DEVIL'S HAMMER is one of many spinoffs of Matt Wagner's GRENDEL franchise, albeit one in which Wagner had an ancillary role: authoring a 3-part backup series in the three 1994 issues of this Dark Horse comic. However, I'm concerned only with the primary serial, which seems to be the source of the magazine's title. and was written by Rob Walton and drawn by Bernie Mireault and Kathryn Delaney.
I've had only intermittent encounters with the Grendel Franchise, so I'm sketchy on some of the developments in HAMMER. The events take place in a futuristic setting, when humanity has been conquered by a tyrant known as "the Grendel-Khan." Further, the forces commanded by the Khan include a dedicated array of knights called "Grendels," who view the idea of Grendel as a transcendent principle in their lives.
Christianity still exists in this world, but it's been largely exiled to the rural parts of the country (whatever country it may be) and reduced to the level of medieval monasticism. The story's narrator is a monk named Petrus Christus (Rock of Christ), who lives according to his religion's definitions of good and evil. He suffers a severe trauma when five Grendel-knights massacre an entire city, Ourador, leaving only Petrus alive to tell the tale.
Petrus seeks out a local monastery, regarded by Christians as "the New Jerusalem on Earth," and confers with its abbot, Sebastian Chiesa. This monk also survived an earlier encounter with the five killers, who tormented him by shooting him with arrows targeted to non-fatal parts of his body. As if to do the legendary Saint Sebastian one better, this Sebastian doesn't have the arrows removed from his body, but allows them to remain, "as testimony to Christ's sovereignty over flesh and the devil."
Sebastian counsels Petrus to allow God to punish the Grendels "in the fires of the next world." But Petrus seeks vengeance, and since he's apparently more of a practiced warrior than the average priest, he decides to infiltrate the Grendels by joining their ranks.
With very little difficulty, the monk joins forces with the five slaughterers of Ourodor-- the leader Mahound, Kali (the only female), Klunni, the Lotus, and Bill, the last being the only one who wears a mask like that of the 20th century Grendel. Mahound, whose name is derived from a medieval corruption of Mohammed, claims that he and his fellows stand far above the "dullards" who serve the Grendel-Khan, for only Mahound's group serves "the indestructible power and indescribable joy of Grendel."
Because the Grendels have no current plan to attack anyone, Petrus baits them into attacking the monastery again, while secretly planning to ambush the knights separately. Instead, he himself gets ambushed by the Lotus, who spouts quasi-Taoist aphorisms like, "The mask that is worn is not Grendel." Petrus manages to slay the Lotus, after which the monk experiences a non-Christian epiphany, standing in a baptismal river while a raven bites off one of his ears. (Neither ear is missing when reality as such resumes.)
Petrus then has an extended conversation with mask-garbed Bill, who confesses a loss of faith, partly because he and his fellow killers cannot equal the rapacity of nature. "We could displace the oceans of Earth with gore," he tells the monk, "and the universe wouldn't bat an eye." Petrus leaves Bill to wallow in his existential torment and ambushes both Kunnil and Kali, killing one and trapping the other, Bill shows up, kills Kali, and tries to kill Petrus, suspecting that the latter has become Grendel's new Messiah. The monk kills Bill and rushes to the monastery to head off Mahound. Petrus and Mahound fight, but though Mahound loses, he like Bill believes that it's because the spirit of Grendel has chosen Petrus as his vessel. He also reveals that there's a "truth" that Petrus must learn about the revered abbot.
I won't reveal the nature of that truth here, but suffice to say that it doesn't do anything to shore up Petrus's waning Christian values. Yet even before the revelation comes out, Petrus is apparently possessed by the actual demon-spirit of Grendel. During the abbot's attempt to exorcise Petrus, the former monk speaks of himself in Biblical terms: "I am the eyes and ears of Heaven. My name denotes my office in the celestial court. Neither apostate nor fallen-- you know me, abbot, as Adversary." With these references, Walton is almost certainly evoking the Old Testament version of Satan, who accused mortals like Job in order to test their faith in God. But clearly the reader is not supposed to invest in the hierarchy of God and his angels, and if the Grendel-spirit is real, then it's because it embodies something more profound about the universe than any god, a principle to which Petrus surrenders herself before he too perishes:
There was never anything beyond the darkness. It was the darkness itself, and the darkness only, that I was meant to see.
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