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How much Hunter Rose is too much Hunter Rose?

Richard Burton over at the Forbidden Planet blog wrote “Don’t ever go back to a first love they say. And it’s so true,” in regards to Grendel Behold The Devil #1.  His basic argument against the book is that it isn’t Wagner’s original Devil By The Deed, “a perfect little tome that perfectly encapsulates the life and times of Hunter Rose.”   He goes on to say that here that Wagner is retreading familiar ground in a lazy and unoriginal manner and that these latest iterations of Hunter Rose’s story somehow lessens the impact or importance of Devil By The Deed.

Now, I’m not going to argue against Burton’s summaries and judgment of Devil By The Deed because I agree with almost everything that he says about that book.  I’ve got mixed feelings about the Red, White & Black stories; some of them are brilliant while some fall flat.  But I don’t see how any of them “sully” Devil By The Deed in any way.  My copy (actually copies) of Devil By The Deed are still sitting on my bookshelf, where the original has been for around 20 years now.  But one interesting point that Burton does make is that when all is said and done, Behold The Devil will be about four times larger than Devil By The Deed and maybe the question of “can there be too much Hunter Rose” is a valid one?

In Behold The Devil #5, Wagner has done something very interesting; he’s changed the “realism” of Hunter’s story to make it more similar and in line with the supernatural in the second half of the original Comico run.  In the original Grendel regular series from Comico, there was a shift around issue #18 where the book became much more supernatural, fantastical and wild than the original Hunter Rose or even Christine Spar or Brian Li Sung stories ever were.  With Eppy Thatcher, Orion and Grendel Prime, Grendel became much more than a psychological crime story.  It became a legend in some ways, capable of being all things storywise.  But even with the unexplained presence of Argent in Hunter and Christine’s story, those early Grendels could never be described as fantastical or supernatural.

In this latest issue though, after Hunter has exhausted every practical way of trying to discover who’s watching him, he turns to the supernatural and turns to a modern witch doctor.  It’s an odd thing to see in a what’s typically been a crime story but you have to remember, this is the same world that not too much later begins to have vampires showing up in it.  This is the same world where Hunter’s main adversary is a wolfman or something.  Adding in the presence of voodoo and witch doctors brings the supernatural more to the forefront of Hunter’s latest story, something that Wagner has skirted around before.

So is too much Hunter Rose a bad thing?  Wagner has a story to tell here and it’s a different one than what he’s told before.  And with most of the post-Devil By The Deed Hunter stories, Wagner has experimented with story and narrative format, page layouts, linework and tone of the stories.  Hunter and Wagner have been the only constants throughout it all.  Heck, even Devil By The Deed is one grand experiment, telling his character’s tale through a prose biographical approach.  If anything, Behold The Devil harkens back to Wagner’s aborted first stab at telling Hunter’s story in a long form comic book.  But after 20+ years, you can see how Wagner is much more in control now than he was then.  Even though he tried then, I don’t think that Wagner would have been able to successfully pull off a Hunter story this long like he is now. 

Grendel: Behold The Devil #5
Written and Drawn by: Matt Wagner
Lettered by: Tom Orzechowski

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