Grendel: Devil’s Legacy, written by Matt Wagner with art by the Pander Brothers. Matt Wagner created Grendel in Comico Primer #2 and then did a three issues for Comico (since re-released as Grendel Archives) before it was prematurely ended. While he was working Mage, he reworked Grendel and released it as Grendel: Devil by The Deed. But, at the end of this, the protagonist (the super villain Grendel) is dead and his antagonist (the cop Argent) is confined to a wheelchair. What Matt Wagner decided to do was continue Grendel, but make the story about the Grendel spirit inhabiting other people. The first story (published in Grendel #1-12) tells the tale of Grendel’s adopted daughter’s daughter, Christine Spar, and her need for revenge. It moved Grendel for a conventional hero/villain battle to something more.

Christine Spar is the daughter of Stacy Palumbo. Stacy is the adopted daughter of Grendel(Hunter Rose) and good friends with Argent. When Stacy realizes that Hunter Rose is really Grendel, she sets him up to be killed by Argent and ends up in an asylum. She and her therapist fall in love and she gets pregnant. When her husband goes crazy, she ends up in the asylum again and Christine is placed up for adoption. When Christine grows up, she gets her mother’s diaries and writings and publishes Grendel:Devil By The Deed. The notoriety gets her a newspaper byline and some modest celebrity. This is where our story picks up.

Christine is a single mom with a young son Anson. They go to a kabuki show with Christine’s best friend Ginny (a cougar). Tujiro, the main kabuki actor and vampire, kidnaps Anson. In her grief over his disappearance, Christine steals the Grendel costume and weapon as the Grendel spirit inhabits her. The story then follows Christine trying to harness the Grendel spirit and get her revenge on Tujiro.

She is helped and hindered by Ginny and Brian, a theater director Christine meets in San Francisco, who try to help Christine heal over her loss of Anson and push the Grendel spirit away. And as Christine trys to get revenge on Tujiro, the Grendel spirit has unfinished business with Argent. The story does a wonderful job of showing how Christine is seduced by the Grendel spirit into believing that the revenge will make her life go back to normal and her slow realization that there will never be a normal again.

Matt Wagner has done a courageous thing with his story. He is evolving it. The main characters grow, change, die and the story moves on. His use of the Grendel spirit is a amazing concept that allows Wagner the freedom  to re-imagine the basic story over and over, while sticking close to a known concept for the reader. Grendel: Devil’s Legacy is the first many, many re-imaginings for Grendel and is the lynchpin for the rest of the Grendel stories.