Grendel: Behold the Devil

By Matt Wagner
Dark Horse, $19.99, 184 pages

To this day I can remember when, as a teenager, I first experienced Matt Wagner’s dark crime boss Grendel. With the brilliant three color art work, the story within the story, and the shifting between traditional panels and long form narration, Wagner explored and expanded the understanding of his medium much the same as Alan Moore did in his own work. Grendel: Behold the Devil carries the pleasant sensation of revisiting an old friend, even as it transported me back decades to when I first encountered the beguiling anti-hero of the title.

While a new concept, Behold the Devil follows the original pattern. Christine Spar, daughter of Grendel’s traumatized ward as well as the Devil’s chronicler, recalls a missing section of his journals. What experience could so unbalance the dark crime boss that he would excise it from his own journal? That is the tale here contained, as Grendel confronts the magical realism which always lingers beneath the surface of these stories and glimpses the dark depths of his future legacy. Can even the Devil emerge from such a thing unscathed?

Reviewed by Jordan Magill