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Tripwire Reviews Grendel Devil By The Deed: Master’s Edition By Matt Wagner

Published

3 years ago

February 9, 2024

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A Devil Of A Project

Grendel: Devil By The Deed Master’s Edition
Writer/ Artist: Matt Wagner
Colourist: Brennan Wagner/ flats: Cameron Mazzia
Letters: David Lanphear
Dark Horse Books

Matt Wagner is a true comics phenomena: beginning his career in indie comics in the early 1980s, he has also managed to straddle the worlds of independent and mainstream with equal aplomb. He is best-known for his two equally different indie creations: the fantasy Arthurian tale with a twist Mage and Grendel, his incredibly ambitious modern noir cycle. Grendel: Devil By The Deed has had a very convoluted and intriguing publishing history: it originally ran as a back up in Mage, collected by Comico back in 1986 and in 1993 it was reprinted recoloured by Dark Horse. Then in 2007, Dark Horse published it again in black, white and red. Now many years after it first appeared, Wagner has redrawn it and expanded it to an impressive 137 pages.

It isn’t a comic but images accompanied with text captions but the creator, with the assistance of his son, Brennan Wagner on colours, manages to keep the pace up and the reader engaged.

It is a beautifully elegant book with Wagner showing his unique command of characterisation and plot, offering cinematic angles and noirish set pieces. His son’s colouring adds a great deal to his art, using a colour palette that is the perfect counterpoint to Wagner’s sophisticated line work.

The world that Grendel inhabits is one that has become more and more ambitious since the creator has built on it over the past 40 years and the part of it that Hunter Rose is part of here is a fascinating one which draws the reader in. It operates on the fringes of our world but also feels like it has its own rules.

Grendel: Devil By The Deed is a wonderful updated version of Wagner’s more primitive version and as with all Dark Horse books, it is a beautifully designed affair. The extra material at the end which includes page roughs and an afterword by him offer an extra glimpse into the process of creating or recreating a work that is almost forty years old.