I'm coming at this series from a somewhat different angle, since I've actually read all of the original Grendels from Comico. So this is more of a re-reading than anything else, and I suspect that my basic familiarity with what's coming makes the complex story more easy to get into right off the bat. However, the complexities of politics and religion that sit at the center of God and the Devil are fascinating and well worth the investment of time and thought. Even if the large cast of characters and the intricacies of a strange future society aren't clear upon first reading, readers can take solace in the fact that eventually all will be explained and in the meantime, there is jaw-dropping, gorgeous recolored artwork to look at.
Wagner's Grendel has always been a fairly dark story, involving crime lords, vampires, the corruption of religion and politics and humanity as a whole. God and the Devil isn't the darkest that the story gets, but it certainly is grim. The setting gives us an oppressive government/corporate/religious hierarchy that leaves inflated prices and starving masses, not to mention corruption amongst law enforcement and religion, the two structures that are supposed to protect the people of this era. Wagner also hints at something darker in the personalities of these institutions, with Pope Innocent's unhealthy appetites for young boys and torture or Pellon Cross's mercenary sensibilities.
Mind you, the heroes of the piece aren't all bright and shiny either. Orion Assante, the driven protagonist of the piece, has an incestuous relationship with his twin sisters and is a manipulative person with ties to a secret society. And Eppy Thatcher, in addition to wearing the mantle of Grendel (a.k.a. The Devil in Wagner's universe), has little problem with murdering, theft or inciting riots. It's this sort of moral relativism, where at least these damaged people are seeking the fall of a corrupt order, that gives God and the Devil some of its darkness.
While the story may be built on darkness, though, the artwork is built on clarity and color, and it is quite simply fantastic. Snyder's imaginative, exaggerated anatomy for some of the characters and his depiction of a ruined future really set the stage for the story, and I love the amount of story that he manages to get onto the page without sacrificing an all-important sense of hedonistic space in the Catholic Tower. It must also be said that Jeromy Cox's colors are stunning, bright and distinctive without losing the dark tone of the series, making the art just pop off the page and showing off every important contour and detail in the work by Snyder and Geldhof.
Grendel is one big saga spanning a long time, one of comics' first successful indy epics, but it also works surprisingly well in these discrete story arcs that Dark Horse is releasing. While I enjoy almost all of the Grendel stories, it is in God and the Devil where Wagner really seemed to find his feet, giving the story a complexity and scope that it hadn't had up to that point. It strikes me that God and the Devil would appeal to a wide base of readers, from those who enjoy the political fiction of Brian Wood on Channel Zero to those who enjoy the complex, morally gray politics of Priest's Black Panther, not to mention those who are just looking for an engaging tale of post-apocalyptic science-fiction.
