I read a lot of comic books as a kid. This series of posts is about the comics I read, and, occasionally, the comics that I should have read.

I knew about Matt Wagner’s signature creation, Grendel, for a long time before I ever read a comic book featuring the character. A devoted reader of superhero stories through my teenaged years, I was fascinated by the various independently published comic books I saw written up in Comics Buyers Guide, Amazing Heroes, and other periodicals that covered the broader scene. The output of Wagner was often celebrated in those pages, and my feeling was that it was held up as the epitome of cool, especially any story centered around the masked assassin known as Grendel.

Much as I was intrigued by the character, the comics he starred in seemed out of reach to me for various reasons, including the haphazard distribution methods of publisher Comico and the nominal but significant-to-my-strained-buying-budget higher price of those indie releases. Like a lot of readers, I suspect, I never actually read a story with Grendel until the 1993 two-part, intra-company crossover that set the character in opposition to venerable DC Comics titan Batman. Written and drawn by Wagner, the comic made me wish I had found my way to his work sooner.

Grendel might be cool, but that doesn’t mean he’s admirable. The alter ego of a famous writer called Hunter Rose, Grendel does away with criminals only to take their place, essentially murdering his way to crime boss status. In the crossover, his journey to Batman’s home turf of Gotham City is primarily motivated by boredom. He wants an adversary who’s worthy of him and spends much of his time goading the caped crusader, claiming he is the verge of committing a daring major crime. The characters are kept apart for a good portion of the story — which is presented in two prestige volumes, Devil’s Riddle and Devil’s Masque — and Batman and his lawman collaborators spend a long period of time assuming that longtime foe the Riddler is this real culprit behind the villainous shenanigans.

Wagner’s storytelling is impressively dense, often positioning Batman and Grendel on dueling narrative paths and wrapping in the travails of other Gotham residents. Some panels nest within other panels or cram up against each other in a manner that visually echoes Frank Miller’s highly influential The Dark Knight limited series from a few years earlier. And yet the comic feels distinct and singular, like only Wagner could conceive of it. The puzzle-box structure of the plot is rendered elegantly and the characterizations are magnetic. It turned out I was right. Wagner did make cool comics.

Previous entries in this series (and there are a LOT of them) can be found by clicking on the “My Misspent Youth” tag.