Wednesday, May 15, 2019

Vivat Grendel: Future Shock!



The Grendel spirit had sprung from Rose's corpse into Spar, and then had a short affair with Li Sung, but where can you go with there? Where can you go with a devil like that?

Wagner had an answer - inspired by Bernie Mireault's idea of the Grendel persona taking over a crowd, rather than an individual - you take over the world, and take the storytelling into strange new places.

The issues of the monthly Grendel comic where months, years and centuries slip by are some of the best of the series - hard to follow at first, but the reward is worth the effort. Dialogue and plot all get heavy mid-80s experimental, telling the story with emojis and other symbols, with circular patterns of sound and fury echoing down the ages.

There are still crooks and liars and thieves and lovers, and banana-powered vampires that live forever, but in the future, everything becomes Grendel.

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