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GRENDEL: RED, WHITE & BLACK #3
Mildly Recommended (5/10)
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Dark Horse Comics/Maverick imprint
"Devil's Clash"
Artist: Michael Avon Oeming
Letters: Sean Konot
"Devilish Escapades"
Artist: Phil Noto
Letters: Cary Grazzini
"Devil, Devil On the Roof"
Artist: Zander Cannon
Letters: Jason Hvam
"Devil, Deed, Denouement"
Artist: Ashley Wood
Letters: Cary Grazzini
"The Devil's Tide"
Artist: Mike Huddleston
Letters: Sean Konot
Writer: Matt Wagner
Editor: Diana Schutz
Price: $4.99 US/$7.99 CAN |
With The Art of Sin City already released and Art of Hellboy on the way, I find myself wondering when The Art of Grendel will be released. In all honesty, I'd rather see something like that than more Grendel: Red, White and Black, because the draw of this book for me is seeing various artists take on Grendel, and the stories aren't doing much for me. Wagner's tales of Grendel seem either like generic crime fables or stories that lack context except for die-hard Grendel fans with photographic memories, and while there are a couple stories in here I really liked, the others all failed to connect with me, as I felt like I was outside the circle of fans who were meant to understand it.
Case in point is the lead story, "Devil's Clash," with art by Oeming. The artwork, as expected, is fantastic, and I love the way Oeming depicts Grendel as almost rubbery limbed, fluid and deadly, contrasting Argent the wolf with sharp edges and more darkness. The story, however, relies on the reader not only knowing Grendel, Argent, Stacy and Barry Palumbo, but all of the intricacies of the relationships between those characters. I was never entirely clear where Stacy was, or if she was entirely a hallucination, and I couldn't figure out what she was supposed to be seeing that Hunter Rose didn't want her to see.
I'll confess that part of my disappointment stems from Wagner's use of illustrated fiction rather than comics, which is a format I like sporadically at best, and not at all when it involves poetry, which is something I'm very, very picky about. So while the artwork by Ashley Wood and Phil Noto was terrific (I particularly liked Wood's use of red), the stories that accompanied it left me mostly bored.
The other thing that I think is not working for me in these stories is that Grendel seems to much a part of the tale, and I prefer the stories where he's more of a force on the outside. That definition fits the two stories in the book that I did like, the "Devil, Devil On the Roof" tale that plays up the old chestnut of a man marked for death and trying to surround himself with guards and "The Devil's Tide," a story of a doctor who finds himself forced into mob service through unfortunate circumstances.
Those two stories also feature my favorite art in the book, quite honestly. I've been a fan of Huddleston's work since I saw The Coffin, and his work on shadows, realistic backgrounds and liquid really brings some atmosphere to "Devil's Tide." I loved his use of red for both drinks and blood, a splash of color against his moody black and white artwork. Meanwhile, Zander Cannon, whose work I last saw (without collaborators) in Replacement God, has grown tremendously, with an almost Paul Pope style of elongated anatomy and beautiful layouts.
This comic book was not among this week's new releases.
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