GRENDEL: DEVIL BY THE DEED
For any comic creator who takes his work seriously, a large portion of his everyday consciousness must necessarily be devoted to the nuts and bolts of his craft, such considerations occupying that lobe of the brain that ordinary people use for thinking about sex, money, food and life assurance. At almost any given moment of the day, the dedicated artisan will be turning new storytelling ideas over within his or her mind, pondering the perception of lapsed time in multi-panel continuous background shots, mentally fiddling around with an imaginary Rubik cube of established precedents, half-formed theories, and half-baked impulses in the never-ending search for a new combination, a new pattern, a new way of telling a story.
To anyone who has been following the adventures of Kevin Matchstick and company through the pages of MAGE with even half an eye, it must be evident that Matt Wagner does some long, hard thinking before committing a line or word to paper, evolving as a result a storytelling style that is at once fresh, clean and wildly innovative. So dazzling and stylish, in fact, has Wagner's performance on MAGE been that I think he may have accidentally overshadowed a feature equally dear to his heart, equally daring and carefully conceived.
GRENDEL, sheltering unobtrusively in the rearmost pages of this splendid comic book, provides a perfect counterpoint to the lead strip in terms of style. While MAGE tells its story entirely in pictures and word balloons, avoiding captions and consequently creating a sense of narrative naturalism, GRENDEL takes the opposite approach and presents its verbal narrative entirely in caption form, adopting a more novelistic approach to its material.
As a result of this, GRENDEL finds itself exploring territories almost untouched within the field of mainstream, comic art: those vague borderlands that lie between what most people would recognise as a comic strip and the traditional illustrated story. This creative terrain is vague because of the lack of a distinct demarcation line between the two areas. What separates an illustrated story from a comic strip told entirely in captions? Is it just the number of pictures? If so, how many constitute a comic strip, how many an illuminated text piece?
The rare excursions that I have seen into material of this nature before have fascinated me with the range of effects that they were able to achieve, quite unlike those found in a regular comic strip or in a traditional narrative-with-spot-illos. I recall particularly a piece that appeared in the science fiction monthly, GALAXY [March 1970, Vol 29 #6], written by Harlan Ellison and illustrated by the late and sadly neglected Jack Gaughan. I believe it was called "The Region Between", and by setting small passages of text against large and dominating images, it achieved storytelling effects that I had never seen before, nor seen attempted since.
Until GRENDEL.
In GRENDEL, Matt Wagner does things with comic strip design that are pretty much state of the art. The pages become whole visual units, panels broken down like the various images contained in a stained glass window or like the motifs on a beautiful snazzed-up Art Deco pinball table. Somehow, this iconic approach to the illustration, combined with the sense of distance that the narrative prose carries, creates a mythical quality, as if one were reading some Egyptian fable told in dazzling sets of hieroglyphics. As a setting for the tale of the mythic and titanic conflict between Grendel and Argent, the wolf, it is perfect. If we could hear these characters speaking their dialogue as we do in regular comic books, they would be diminished somehow, reduced to ordinary funny book characters, however interesting, instead of characters with all the potency and glamour and timelessness of those in the very best fables and fairy tales.
That GRENDEL is a fairy tale shouldn't be belied by its backdrop of cooly modern city skylines and meticulously elegant apartments. With its subtle and clever account of a war between two wonderful creatures of gigantic stature, it evokes powerful resonances of the ancient sagas that spawned its namesake, BEOWULF's Grendel. The excellent jewelled colouring does nothing to detract from this effect, transforming even the skylines and apartments mentioned above into scintillating and enchanting backdrops as rich as any provided in folklore.
In a comic book world where text pieces are generally regarded as filler and where comic strips have balloons, GRENDEL is a brave and possibly even reckless experiment that has succeeded admirably in its own terms and which deserves our support and admiration. Perhaps here, in a collected volume away from the all-too-welcome distractions of ogres and grackleflints, it will finally receive the respect it deserves and be seen as the trailblazer that it truly is.
Matt Wagner is best known for one of comicdom's most respected creator-owned titles - the centuries-spanning epic GRENDEL and his more personal fantasy allegory MAGE. Lauded for his character-driven stories and his obvious love of world history and mythologies, Matt’s efforts have won multiple Eisner Awards.
