Grendel: Caring about Christine

When a comic character has been dead and gone for decades, one simple way to get the reader invested again is to show that character's raw emotions, and how they can carry a hurt that never dies. Christine Spar is back as Grendel and she is just as complex and angry as she ever was, but she's also devastatingly human.

Matt Wagner pulls off a fittingly neat and efficient narrative trick in the latest volume of Grendel. We're hundreds of years into the saga now, and Christine - a main character from the earliest days - has returned, cloned into new flesh. And the new Christine has work to do. This future world is run by leech-like vampires and she has to make it right, because Grendels fucking hate vampires, and this one most of all. 

Bringing back a new character as clone is the hoariest of cliches, but it takes less than an issue for this Christine to be established as a real person, because while she knows she is a copy of the original, she is still haunted by the death of her son, so long ago. 

It's the worst thing you could possibly imagine as a parent, to lose a kid. Christine's son was taken from her by a vampire Kabuki dancer hundreds of years ago, and she still feels his absence in the world, long after he would have turned to dust, even if he'd lived a full and rich life. 

All that lost potential will also be missed in Christine's world, wherever she is, and whatever flesh she is cloaked in.

It's a strong way to instantly give the character some weight and depth. It also helps to see her slice up some future fascist fucks in her first real outing - and Wagner's action sequences still sing with clarity and purpose - but it's the grief that makes her human, an ache that we all can recognise, if only in our worst nightmares.