MYTHCOMICS: DEVIL BY THE DEED (1984)

The title DEVIL BY THE DEED suggests that even though creator Matt Wagner has given his protagonist the name of a famous literary monster, this Grendel should be judged not by his lineage (the original Grendel was the offspring of the Biblical Cain), but by the totality of his deeds, both good and bad. In the history of pop culture, a fair number of features in pulps, movie serials, and comic books focused upon villains. Yet Grendel has less in common with “the Secret Society of Super-Villains” than with the recherché charms of Fantomas, at least in terms of showing the attractions of criminality.

I didn’t follow Grendel when he debuted in the early 1980s, when he seemed to be one of many characters inspired by the vogue for ninjas. I was aware of the character’s strong appeal for fans, but those who followed the character’s first appearances in 1982 were doomed to disappointment when his magazine was cancelled before Grendel’s first story-arc was finished. However, Wagner both recapitulated and completed the original arc in DEVIL BY THE DEED, but with a difference. This time Grendel’s story was distanced through the device of being narrated by a chronicler, albeit one whose identity is not revealed until the tale’s conclusion.

In the BEOWULF poem Grendel is an inhuman monster slain by the titular strongman hero, but Wagner reverses the human-inhuman dynamic. His Grendel is a normal-looking human who alternates between two identities: that of social butterfly Hunter Rose and of his alter ego, Grendel, a  sword-wielding assassin who controls all criminal activity in the unnamed city where Hunter dwells. His one significant opponent is Argent, who rather than having the name of a “wulf”  looks like one, being a near-immortal being cursed to take wolf-man shape. His name, a synonym for silver, is clearly a reference to the association of werewolves and the moon-colored metal, even though Argent does not transform, and is entirely on the side of the angels against this “devil.” Yet despite these tacit references to the BEOWULF mythos, the story that most glosses DEVIL BY THE DEED is the tragedy of Oedipus.

The chronicler of the story, later revealed to be female, starts the story by relating that she meant to write the story of Grendel in order “to clear my mother’s name,” but that she ends by becoming “as enraptured as [my mother] was with the man whose given name was Eddie but who eventually engaged the world as GRENDEL.” The name “Eddie” is never again mentioned, nor does the story reveal any details about Eddie’s parents, aside from the intimation that they had wealth and thus gave Eddie the freedom to develop his “almost limitless brain capacities.” However, the significance of the young man’s name is seen when it’s revealed that “Eddie” became a man by knowing a woman twenty years his senior, a woman with the possibly assumed name of “Jocasta Rose.” The lady with the Sophoclean name allegedly perishes without leaving any records of her presence, save in Grendel’s diaries, as conveyed through the agency of the narrator. By this choice of names, Wagner signals the strong possibility that Grendel’s first sin is that of sleeping not with his literal mother but with a mother-substitute. The young polymath then assumes the name “Hunter Rose” for the rest of his life/fictional existence, at least as far as DEVIL is concerned.  The invented cognomen could mean any number of things, though it may significant that both the name Rose and the flower are most commonly associated with femininity.

Sophocles’ tragedy of the original Oedipus alludes to, but does not emphasize, the fact that the hero has conceived children, now grown, from the bed of incest. Neither Hunter Rose nor his lupine adversary father children, and yet, both of them become paternally protective of a nine-year-old girl, Stacy Palumbo. (Her surname is Italian for a type of dove.) Stacy, an orphan like Hunter, is not aware of the greater conflict going on between Grendel and Argent, but comes to know both of them because at one time or another both law-keeper and law-breaker attempt to leverage information from her adoptive uncle Barry Palumbo. Uncle Barry is then poisoned and his girlfriend goes down for the murder, but some time after Hunter Rose adopts the twice-orphaned girl, she eventually finds out the truth about Grendel, and uses her “inside knowledge” to bring about the destruction of both Grendel and Argent. However, as the narrator—Stacy Palumbo’s own grown daughter—reveals, the wages of sin are still destruction, as Stacy herself succumbs to insanity as the result of her actions.

I won’t discuss the specifics of Stacy’s retaliatory plan here, save to state that, as in many tragedies, it depends on being able to take advantage of familial loyalties. The climactic, mutually-injurious battle of Grendel and Argent is distanced through the agency of the narration, though Wagner is careful to build up the final combat with at least one other Classical reference, in that one of Grendel’s diaries refers to Argent as “my Hector.” I have not followed all of the later iterations of Grendel, so I’m not sure how final his “final fate” actually was. But Wagner does succeed here not just in giving the fate of his supercriminal an elegiac tone, but also giving him a larger significance, ending the chronicle by stating that Grendel “is the demon of society’s mediocrity.” The creators of Fantomas probably would have empathized.