The Devil You Thought You Knew, The Devil You Wish You Didn’t

Hating comics is a strage business for me. I’m not against it – I’m not a Team Comics guy, worried about hurting Brian Bendis’ feelings. I’m a big Comics of the Weak fan, and I’m writing for the Hooded Utilitarian. I’m down with hate. But I find it unexpectedly difficult to hate comics.

Most comics, even some corporate ones, are the product of one or two idiosyncratic minds putting pen directly to paper. Even if I don’t particularly care for them, they tend to fascinate me as art objects. And the truly focus-grouped editorially-driven corporate comics? I’m frankly not invested enough in most of them to care if they’re all that bad. A bad comic of that sort is far more likely to inspire mere apathy. It takes something more than poor quality to drive me to hate.

To hate a work of art, I have to feel trapped or confronted by it in some way. Popularity will do it, sometimes. I almost wrote this essay about 100 Bullets, and then almost again about The Walking Dead. Neither of those books are the worst things I’ve ever read, but I also don’t find much to value in them, and their various levels of critical and commercial success serve to turn my general distinterest into a sneer of disgust. (You might think that sounds petty, and at one point I would have agreed with you. But I’m more inclined these days to see the general public reaction to a work as a legitimate part of that work’s existence, and worth reacting to in its own right. Plus, frankly, it’s just sickening to hear constant praise of work you consider undeserving.)

But most comics aren’t really that popular or that talked about. And unlike a movie, for which you sit passively in a dark room for a predetermined amount of time with nothing to focus on but Bradley Cooper’s “punch me” face, reading a comic at all requires active participation. If I’m not enjoying a comic, my energy for that participation just slides away, and I toss the book aside. I’m not trapped in it.

I can’t even fall back on old, reliable superhero nerd rage. Up until embarrassingly recently, I could become greatly offended by terrible superhero comics that violated my vague platonic ideal of what a superhero comic should be. A few years ago, I might have found it in me to write this entire essay on Identity Crisis, or a Mark Millar comic. But now, I try, but it fizzles. Superhero comics were never the most relevant things to begin with, and for me they’ve now spiralled off into utter inconsequence.  (Superhero movies, on the other hand, are a constant presence in the cultural conversation, as well as being formally dominating experiences, and I have little to no problem hating THOSE. I hate that new Batman movie and I haven’t even seen it yet.)

So to write about a comic that I truly hate, I have to pick one that affected me on a personal level. I’ve picked a comic that, although it isn’t particularly important, let me down tremendously, and that I came to hate through sheer disappointment. That comic is Matt Wagner’s Batman/Grendel II.

I wonder for how many people Matt Wagner’s name still resonates. Briefly glancing over a chronology of his work, most of his output over the last decade-and-a-half seems to be scattered projects from DC or Dynamite, mostly writing franchised characters like Zorro or Madame Xanadu; some short work writing his own characters, some work drawing Batman. But nothing much to suggest that, for a time in the late eighties and early nineties, Wagner was one of the most consistently interesting and experimental of mainstream-minded American cartoonists. His was a mixture of complex but balanced geometric page layouts, high fashion and art deco-influenced design, a deliciously cartoonish line embellished with painterly colors, all mixed with a strong, semi-modernist writing style.

His earliest major work, Mage, a traditional fantasy quest recast to then-current ’80s urban America and strained through a cheeseclotch of comic book iconography, was the kind of thrilling learn-on-the-job opus that only a young cartoonist can deliver – from page to page and chapter to chapter you can see Wagner gaining confidence and competence in equal measure, his skill rapidly catching up to his ambition. In the middle of Mage, Wagner began his other major early work, Grendel: Devil by the Deed, a re-make of his first comics series, a crude but vibrant entry into the ’80s black-and-white boom called Grendel, about a young, wealthy sociopath named Hunter Rose who becomes the world’s greatest criminal mastermind out of want for a challenge. Foregoing the previous work’s lightly-manga-influenced adventure comics style, and having substantially improved as a draughstman, Wagner re-told (and expanded) the entire Grendel story in a series of tableaus and captions, the panels of the comics page divided up to somewhat resemble the composition of a stained-glass window. It was an experiment that earned high praise from then-fresh superstar Alan Moore in his introduction to the collected edition, and arriving as it did simultaneously with the virtuoso final issues of Mage, together they announced Wagner as most definitely someone to watch.

Wagner’s career post-arrival followed what now seems like something of a familiar path for eye-catching independent artists working in a mainstream idiom. He only occasionally drew his own characters again in comics form, instead making the likely economically expedient (as well as, admittedly, often aesthetically interesting) choice of writing a long run of Grendel stories for other artists to interpret, and plying his drawing skills on various franchise characters (including a Terminator comic that was actually fairly excellent, if memory serves) and many, many cover art jobs. Through the ’90s he did draw several short Grendel stories (the character of Grendel long-since transformed into a sort of freefloating symbol of the evils of mankind, with many different characters through time and space taking on the persona of the devil), and delivered a long-awaited sequel to his Mage series. The latter, though, is best discussed through the prism of the twin projects that are my true, belated subject today: 1993’s Batman/Grendel and 1996’s Batman/Grendel II, or rather, the aesthetic distance between these two works, both written and drawn by Wagner himself.

 

The Aesthetic Distance.  (Left, Batman/Grendel.  Right, Batman/Grendel II.) 

 

Batman/Grendel is far from the best comic ever made, but it does happen to be one of my personal favorites. Wagner, operating at his most formally innovative — with page layouts to die for, and the most elegant linework of his career (not to mention beautiful coloring by Joe Matt) — delivers a comic that on the surface purports to be about an epic battle between two wealthy playboys who enjoy violence on rooftops while wearing masks, Wagner’s own perverted inverse of Bruce Wayne versus the genuine article. The heart of the comic is actually, however, the story of two women, Hillary Ferrington and Rachel King.

The narrative consistently paints both Grendel and Batman as obsessive, destructive, meticulous, and both more than a little inhuman, both callous to the emotional realities of human life, the only difference being that one is callous out of sadism and the other out of expediency. And in the vein of the best of Will Eisner’s work on The Spirit, their entire superheroic clash of wills is constructed largely as backdrop to the story of Hillie and Rachel’s friendship, their tortured pasts, and their struggles against an increasingly hostile world filled with terrors such as wealthy playboys who enjoy violence on rooftops while wearing masks.

 

Wagner still fulfills the genre demands of a Batman story – there’s plenty of Batman puzzling things out at a computer, or thinking terse caption thoughts about how the weights in his cape are perfectly suited for urban combat – but he structures the big emotional beats of the story all around Hillie and Rachel. It’s a comic that uses the superhero setting to tell a human story, and unlike 99 percent of the stories that try that trick, it unembarrasingly succeeds.

Again, it’s still a Batman comic, still an inter-company superhero crossover, and still indebted to genre and melodrama in ways that could be argued to work to its detriment as a piece of art for the ages. It isn’t the best comic ever made. But I think that its formal mastery, compelling story, and welcome attention to gender politics and genre critique make it something kind of special. I love it a lot.

Batman/Grendel II, released three years later, takes a huge shit on everything that made Batman/Grendel even a little bit special.


The sequel finds Wagner in a different mode of storytelling. Gone are the tightly constructed and narratively functional layouts. In their place are splash pages crowded with unmoored smaller panels that often lead your eye in the wrong direction, to no good aesthetic effect. The most functional visual device is a re-hash of Frank Miller’s already decade-old television narration from The Dark Knight Returns. Gone, too, is the elegant linework. In 1996, Wagner had begun to loosen up his art, freeing himself from his devotion to the angles and fashions of 1980s illustration. The result is art that may very well have been more fun and personally fulfilling for Wagner to draw, but which looks clumsy and ugly on the page when compared to his previous style.

Most importantly, gone is any thematic or narrative resemblance to what made Batman/Grendel a minor miracle. This is not a story about any kind of human experience. This is a story about Batman fighting a cyborg from the future. Overwrought captions describe in agonizing detail how each of them feel about every moment of the story, endless verbiage that unironically calls Batman “The Dark Knight” and Grendel “The Devil” as it painstakingly narrates their utterly pointless and generally uninteresting fight to a stalemate that Wagner pompously postures as enigmatic and ambiguous in a desperate attempt for any kind of meaningful resonance.

Batman/Grendel II‘s thorough betrayal of everything Batman/Grendel did right can be summed up by its very first page, in which Hillary Ferrington, the narrative and emotional heart of the former work, makes a cameo appearance that is used for exactly three purposes: (1) to display via her close-shaved head and multiple piercings that Wagner has ditched the elegant art deco stylings of old, (2) to lay exposition regarding the book’s fatuous internal free speech debate, and (3) to talk about how awesome Batman is. That Wagner is seemingly fine with disrespecting one of his best characters in this way speaks to the loss of something in him. And it is a loss that can be seen in his work through to the present.

After Batman/Grendel II, Wagner delivered his aforementioned Mage sequel, which displayed a similarly loose pencil and disinterest in the formal rigors of his previous work. It also, like Batman/Grendel II, displayed a much less nuanced sense of irony in regards to its straight-ahead mythic-adventure story. Where once Wagner used fantasy tropes to explore human situations, now the tropes themselves had become the focus. The same can be said of his post-’96 corporate superhero work (which makes up the bulk of his post-’96 work, in toto), at least that which I’ve read. Even the latter-day Grendel stories that he still occasionally writes for other artists are laden down with all the self-importance and forced darkness of a goth teen. Where once he used genre trappings as a delivery system for something bigger, he seems dedicated now to wallowing in those trappings for their own sake.

There’s a large degree of unfairness to what I’m saying. A perfectly valid view of all of this would be that I’ve merely gotten older, and my tastes have changed, while Wagner too has matured, and his art has shifted gears, just in a different direction. In some ways, his looser artwork may speak to Wagner achieving a more direct and free form of expression on the page. That I’m frustrated at the lack of particular thematic or formal tics in his current work is perhaps as much to do with my own nostalgia as any artistic lack on Wagner’s part. And like I said up top, Batman/Grendel II isn’t the worst comic in the world. If what you want is Batman fighting a murderous cyborg from the future, it might even be a pretty good one. But I can’t tell. I’m too sad at the loss of a cartooning voice I cherished, and too angry at the imposter that strolled in and tried to take his place. It’s an irrational feeling, but then again, so is hate.
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18 thoughts on “The Devil You Thought You Knew, The Devil You Wish You Didn’t

  1. I agree it’s a really nice piece.

    I always wondered what happened to Matt Wagner. I loved his Demon mini-series for DC way back when, and enjoyed some of his Grendel books, but then lost track of him. Looks like that was maybe just as well….

  2. Great post, Jason. I too was once a huge fan of Wagner back in the day, and agree with you that the first Batman/Grendel, while not the greatest book ever, is a pretty damn good genre comic. I actually think Wagner’s peak was issues #13-17 of the original Grendel series, which share many of the formalist experiments in page layout and story construction that you mentioned in regards to Batman/Grendel I.

    I will say that Wagner’s work on Sandman Mystery Theatre in the 90s, the same period he did Batman Grendel II (which I have not read and probably won’t bother to now), is actually quite strong, though it starts off slowly. Of course, a big part of the reason is that he was working with Guy Davis, one of the best artists in mainstream comics.

  3. This article was interesting, I think Wagner is often at the back of my mind when I read comics but I’ve never talked to anyone else who has read anything by him. I think a couple of my comic-book-reading friends had at least heard of Grendel but none read any of the comics. I know when the Batman: The Animated Series first aired I had just read Wagner’s 3-issue Two-Face Miniseries (Faces, in Legends of the Dark Knight) so that whole iteration of Batman has always been connected with Wagner’s art in my mind.

    I never put two-and-two together and realized he came out of the 80s b&w boom, that’s interesting.

    The first comics by Wagner that I read were Batman: Faces and Grendel: War Child, back in the summer of 1992 when I was 11. I already mentioned Faces, but it was the Grendel story (that Wagner wrote but didn’t draw) that I was most drawn to. I read a bunch of earlier Grendel stuff after that, but none of it made quite as big an impression on me. I think the other one I really liked was the Grendel Tales miniseries that was written and drawn by Darko Macan and Edvin Biukovic. Wikipedia informs me that they did two stories for that series and I know I read at least one of them, but I’m not sure which and it’s been a very long time.

  4. I did read some Sandman Mystery Theater and enjoyed it quite a bit – though I haven’t looked at it again since around the time it came out, and I can’t have read more than two or three story arcs. There was also a Batman Riddler story I have some memory of, looks like it was published between the Batman/Grendels — if memory serves, it had terrible (non-Wagner) art but a reasonably solid story by Wagner.

  5. Very nice. Very smart. Very WHATEVER DUDE ALL OF YOUR COLUMNS NORMALLY MAKE THE INTERNET SO MAD WHY ISN’T ANYONE MAD USUALLY IT IS FUNNY.

  6. If I’d shit on a Batman movie instead of a Batman comic probably people would have gotten all mad.

  7. I had the exact same whiplash going from the first BatGrendel to the second. It’s like Wagner looked at the stuff Image was pumping out and thought “Why am I trying so hard?” What makes it even worse is that it’s also a follow-up to a lush, painstakingly painted Grendel story (title escapes me) where the cyborg guy travels through time to who knows wher (Bat City ’97 turns out). So it’s actually a sequel to 2 really strong Wagner pieces.

  8. This article mentions the three years between the publication of Batman/Grendel and Batman/Grendel II, but the first series was actually written and drawn many years before it was published, the delay being caused by the financial collapse of the co-publisher Comico, who I believe were attempting to assert some ownership of Grendel as well before Wagner legally extricated it from their wreckage. Hope this helps explain the difference between the two works.

  9. My understanding is that Batman/Grendel was worked on for those many years, but not necessarily finished and sitting on a shelf. Wagner makes specific mention in the collected edition that he spent a lot of time working and re-working the material due to delays, which is one of the factors to which I attribute the quality of the end result.

  10. I think there’s a whole article to be written about the wasted promise of Matt Wagner. He was undoubtedly one of the most innovative mainstream cartoonists working in the late 80s and early 90s. As far as modern mainstream cartoonists are concerned, I think you could compare him with JH Williams in terms of formal ability but he was really a much bigger thinker.

    I still have fond memories of Mage 1, his Mage watercolor interlude, Devil by the Deed, his Bernie Mireault collaboration on Grendel, his micro-panel Grendel 2-parter and his Kurtzman tribute Grendel. Sure they’ve faded with time but almost everything has from the 80s boom. At one point, he was even starting out on a Japanese inspired “pillow book” and drew one episode of a gay adventure comic called The Aerialist which was quite beautifully drawn if I remember correctly. Noah already mentioned the interesting script for his Demon mini-series. I suppose if you look at his early works, you could say to yourself – this would be what David Mazzucchelli would have looked like if he had stuck with superheroes. So when I think of Wagner, it’s not hate which I feel but sadness at talent violently thrown away.

    For me, Batman/Grendel 1 was the beginning of the end. In retrospect, money over art became the norm at that point. I still picked up Batman/Grendel 2 but I had given up on his comics by that point.

  11. “So when I think of Wagner, it’s not hate which I feel but sadness at talent violently thrown away.”

    He has children to support and a house to pay for. Doesn’t seem to me “violent” as much as the erosion of youthful passion and the ability to make daring choices that tends to happen to suburban dads, which is what Matt is now and wasn’t when he did the early stuff we love.

  12. What Fing said. In a recent interview, Howard Chaykin basically ruled out creating his own strips any more — he’s a father and grandfather, he has a mortgage to pay…so it’s Wolverine from now on. Depressing…

    Wagner is still fairly young, though, and there’s every hope he’ll bounce back creatively!

  13. See, but Chaykin is still doing Black Kiss II, and Wagner still did his second Mage book after Batman/Grendel II. But that Mage book, as I write, showed a lot of the same problematic aesthetic shifts as the second Batman/Grendel. I don’t think we’re dealing with solely economic issues here, though I admit that’s obviously a part of it.

  14. Sure, I’m just repeating what Chaykin said. It might be a decision taken after finishing Black Kiss II.

    Myself, I haven’t any real problems with that second Mage book…

  15. I love Mage the Hero Discovered. Mage 2 was a huge disappointment.
    I think if Mage 2 had come out in the summer of 1989 like it was originally planned it would have been great.
    I agree with Marc. Grendel 16-19 were awesome. Matt was using 4 different art styles on it, great stuff.
    I still think he’s a really great artist but I don’t like the style he uses now.
    I don’t think Mage 3 will be that good based on how the second one came out.

  16. I thinked you’ve nailed something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I discovered Grendel WAY late in the game and in the early days of EBay, sought out the whole Comico series up to Batman/Grendel I. I was blown away by how big that story became and thought that Wagner was one of the all-time greats. Mage was also a heck of a lot of fun.

    But then when I had to catch up to everyone else, waiting for his output, it was Mage II, and Batman/Grendel II. I was like, is he using crayons now? Is the printer outputting the blacks at 150% line thickness? It didn’t seem like the same guy!

    So I’m still chasing the dragon, and will pick up his random Grendel stories he spits out now and then with a bit of hope. But I haven’t rediscovered the awe that I once had, sitting on my Lower East Side stoop, reading Grendel one issue after the next, devouring that entire series.

    (Nice Aerialist mention, Ng! I forgot about that one. That looked promising)

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