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.
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