbolism that's going over my head?

MW: HA! You got that, huh?

Well, the only symbolism there is somewhat trite and obvious. It's to foreshadow the fact that both of these guys lives are about to go right down the shitter.

Hey, they can't all be serious and profound!

Tomorrow: we take a break, and allow Chicago to come and go, and we'll start up with the Incubation Years early next week as we build to God and the Devil.

[VivatGrendel.com]

GRENDEL: THE INTERVIEW 6 - THE INCUBATION YEARS

With apologies to those who were looking for these to continue a hell of a lot earlier than this (and no, you can't call yourself any worse names that I've called myself), Matt Wagner and I are finally getting back to our series of interviews examining and celebrating Grendel.

So - where were we? Right, right - issue #20. The four issue arc which served as the "incubation years" for Grendel. Wagner was experimenting again, and on this "arc," you could feel him pushing against the walls - sometimes it would work, other times, not so much. Regardless, he had somewhere to get Grendel - a point Z from his point A, and these four issues covered a lot of ground.

Newsarama: And again Matt, with Issue #20, we're at the start of a new direction, a new phase for Grendel. There's been talk before about why you went from a linear "handoff" progression from Grendel to Grendel, but let's address it again, with eyes that are 20 ish years down the road, and already looking back, due to the previous pieces. Simple, big question - why'd you decide to go this way - to take four issues and spread the timeline out to cover 400 years? Another break to always keep fans guessing?

Matt Wagner: Sure, like I've said in the past, it's my job to take my readers to a place they hadn't expected. With this new phase of Grendel, I knew I was definitely venturing into places that even I hadn't expected. Again, that whole next-person-in-line-to-bear-the-curse scenario had, for my money, reached the end of its schtick. I just couldn't see continuing that beyond what I had already achieved. Going from Hunter, to Christine, to Brian made for a wonderful story arc; it spoke of arrogance, rage and damnation in a very linear fashion and I thought, "That's enough. Don't push the balance of what is already perfectly succinct." So, I decided to really go off the deep end and try something radically new and bizarre.

I had decided to have the Grendel persona ultimately take over the whole world. To that end, I knew I'd need to take quite a bit of time setting up a world wherein that could be the case. It needed to be a world that was utterly different than our own. In "our" time frame and reality, the name "Grendel" was the heinous of terms. In the world of the future, I had to utterly reverse that condition.

NRAMA: That said, how much of a "Hail Mary" pass was this for you? At the time, linear progression was the way to go, and Grendel was seen as (aside from the four issue previous to this) a fairly traditional book. Did you worry about the risks at the time, the chance that your audience could just not get it, and bail?

MW: Oh sure, it was a huge risk! And, to be fair, it didn't always work out like I had hoped. I mean, this section of issues where discussing now-The Incubation Years-took an extremely successful book and story progression and set it on its ear. Our title character didn't actually "appear" per se in his own book for four issues! That's unheard of…even for today's more permissive marketplace. In those days, it was considered suicidal! And, again to be fair, it cost me a lot of readers. There were many, many people who just didn't have the stomach nor patience to see where I was taking the story after this stage. I was basically taking four issues to portray nothing but set-up, all in service to the next, far grander storyline.

NRAMA: So - your global, larger plan set, you still started with Wiggins, catching up on the framing sequence of the previous four issues…why'd you get rolling with him? Was it a case of Grendel would never allow him to go unpunished for what he did?

MW: It was more that Wiggins was the most immediate vessel at hand. "Grendel"-again, if we're speaking of it as a personified force-wouldn't be prey to such petty emotions as vengeance for its own sake. Wiggins was just in the way…like a cell that metastasized due to its proximity to a tumor.

NRAMA: Hey - we haven't touched upon it before, but what's with the Eskimos? They're present in Legacy and Devil Inside…what's the deal?

MW: HA! That was just a minor detail where I was trying to convey the fact that this was set in a very changing world that still look quite a bit like our own (aside from the flying cars). I figured in a world that was so rapidly integrating other societies and cultures, the Eskimos would be the only racial stereotype left for people to hate. Their world was remote and lacking industry so they'd eventually immigrate southward and become the latest class of exploited people who were easy to distinguish and bear prejudice against.

NRAMA: With Wiggins' story, you moved to fully painted art - why?

MW: For the life of me, I can't remember what led to that decision. And that continued throughout the rest of the book's initial run. I seem to recall that there were a lot of color separation problems with what we had tried to achieve on The Devil Inside. This was in the "olden days" of hand-separated color reproduction and a lot of the wilder color effects we were trying to pull off just drove the separators crazy. I have to assume that, after all that we just said, "Fuck it. Let's move to fully painted art and full-color scans for reproduction."

NRAMA: [laughs] You're a revolutionary. Along the lines of traveling down a different road with the art, the dialogue in issue #20-#23 - it's boiled down to its core, and nothing more. Talk about the reasoning of going that way, rather than full dialogue…

MW: Okay, well this is a good point to talk about what the entire narrative progression of these issues entailed. In order to get "Grendel" to the stage I wanted to achieve, I figured I had to take it through a stepping stone path of importance to the world I constructing. To that end, Grendel goes from being; 1) a personal vision, to 2) a corporate property, to 3) a tribal totem, to 4) a societal icon. In each case, the character and concept became not only larger in scope but also attained a much deeper symbolic power. By the end of this storyline, the term Grendel has assumed so many roles and meanings that only a general state of fear and confusion surrounded it now. In effect, Grendel had truly become The Devil.

The speech patterns and ballooning of these issues is an example of wherein I think my experimentation went a bit too far. I was trying for something that I now think the average reader would never pick up on-or at least wouldn't affect them in the ways I had initially intended. A narrative motif doesn't always have to be immediately understood to be effective. In the first case, any private discussion was meant to be individual, thus the single-word balloons-it's like any one person can't see beyond themselves and their singularity. The boardroom and corporate discussions were meant to institutional, thus the hollow sounding phrase fragments-these are basically sales pitches turned into conversation. The tribal cadences were meant to be instinctual and so everyone speaks in easy, chanting rhymes-like they can't exist outside of their clans so each word has to piggy-back off the one(s) that came before it. And the religious speeches were meant to be iconographic, so everything sounds like a bit of scriptural quoting-the irony being that when holy writings become that common and pervasive they no longer have any real power nor wisdom. They're just empty jingoism.

Well, that was my intentions with this experiment and-like I said-on some level, I just don't think it worked very well. But, hey, the potential for failure is part of any experiment. If your reach doesn't exceed your grasp on at least some occasions…especially at that age…then you're not trying hard enough.

NRAMA: Sure, sure - the failures are more important. I was watching Disney's Meet the Robinsons the other weekend, and I thought it was clever how, as a family with all their accomplishments, what they cheered were the mistakes and failures, because those were what drove you forward. Aaaand…I never thought I'd end up talking about a Disney movie in a Grendel interview…

MW: HA! [laughs]

NRAMA: Back on track to the issue, while the dialogue was boiled down to its barest of bare bones, how would you explain what Wiggins was seeing through the prosthetic?

MW: Well, it's supposed to be a lie detector but when it starts to malfunction, it's showing him the ugly underbelly that he suspects is present in everyone he encounters. If you've spent that long seeing things through an artificial, falsehood monitor, wouldn't you start to feel that everyone was a lying, scheming bastard?

NRAMA: In your words, what happened to Grendel between #20 and #21? This was the natural extension - with almost a prescient eye on your part - of how a media sensation can become an icon, right?

MW: Once Wiggins succumbed to the influence of Grendel and became a criminal himself, the publishing rights to his "Tales of Grendel" were absorbed by the corporation that owned his contract. Omni Broadcasting and Entertainment Systems forms a fairly obvious acronym. If you'll notice, every corporate officer in that issue is shown as being vastly overweight.

NRAMA: Very true. What had OBES been producing?

MW: What…before the Grendel stuff? What does it matter? After they got their hands on that cash crop though, they never looked back. The public just couldn't seem to get enough of The Devil's new adventures and OBES was happy to oblige.

NRAMA: These issues - were they narrated by Grendel?

MW: Well, yeah, that's the narrative conceit for this run-the fact that "Grendel" itself is in fact narrating and manipulating the scenarios even though the story participants are fairly ignorant of this influence. Here again, though, I didn't want this to be an all-out final definition of what "Grendel" really was or is. I think of it as more of a phenomenon than as a concrete consciousness. In my own mind, I compare it to fire; it's not something that you can actually define aside from it's relationship to what it's effecting. Thus, even though I used Grendel's "voice" as the narrative device for these issues, I still don't think of my title character as an actual "demon" or self-aware entity. It's more set of conditions that elicit a certain response. Viewed from that standpoint, the narration of these issues could be seen as the internal "Id" of the situation, describing and defining itself as the story progresses.

NRAMA: Gonna have to confess here - this one might need some walking through…Omi was making megabucks on Grendel, and what - the trade and information agreement was going to threaten that? FRETCOM needed to be killed in order for Grendel to thrive?

MW: The point of this storyline was that a corporations bottom line is profit; growth at all costs. And unfettered growth on a cellular scale is cancer. Well, it's not much different on a society level either.

NRAMA: So - in order for Omni to continue making money, Grendel needed to be more popular than the real world, and when the real world (a la FRETCOM) threatened, Omni killed the leaders of the US and Russia, allowing Grendel to, in their eyes, remain popular, but in reality, this allowed Grendel to grow, unfettered?

MW: Exactly. Couldn't have said it better myself. But, in reflection, it certainly sounds fucked up, doesn't it? Ahh well…that's Grendel for ya!

NRAMA: Again, fill in the blanks - what happened between #21 and #22? A hell of a lot, it seems like…

MW: World War III happened. The entire eastern seaboard of the United States, much of Easter Europe and several large portions of the Asia were reduced to post-holocaust wastelands. The countries of the Middle East were a basically wiped out in a flurry of nuclear bombardment. Everything we've grown to fear since the end of the Second World War basically came true and, according to this version of reality, we've got Grendel to thank for it! Yeah, a lot happened between those two issues.

NRAMA: A lot of the landscape which would be seen down the road with Eppy, the Pope, Orion, Prime and more…

MW: Exactly.

NRAMA: Who were the factions in this issue, and what role did Grendel play?

MW: Well, this is basically my Grendel-style homage to the Mad Max movies with isolated groups fighting it out for what remains of the east coast's rapidly diminishing oil reserves…all under some barbaric semblance of societal structure. The rest of the world has gone to solar power by this point but these pathetic remainders of a world that had suddenly become extinct still treat that mystic black goo with the same sort of twisted reverence that seems to drive so much of the world's economic policies today. In essence though, this tribal banding together represents the initial stages of the clan castes that will come to dominate the global empire after the rise of Grendel to the worldwide stage.

NRAMA: With the rhyming in the dialogue - was this was about the same time you were doing The Demon over at DC?

MW: No, it was years later. Guess I never got it out of my system. Rest assured…at this point…it is!

NRAMA: Your words - what did this story do in regards to the larger story? Where did it move it to?

MW: These stories were all about betrayal and each depicts the growing escalation of Grendel's cultural significance in that world. Even the time frames escalate. In the first chapter, Wiggins betrays his own personal relationships when he murders his wife. That part is set about thirty years after The Devil Inside. In the second chapter, OBES betrays their nation by callously igniting the war. That part is set about a half century or so after the first. In the third chapter, Ivy betrays her family blood bonds in favor of her teen-aged, bad-boy lover. That part takes place about a century later. And in the final chapter, Fairbanks betrays his faith by not revealing the secrets behind the Grendel drug. That one's set 250 years later. By the end of this run, the world has entered a second Dark Ages. Technology hasn't really advance beyond a certain point. Philosophy and politics have reverted to a theocratic state. And the world seem poised on the brink of some grand upheaval that it certainly isn't ready to accept.

NRAMA: At this point in time, post-Incubation, what was the role of Grendel in society?

MW: This world has a love/hate relationship with Grendel. By the final chapters, Grendel has attained a nearly Satanic stature in the minds of most people and yet at the same time (much like today) that iconic status has little real bite in regards to people's day-to-day hopes and fears. It would take a new, literal personification of "Grendel" to fully cement that role in society's eyes. And, boy, did they get it!

NRAMA: Let's not jump the gun with Eppy here. By issue #23, you'd brought in the Catholic Church - why? How did you see it fitting in to the larger Grendel story, and how did it come to such power in the world, alongside Grendel?

MW: I needed a highly structured organized religion to step in and fill the ugly void that had developed in the civilized world's underbelly. I'd recently married into a Catholic family and was really kind of shocked to see people so blindly following the strict rites and requirements of that branch of Christianity just because…well, that's the way it's done! I was raised in a fairly religious home but my parent's were Methodists, which tends to be a more internalized branch of the Protestantism and, while they certainly have their fair share of structured rituals, it's nothing like the Catholic Church. I saw so many people in my wife's family who were super Catholic but just never gave a second thought to the real role of religion in their lives, nor how it should affect their behavior and philosophy beyond the obvious requirements of the Church. So long as they went through the bullshit rituals and went to confession every once in a while, they figured that…hey, God's got them covered! That whole experience left me shaking my head at the blind, herd mentality of it all. Still does.

Now, before anyone gets too upset about this, I want to point out that I'm not trying to play favorites here. There are plenty of empty-headed Protestants just as I'm sure there are plenty of more spiritually introspective Catholics. Anyway, as we've mentioned before, I tend to include what I see around me in the pages of Grendel, and I needed a narrative element that would operate as the symbolic stand-up for the way, in truth, I view all organized religions so-bang-the Catholic Church got the job! Plus, let's face it, the Catholic faith has all those costumes and Medieval history to play off of-it just reeks of comic books on a certain level!

NRAMA: Okay - so - by the end of these four issues…you're set for the next arc. Did you know when you started issue #20, did you know for certain that you wanted to set things up specifically for 2512 and what would then come, or did things come to you more piecemeal than that?

MW: Oh, yeah. This is one stage of Grendel wherein I knew where I was headed. I knew I was trying to set up a second Dark Ages. I knew the Church was due for "Grendelizing". I knew who the next "real" Grendel would be and I knew which character from the past would be returning to the book. As it says in the intro re-cap for the next storyline, God & the Devil; "The year is 2512. The Kingdom of Grendel is at hand!" What I didn't know at this point was which character would arise to lead that kingdom.

[VivatGrendel.com]

GRENDEL: THE INTERVIEW 7- GOD & THE DEVIL 1/2

Continuing our interview series with Matt Wagner about Grendel, today we kick off part one of our chat covering God and the Devil, the arc which introduced Eppy Thatcher and Orion Assante (among others) and saw a return of an old friend. "Friend" meaning vampiric enemy from about 500 years earlier.

Wagner had spent the previous four issues stretching and reaching, both as a creator, and with his story. The series now took place in 2512, the world was both fantastically different and (well it is now) eerily similar. For this arc, Wagner welcomed John K. Snyder and Jay Geldhof on as artists, and Grendel went from an abstract idea, journeyed through a madman, and ultimately came to take the world.

Newsarama: With God and the Devil, you've moved to your new timeline, and established your characters. You've talked before about the why of the move, but let's dig into it - was there any rhyme or reason behind how long you needed Grendel to incubate? Were you, for example, looking at trends and sociology to get a good guestimate of how long it would take Grendel to go from icon to cultural fixture?

Matt Wagner: Well, I was becoming political for the first time in my life and I guess part of that had to do with the fact that I was living in Canada at the time. As I said earlier, I'd met my soon-to-be wife and we eventually moved to her hometown of Montreal so that she could finish her schooling. As a result, I found myself living "abroad" and viewing the world from outside what I discovered was that fairly insular way that most Americans tend to perceive things. Y'know, growing up in America, we like to think that so much of the rest of the world lives under a yoke of propaganda and misconceptions about liberty.

We feel like we've got it made and that everyone else is somehow lacking in the basic freedoms and understanding that make our country "#1"! When you get outside of that protective bubble, you realize that it just isn't so. Sure, the Declaration and our Constitution were radical ideas that did, indeed, help transform the way human governments would evolve but that doesn't give us a free pass in so far as maintaining that level of advancement. From the outside looking in, America can sure seem much more like a militaristic empire rather than the paradisiacal republic we're all taught to believe in.

So, I'd have to say that living outside of the States for a while helped me assess the way many cultural icons are conceived, supported and even taken for granted. All those "Americanisms" that I grew up knowing on a level that was almost genetic didn't mean a damn thing to my wife and I think that really helped me tackle this section of the Grendel saga. It's funny, now that we live back in the States again, she's become a teacher and her subjects are Language Arts and American History. So, it's been really interesting seeing her basically have to learn all the cultural background that, again, I just took for granted for so many years. And, of course, she brings an entirely different perspective to the table as well.

NRAMA: Your world of the future - the common mantra regarding futuristic comics of this era is that Howard Chaykin told us what the future was going to be like in American Flagg! and we all just went with it, but here, now, we're out of the malls and are living closer to the future that you were showing here. Back when you were creating 2512, what informed and influenced you in regards to what the world of the future would be like?

MW: Like I said, the politics of the time informed me-combined with the fact that I was living outside of the States and therefore perceived things on a more global scale for the first time. Even then, my outlook was limited but at least I enjoyed a slightly more open attitude. When you look at that time period (the late '80s) it just seemed like the world was on the brink of such a serious change; the Communist Bloc was crumbling, the Internet was on the verge of exploding onto the scene, social and racial integration seemed to be just around the corner, and the gurgling presence of religious fundamentalism seemed to be mired in public corruption and scandal. I was trying to paint a certain "fear" scenario that I thought was going to be styled as something of a farce.

The entire concept of this phase of Grendel was based around the idea of…hey, what happens if human civilization doesn't make that "great leap forwards" for which we all seem to be hoping? What happens if we don't proceed with any serious exploration of space? What happens if we don't ever develop energy source alternatives to fossil fuels? What happens if we don't experience any great social advancement but instead slide backwards into a regressive feudal mentality?

Again, I thought it was gonna be a farce.

NRAMA: I'll agree with that - at the time, in reading it, I recall looking at well, both your future world and Chaykin's with an "oh, come on!" response, which was probably fueled by my teenage optimism which was yet to be chipped away. But it seems that the only thing you were off on, really was the Catholic Church in terms of the theocracy.

So are we closer to your 2512 now than you thought we would be at this point?

MW: Are you kidding? Listen to this opening preamble for the first chapter of God & the Devil:

"The first Great American Empire slid into its decline over the twenty-first century and concluded with the twenty-second. Bloated with the extended middle class, rampant debauchery, military indulgence and standardized communication that mark all imperial old age, the actual dying of America began… The already powerful mega-corporations then had precedent to declare themselves as following "policies" outside the law in an every-increasing number of cases. Soon, the federal government would be no more than an archaic ritual that the megacorp's eventually wiped out."

That just about makes me cry every time I read it. I didn't want to be right. Still don't.

NRAMA Let's talk artists again - John and Jay...how'd they get into the circle, and what was it about their work that cinched it for you and moreover, for this arc, specifically?

MW: Actually, this was an instance wherein Diana played a really proactive role in lining up the art team. She and John had some kind of contact mainly, I believe, due to her admiration of the work he'd done on his Fashion in Action series that ran as a back-up feature in Tim Truman's Scout. She contacted him and asked if he'd like to be involved with Grendel to which he eagerly responded, "Hell, yes!" I forget exactly how John and Jay had first hooked up but it was John who offered Jay into the mix-they really wanted to work together and so that started me thinking about how to the style the upcoming storyline around two narrative viewpoints. I already knew most of what I intended to do with this next story segment and I knew it was gonna be fairly epic. I liked what I saw in both John and Jay's work; John's stuff had such palpable energy and his story-telling was very accomplished, Jay brought a stylized finesse to the table that really strode the line between illustrative and cartoony. In both cases, their work was so very well-conceived and executed. You tell that these guys were serious about what they did and that just seemed to fit the upcoming chronicle so very well.

I remember we all got together for lunch at the San Diego Con one year to discuss what I had in mind for this next stage of Grendel and just to feel out how we all might work together as a team. This was before SDCC had evolved into the enormous pop culture extravaganza it now is and I believe it was even still being held at its older venue, just off Broadway in San Diego. At the time, Jay was dating Jill Thompson-who hadn't even had much of anything published at that point-and she tagged along for this somewhat historic jam session. In order to take a bit of steam out of this whole event, let me point out that we all just slipped around the corner and had lunch at the local Wendy's. So the four of us grabbed some grub and sat down at a window counter to chat about the storyline that would become God & the Devil. At that point, I had almost all of the elements outlined in my own mind and so I laid it all out there for them; the world has entered a second Dark Ages, the Catholic Church has again risen to the forefront of power, the Pope is a despotic tyrant and secretly a vampire (!), the "hero" of the story is a decadent aristocrat about whom we'll be morally conflicted, and the newest incarnation of Grendel is an utterly mad drug addict with a twisted and overwhelming messiah complex.

Well, after just a moment of stunned, "You've-gotta-be-fucking-kidding-me" reaction, both John and Jay were absolutely on fire for the ideas I'd just described. They both headed home and started churning out sketch ideas with hardly any further input from me. The results were really as spectacular as I could have hoped.

NRAMA: How much of the look of 2512 was your design work, and how much was what they came up with based on just listening to your descriptions?

MW: As I mentioned, initially, they just went to town and started ideating both character and environmental design work all over the place. They both really dug my description of this being a second Dark Ages and so we should try and incorporate a certain regressive look and feel while still maintaining certain consistent futuristic aspects. We communicated quite a bit about this, I remember, and that back-and-forth is what resulted in the series' look. I wouldn't say it was me telling them what to do, nor was it them just flying off on their own. There was a real active synthesis going on and that just worked really, really well. For instance-again, I was living in Montreal at the time-there was a downtown Cathedral that was under some sort of bizarre renovation at the time. The entire church was propped up on braces and pylons as the construction crews completely excavated the ground underneath it. I forget why they were doing this but I suspect it had something to do with Montreal extensive system of underground shops and rail terminals. In any event, I took a bunch of photos of this oddball scenario and sent those off to John and those in turn, of course, became the visual basis for the ever expansive, almost cancerous growth of Vatican Ouest. It was Jay who came up with the splattery handprints that echoed the Grendel eyepieces. I think he was just fucking around with all sorts of developmental work and actually dipped his hands in ink or paint and came up with this crazy design. It was so visually arresting that I later wrote it into the story as the basis for Grendel's "origin" during one of Eppy's traumatic drug trips; a fucked-up variation on Bruce Wayne looking up to see the bat swooping towards him as a source of inspiration.

NRAMA: We'll touch on Eppy heavily, but let's get into the character who would come to mean so much to the larger picture of Grendel over the years - Orion Assante. What went into him and what informed you when you were creating him? Obviously, there's the Greek heritage, but what qualities did he have to have? Give us what you know/remember of his backstory - how did he get to be where he was at the right time to take on the church?

MW: To combat the insanity of the religious fundamentalism that had overwhelmed the world, I needed a serious and dedicated secularist as my protagonist. He needed to have a certain arrogance that would cause him to look at Pope Innocent's garish manipulations with a solid disdain. This had to be a man who didn't take his marching orders from anyone and who would regard the general populace that licked up all this phony pious horseshit as little more than sheep to the slaughter. At the same time, he had to have enough of an egalitarian ideal to want to save the servile masses instead of just turn his back on such a world gone insane. So, he had to be aristocratic but his family had to have forged their own way up to such status.

NRAMA: That said, Orion had a compassion that allowed him to still want those who were suffering to lead better lives…

MW: Sure, sure. You get the feeling that the Assantes are maybe only a generation or so up from the streets and haven't yet lost their connection to the common humanity. At the same time, they certainly are upper class and bear the insular protectiveness in regards to their family that you tend to see in the wealthy and powerful. Additionally, I wanted Orion to act as the progenitor of an entirely new second wave of Grendel's advancement as a character and as a concept. Thus, his name. In Greek Mythology, Orion is a hunter.


NRAMA: No delicate way to get into this next thing - dude - Orion and his sisters? What the hell, man? What the hell? The three of them, and their…special relationship…

MW: Ha! That's meant to reinforce the aristocratic aspects of the Assante family and to confuse the reader's feelings about the one character who seems to somewhat have his shit together in this crazy world of the future. In most feudal societies, it's not at all unusual to see this sort of inter-familial bonding. Initially, it's meant as a way of shoring up the bloodlines and preserving genetic purity against any influx from the unwashed masses but eventually this sort of insular behavior becomes emotional as well.

I remember when I first described this scenario to John and Jay; "They're his sisters and his lovers." There was a collective, "Whoa!" at that point, I recall. I'm actually quite proud of how that narrative element comes off. On one level, it really makes you squirm but, on another level, it's also pretty erotic and the reader soon gets over the initial repulsion and accepts the truly dedicated and poignant bond that exists between these three characters. Here again, nothing's ever quite what it seems or what you'd expect when it comes to Grendel.

NRAMA: And it's a theme that would repeat later in Orion's life and in the series…

MW: Right.

NRAMA: We'll get into Eppy in depth coming up, but in your intro to the arc, you mention that Grendel was waiting for a perfect vessel, which was Eppy. Really? In the hundreds of years, there was no one better than Eppy? Or was it a matter of the right person at the right time?

MW: Eppy was "perfect" in the sense that he had no Ego nor Superego to stand in the way of his transformation into Grendel. Eppy was pretty much a great big pile of unfettered Id and that's what attracted "Grendel" to him. At the same time, he was no dummy. He's a techno-savant and that meant that Grendel would at least have a vessel that could competently sow the destructive seeds that would eventually lead to the cultivation of so very much more Grendel than we'd ever seen before. Additionally, Eppy was a creature in pain and, as a result, somewhat inured to pain. For him to act as the catalyst in the larger scheme of things was gonna mean a lot of sacrifice and excruciating sacrifice at that. But yeah, you're correct in that it was all a matter of being in the right time and place. In the overall narrative, Eppy doesn't matter as much as Orion but Orion's ascendancy couldn't have happened without Eppy. He's the madman crying out in the wilderness of lunacy. He's John the Baptist, who paves the way for a greater power that will follow him.

NRAMA: So let's just ask that question hanging there - Grendel's goal in all of this...he/she/it wasn't just going against the church in the form of Eppy was he/she/it? Did Grendel know what this strike at this time (including Orion's involvement) would do? That is, following that Eppy was there at the "right" place and time - the start of the demonic Rube Goldeberg contraption that would end with Grendel ruling the earth?

MW: No, I actually think of "Grendel" as having gone "insane" at this point. There was no actively planning per se so much as a desperate need to re-format itself. Think of it as being something like a breeding frenzy. To my mind, "Grendel" frantically needed to find a host once again after so many years as only an amorphous presence. It needed to discover a corporeal reality in order to not lose its sense of self altogether. That's true of my feelings about the character as well. After going so long-in fact, only four issues but also a vast amount of story time-without a Grendel in some sort of concrete, recognizable…okay, I'll say it…costumed form, I was beginning to feel a bit lost myself. So, yeah the time was ripe. As that same preamble states; "The year is 2512. The kingdom of Grendel is at hand."

NRAMA: With this story, you starting introducing some familiar elements - the cop with the cybernetic enhancements, heck, even Piddle with his haircut matching that of one of Tujiro's goons. Was this a hint to readers where you were going with this, or part of the cyclical nature of the story of Grendel? Time after time, similar elements/ingredients are drawn together...

MW: That sort of stuff was just one of the happy accidents that arises from the collaborative structure that has been the backbone of Grendel's success for so long. I'm pretty sure the things you're mentioning there are all a result of John and Jay's visual prowess. They just naturally fell into certain motifs that had already been part of Grendel's narrative reality and, yeah, that only goes to enhance and defend the cyclical nature of it all. Certainly, part of that's my partially my plotting as well-the fact this civilization is simply churning up it's own detritus again and again-but that then also gets reflected by the artistic aspects. It's just a nicely primed and well-oiled machine and so I absolutely love it when that happens!

NRAMA: Totally as an aside - going through these issues again, there was this kid who wrote in to nearly every issue - Jamie Rich. What ever happened to him? [Jamie went on to work in comics himself, namely, editorial at Oni Press, and has gone on to be a successful comic writer and novelist]. You guys ever talk about the old days when he was Grendel Fanboy Prime?

MW: [laughs] Not really. In the "it's a small world" department, Jamie now lives here in Portland and we've actually become good friends over the years. We just had dinner together last night, in fact (a bunch of us went out after a local comic show). And, no, we don't really rehash those old days other than the fact that he fully and readily admits the influence my work on Grendel had in eventually motivating him to pursue his own writing career. And look at him…he's a very skilled author with a very distinct voice that in no way seems to be aping or even echoing my work. He's an artist who I helped to inspire and whose work I find to be quite personal, accomplished and resonant.

That's just about the best compliment I could ever hope to receive.

[VivatGrendel.com]

GRENDEL: THE INTERVIEW 7- GOD & THE DEVIL 2/2

Today, we continue our conversation with Mat Wagner about the "God and the Devil" arc of Grendel.

Newsarama: Another aside, and, surprise, surprise, something controversial here that I think, people may have softened on in remembering the work, or just forgotten about it - you're drawing Orion and Innocent at opposite extremes, despite Innocent's false guise…reason and religion, with Orion pointing the finger at Innocent's quest to find the devil as something that will draw the world back into darkness and ignorance. Gotta say, reading that then, eh, but reading that now….like I said earlier, it's like the same eerie feeling I get from reading American Flagg! and thinking that someone from the future was calling Howard and giving him notes…

What led you, back when you were writing this, to figure that the church/religion would play such an important role in government? Looking back, it's a little hazy, but now, we seem to have crystal clarity on that point…

Matt Wagner: There's an old saying that the only thing Man ever learns from history is that we are doomed to repeat it. Historic precedent led me to realize that religion and government would someday merge once again. At times of great social upheaval, populations tend to cling to superstition in order to make sense of a world that seems out of control. Overwhelming fear tends to result in a rejection of enlightened reasoning and a morbid fascination with apocalypse mythologies.

Here again, I want to point out how most Americans seem to live in a dream bubble about the state of our civilization and it's ultimate survival. So many of our citizens just seem to think that America is the "best durn" country that's ever existed and that it's truly wonderful ideals of liberty and popular governance have got some sort of eternal longevity that'll never fade away. They seem to think we've got some sort of free pass in regards to the historical progression of empires and how long they tend to dominate on the world stage before eventually crumbling under their own weight. Y'know, back in the '80s Ronald Reagan inspired a lot of people with his description of America as a "shining city on the hill"-a glowing example of personal liberty and enlightened ideals. And then he let the foxes into the henhouse by allowing the gradual influx of religious influences that have led to the situation we see today. If America really is that shining city on the hill, it got that way due to the efforts of enlightened reasoning and not due to any specific set of religious beliefs. Its continued survival depends upon a defense of these origins and a continuation of those initial ideals. Most Americans don't even realize that the word "god" was distinctly and deliberately left out of the US Constitution. A great majority of our populace seems to think that the Founding Fathers originated a Christian nation and that just couldn't be further from the truth. Many of the most prominent power-brokers of the new republic were, in fact, deists, not Christians; Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Paine, and Ethan Allen, to name just a few. When you look around today, you see the gathering power of these evangelical groups, the James Dobsons and the like, and you realize that they really have very little interest in governing by the living document under which we currently exist. The fact that the US Constitution is a system that supports its own change and growth is too uncertain for them. They want the Christian Bible (their version of it, at least) to be the true law of the land-an inconsistent record that was set in stone nearly two thousand years ago.

In preparation for this portion of our interview, I went back and reread some the "Grendel's Lair" letters columns from the original editions of this story arc. One reader pointed out that the modern evangelical movement wasn't really, in fact, a monotheistic religion but might more accurately be described as a duothesitic situation focusing on Satan as much as it does on God. I think that's actually a pretty good point and I think it ties back into what I said earlier about the rise in power of such fundamentalist mentalities. The condition arises from a fear of the unknown and tends to focus on apocalypse fantasies--the ultimate end of the world that the adherents of these philosophies find beyond their ken.

So, you asked how I knew all this was gonna go down the way it has? Listen, kid, I paint what I see!

NRAMA: Take us in Eppy's world a little here - the Grendel Fights, the underground. Kinda a typical scene - some may be living the high life and pretending everyone else was there too, but the masses were living like Eppy?

MW: Exactly. Have you ever been on a cruise ship? You see ads on TV that show people standing on these picturesque balconies, gazing out over the railings at the most colorful sunsets and it seems like that's what the cruise experience would entail. In reality, those cabins are the very upper echelon of rooming on a ship that holds over two thousand people at any given time. The lower decks feature cabins that, at best, have a single porthole thru which to enjoy those glowing oceanic vistas. Worse still, the cabins down in the "steerage" sections cram two, three and four people into small-ass cabins with the beds stacked up in bunk fashion.

So, yeah, apply that model to the cities of the 26th century--only throw in rampant overpopulation, oppressive poverty, extensive drug abuse, general lawlessness and religious fanaticism-and you've got a pretty good portrait of Eppy's world.

NRAMA: In taking the drug, and given his…"precarious" mental condition, Eppy was ripe for Grendel's picking, obviously. Why wasn't Grendel talking to him?

MW: Ah, but I'd have to say that "Grendel" was speaking to him. Not thru words but thru omens. Eppy's entire life had been one of religious fundamentalism coupled with drug-induced paranoia. He's used to seeing visions and having them "speak" to him. As a result, he finds meaning in the most disparate sources and sees and interprets these signs in the most twisted fashion imaginable. Like most religious fundamentalists, he's got a latent Messiah complex-he wants to actually be his hero, Jesus-and so he's more than ripe for the influence of another power that doesn't really give a damn about the state of his soul or offer him any real hope of redemption. When Eppy first wakes out of that trance/trip wherein he smashed his hands all to shit and the blood formed a seemingly random pattern that echoed the Eyes of Grendel….his fate was sealed.

NRAMA: Back to what we were talking about with the cycle of Grendel - Orion's a fencer as well, huh? Take away the psychotic shit of Hunter, and it seems that you could argue that he's the closest Hunter-Grendel since the original…they seem to share the same vision, although Orion seems to have more patience…

MW: Right - I mentioned this earlier. In Greek mythology, the character of Orion was what? A hunter. If you look at the resultant aftermaths of both their storylines, Hunter and Orion are the two most important Grendels in regards to their lasting effects. Hunter's existence leaves a wake of psychosis and violence that trudges along in a very linear fashion before finally petering out after only a handful of incarnations. In Grendel terms, Orion was even more successful in that he codified the experience and made it something to be desired instead of shunned. The aftermath of Orion's (much longer-lived) stint as Grendel is an absolute scatter shot of lineage that spreads all over the world. I also want to point out that Orion is the only Grendel from my initial 50-issue saga-the only one-who dies a peaceful death. He'd done so very much over the course of his turbulent life to propagate the Grendel persona that the "force" or "spirit" or "devil" of Grendel-whatever you wanna call it-granted him that final reward.

NRAMA: Touching on the whole getting calls from the future thing again…you showed waterboarding in issue #27, didn't you?

MW: Waterboarding dates back to the Spanish Inquistion. That's the thing with this whole culture of torture; the latest perpetrators always seem to think that they're the first to have been "forced" into such drastic actions to defend what they hold sacred. When the reality is that mankind has had the whole "inflicting pain" thing down to an absolute science for millennia. The point is, there is no just or honorable way or reason to torture someone-no matter what the supposed goal. Torture is a degrading and inhuman practice that consumes it's practitioners as readily as its victims. It's a clear and pertinent illustration of the Friedrich Nietzsche quote; "And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."

NRAMA: Explain the Deva Princes - why are they there, and what purpose do they serve, both in the story and as a storytelling device?

MW: In every totalitarian regime, you're going to have those various factions who scheme to undermine and overthrow that authority. Herein, the revolutionaries have named themselves after a group of Hindu deities-about as far as they can get from the overwhelming Christianity that they feel is stifling their world. In this case, I wanted to show that Orion was willing to work outside the system in order to change the system. Ultimately though, his fellow co-conspirators aren't on the same page as Orion. They're willing to gripe and bicker amongst themselves but don't seem to have the backbone for decisive action like Orion does. Really, it's that firm willingness to act that leads to Orion's eventual ascension of power.

NRAMA: Orion's building and building - and then notes "I feel like Christine Spar." What's the legend of Christine like in these days?

MW: Well, I'd say that the world of the future has a very confused and conflicted view of Christine Spar. On one hand, she was the first person to fall prey to the devastating persona of Grendel. On the other hand, I'm sure she's seen with a certain sympathy considering all the challenges she had to face. In this instance, Orion means that he too feels that same sense of frustration that she experienced. He's got a bizarre relationship to an active personification of Grendel, albeit indirectly, and he feels alone and persecuted for actions that he feels are rational and justified. It's the first indicator that he's going to become an incarnation of Grendel himself.

NRAMA: Subtitles that went over my head time - what were you getting at with the rat that was being hunted?

MW: Ha! Each of the animal sub-stories relate to the main narrative in some fashion. The hatchling who has the prayer balloon stuffed down its throat is the populace in general and, more specifically, Eppy before he transforms into Grendel. The voracious crocodile is Innocent. The hog wallowing in the human detritus from the Tower is Sister Aimee. And the rat is Grendel. Or, I guess I should say, Eppy as Grendel. The whole point is how tenacious, sneaky and just un-killable the little bastard seems to be. Those two maintenance men (whom, in my scripts, were named "Yeh" and "Uh-huh" for obvious reasons) try and try and try to track that rat down, try to trap him, try to kill him. And nothing ever seems to work. He always manages to slip away, to live another day and cause more trouble inside the inner workings of the system. Well, obviously, that's a metaphor for Eppy. He's got the Church, the COPS and Orion all looking for him but no one can seem to find him. And it's not like he's too sophisticated to avoid detection. He's just a rat. That's what they do.

I should also point out that the eagle is Orion. In those final pages, where we see the eagle finally catch and carry off the rat, that's a foreshadowing of the fact that Orion has taken over for Eppy and will now inherit the mantle of Grendel. The eagle itself also acts as a foreshadowing. Seeing as how it was one of the of the official symbols of not only the USA but also the Third Reich, it's a harbinger of the fact that Orion's empire will not only be vast and initially optimistic, it will ultimately fall into a state of fascism.

NRAMA: When you revealed Innocent - what was the reaction from the readers like?

MW: It was great! Some readers claimed to have known it all along while many others were completely bamboozled and just blown away by the big reveal. Most pointed out that, if you go back and look at his face from that panel where he first appears in this story arc, it's almost a dead giveaway. Of course, that's with the benefit of hindsight but that portrait does have a pretty chilling demeanor to it. John pulled that off extremely well. And, c'mon…the big surprise is the fact that this vile, corrupt pope is actually a decadent, blood-sucking vampire! Hey…what's not to love?!




NRAMA: Heh. Speaking of Innocent and his cohorts, you again brought the police into the picture with Pellon Cross. But he ultimately fell in a horrible way (though it would keep him alive through the next two arcs). What was Pellon's undoing? He was overconfident, but what pushed his relationship with Innocent through to the wrong side?

MW: Well, as you say, Pellon Cross is overconfident. He's tough as nails, highly competent and generally views the rest of the world as weak and undeserving. His biggest problem, in the long run, is that he ultimately underestimates Pope Innocent's true nature as well as his final ambitions. To Pellon, Innocent is simply one more civilian client who's worldly decadence has made him, from a military standpoint, physically anemic and morally grotesque. But, in his defense, who would suspect that this guy's really a vampire and that his secret goal is to blot out the sun? In point of fact, that decadence is the source of Innocent's power, an anomaly that Pellon's never encountered before. As a result, Cross never sees how the Pope is manipulating him to get what he wants; first protection and then subversion and, finally, access to the radioactive material he needs to complete his objective. Once he's fulfilled this task-and to a soldier of Pellon's capacity, impossible challenges are an undeniable attraction-he's served his purpose and Innocent feels free to dispose of him.

But, if you'll notice Innocent doesn't really dispose of Pellon like he does his other victims-by eating their eyeballs and thus insuring that they won't be able to rise after receiving his infectious bite. He stores Pellon away and obviously intends to treat him as some sort of vampiric disciple-a powerful underling who, he must assume, will do his bidding after the reign of darkness begins. Of course, at that point, he doesn't expect his plans to go awry; he doesn't anticipate the two disparate forces (Eppy and Orion) that still oppose him. In the end, Innocent is-once again-defeated by Grendel, leaving Pellon Cross alone, unhinged and newly empowered in a manner he never suspected.

Since you've been commenting again and again on the sadly prescient points of so many aspects of this storyline, I should also point out the predominance of C.O.P. (Confederacy Of Police) in this world of the future. Again, sadly, we're seeing this happen today as the current administration moves to advocate and utilize the services of private para-military operations such as the Blackwater troops. By many historians' viewpoint, such actions always signal the beginning of a facist regime. In fact, Naomi Wolf has recently written a fascinating treatise on this subject, outlining the warning signs of just such a society downslide, titled, The End Of America: Letter Of Warning To A Young Patriot.

NRAMA: Yeah - I was going to mention that as well. While Orion was doing everything - going into hiding, the pirate broadcast, etc - was he considering what the world without the Church would, by necessity, look like, and his position in it? Obviously, if you gut the church, the body's going to continue to move for some time, even though it's dead…

MW: I think he was looking beyond these events to some extent-he's got his secret bunker in the Dakota hills and he knows when it's time to go into hiding-yet at the same time, I think he gets fairly lost in the moment and fails to recognize the truly devastating social upheaval that his actions will cause. Of course, he's still onstage and able to deal with those crises when they arise which, again, leads to his ultimate global domination. But in no way do I think he planned that effect. His goals and ambitions are for the greater good. It's his methods of achieving that which finally slip into an imperious disconnect.

NRAMA: As things built towards #33, the story became more and more of a focus on obsession and its cost, correct? Orion, Innocent, Pellon, Eppy - all were so focused on their respective goals…

MW: Absolutely, they're all lost in their own specific narratives; all running around with their respective heads stuck up their respective asses.

NRAMA: And the cost - as Orion himself noted, it could be argued that his obsession was responsible for his sisters' death.

MW: Exactly.

NRAMA: Why did Orion's hair get a while streak in it? And while we're on his ascension, what is his relationship with Grendel at this point? Does Grendel (not Eppy, but Grendel) know of him?

MW: As you noted in the earlier question, he's become pretty damned obsessed with bringing an end to Innocent's unfettered sway and, yes, his rebellious actions do, undeniably, lead to his own tragic loss. And that's when he crosses over the line and begins his transition into becoming Grendel, himself. In a very real sense, once his sisters are killed, he begins to take it all very personally. He views Innocent's actions as a personal affront and deems it now necessary to strike back in a physical fashion. It's around this point that he truly begins to feel-and act-like Christine Spar. His attitude becomes, "Fuck working inside or with the system in any way. The system is corrupt and broken and I'M the only one who can set things right-in whatever manner I deem necessary."

No more, "Mr. Nice Guy"!

One of my favorite bits of chilling dialogue from this entire storyline (and, actually, the series as a whole) comes in the final issue of this run; Orion is leading his own paramilitary troops in an all-out assault on the Tower during the Easter services and his internal dialogue fully captures the Grendel attitude that has infected his soul.

"Finally, I have seen the day…the day when my solution, simply, is to kill these people. Kill them all."

You asked whether "Grendel" was aware of Orion. With an attitude like that roiling over into the public area, how could it be otherwise? In a sense, Grendel abandons Eppy at that very moment and joyously flees to inhabit its new, highly capable host.

NRAMA: Ah - right, right. But I think the fact that people can miss the transition is a testament to what you were doing with Orion. As you said, he was the most capable, and ultimately, sympathetic, of the Grendels, ever. his line of dialogue felt natural - an endpoint of an evolution.

MW: Right.

NRAMA: Oh - and in the whole Tujioro angle, Elmer - a nice, nice bit of coming back around within the story. He's essentially Tujiro's Renfield, right?

MW: Yeah, except he's a scientific genius and not a raving lunatic…well, not quite.

NRAMA: Dude - why the bananas?

MW: Ha! The bananas were just one more phallic symbol on a big whopping heap of phallic symbols. Y'gotta remember, I was treating this story arc as something of a Grand Guignol-a narrative that was grotesque and horrifying and yet so over the top that it had a definite humor to it as well. The whole old shtick of wanting to "take over the world" is such a tried and true goal of so many super-villains that I wanted this to be a bit of a mockery of that whole deal. To my mind, the whole point of such power hungry individuals is just to show the world what a fucking big dick they've got. So, in this case, I decided to take that idea and layer on the metaphors so thick, you'd have trouble cutting through them with even the sharpest knife! The Tower, The Sun Gun, the bananas...Christ, even Innocent's fucking hat! They've all got such a phallic fetish about them that it almost seems like some sort of twisted fertility cult. But, in fact, it's just the opposite of that-it's a death cult and the phalluses (phallai?) represent viciousness and rape more than breeding and health. Innocent isn't try to spawn life, he's trying to eradicate it. By trying to cause a chain reaction that will neuter the sun, he's basically trying to rape the entire world. Pretty big dick, that. He's gonna need a lot of bananas!

NRAMA: And here, when I originally read it, I was swinging back and forth between something with potassium and an army of vampire monkeys that needed to be fed…

MW: [laughs]

NRAMA: By the end of God and the Devil, what's the relationship between Orion and Grendel? The shadow is cast over his face in the one panel, but at the same time, he's so very rational - why would he ever believe in something, even something moving through him that seems to have the same goals?

MW: Like everyone who had fallen prey to the Grendel persona, Orion feels like he's in control-not the church, not society and, certainly, not the Devil. He feels like he's using what he views purely as a pertinent symbol to exorcise the influences that had so corrupted the world. But, of course, he feels like he's above that influence. Y'know, one of the most familiar quotes about this sort of thing is from the nineteenth century British historian, Lord Acton, who said, "Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely."

Ask almost anyone and they would probably agree with that statement but almost no one would agree that it applies to them.

Of course, Orion's power at this point is far from absolute but he's on that path. His support system is peopled by well-meaning, brilliant individuals who ultimately submit all of their efforts to defending their leader rather than the world and their race. "Grendel" has learned well over the years and, rather than strike out with the unsparing individuality of Hunter Rose or the passionate fury of Christine Spar or the flailing desperation of Brian Li Sung…this time Grendel is content to wait and let it's influence spread and spread and spread like an undetected cancer.

NRAMA: There's a great line in Scrooged where, after seeing some horrific special effects, Bill Murray's character says, "We're going to get calls." After re-reading God and the Devil, I feel like saying the same thing…did you get letters about the story? Anyone in particular that was worried about your soul?

MW: Y'know I can't really remember at this point. I'm sure there were a few but generally I'd have to say that I was probably preaching to the choir at that point. I mean, if you were morally uptight and a religious fundamentalist, why would you even be reading Grendel in the first place? I'd dealt with lots of "objectionable" subject matter before this after all. But, you're right…for some reason, religion is the one's that always seems to push the "crazy" buttons, isn't it?

NRAMA: Exactly.

MW: And, so far as my soul goes…well, I feel plenty confidant that the world's greatest prophets, preachers, messiahs, etc.. would agree with me on this point…that's my business. Inward peace and moral redemption is a personal issue and I take great offense at the assumption that it somehow belongs to any certain community or specific religious system. Near where I live, there's one of these creepy "mega-churches" that are just the sort of thing I was mocking/warning about in God and the Devil and the irony of it's mere existence just makes me shake my head in befuddlement. Nothing could be further from the simplicity and beauty of Jesus' teachings than these goddamn giant "Arenas O' Christ". Yet they seem to be creeping up everywhere, don't they? Again, in a scary and confusing world, people tend to cling to things that treat them like children; "There, there…everything will be allllll right. Just eat this wafer and drink this wine and you're good to go!"

NRAMA: … We're gonna get calls.

All of that said - we've talked about the autobio nature of Grendel before, but what you've said here kind of blurs the line again between character and creator - how much of you was in Orion at this point?

MW: I was working on this arc and moving into the next storyline (Devil's Reign) just as my original publisher was imploding under it's own bloated excesses. So, in a sense, I was operating inside a microcosm that mirrored Orion's world to a great degree. I don't-and didn't-think that I could have saved or delivered that "world" from its ultimate fate but I'm certain that led me to fantasizing about someone who could. Orion's story was slated to be the final statement of the initial Grendel saga but, of course, I've since realized that the Devil never truly dies.