Grendel: Devil's Odyssey by Matt Wagner and Brennan Wagner

The Grendel stories used to be about the flaws of their protagonists: usually, eventually, in the tragic sense. Each new person behind the mask would have strengths, of course - well, Brian Li Sung might be an exception there - but their weaknesses were just as important, and led to each one's inevitable end.

But then creator Matt Wagner had an idea that seemed good at the time: what if there was a perfect Grendel? One whose flaws were entirely about lack of vision and emotion, a cyborg killing machine willing, able, and ready to do whatever his deeply crapsack world asked of him. It was an intriguing idea in context, and at the time - the early '90s - it was very in tune with the zeitgeist of big adventure comics.

Unfortunately, it leads to the question: where do you go after perfection? And Wagner's Grendel stories since War Child - that is, since 1992 - are either flashbacks to the first Grendel, Hunter Rose (who is problematically "perfect" in different ways, seeing as how he's basically Evil Batman) or more Grendel-Prime stories. They were mostly Hunter Rose for the Aughts and into the Teens; Wagner seems to have shifted back to the end of his timeline more recently. (A lot of those stories over the past twenty-five or so years have also been crossovers with other properties, too, which are, as far as I can tell, roughly in continuity in the sense that the Grendel in question did go over to the other universe, did some stuff, and came back to say "that was weird" and then never talk about it again.)

Grendel: Devil's Odyssey was an eight-issue series, starting in 2019, and collected in this form soon after it was finished in 2021. There's already been the first of three follow-up series, still focused on Prime, so Wagner is clearly back into the thick of Grendel these days, adding on new stories to the end of his timeline.

Grendel stories can sometimes - especially in the interstitial stories of the '80s as Wagner moved from one crapsack future to another future, crapsack in excitingly different ways - turn into tours of the steam-grommet factory, with Wagner infodumping all of his ideas about this particular society and all of the ways in which it is horrible. Odyssey is not exactly in that vein, but it comes out of the same impulse in Wagner's storytelling: showing us one society after another, through the eyes of Prime and his flying drone companion Siggy.

It's another couple of hundred years on after Prime reinstated the Orion dynasty, and, inevitably, the world has fallen into strife and corruption. (Democracy has never and probably will never work in Grendel's world - it's just a succession of strongmen, and things are "good" for the world when the particular strongman is basically honest, smart, and hard-working. These people, in Wagner's world, are very rare.) Prime has become a legend, off doing whatever in the hinterlands, but the Last Good Ruler calls him, using the Secret Codes of Yore, and tasks Prime with finding a new home for humanity among the stars, because that's exactly the kind of job where you want a murderous and unimaginative centuries-old cyborg inculcated with a toxic mindset.

Anyway, there was a Secret Starship built, filled with shiny technology and the requisite embryos (of clones of Orion and his sisters, as the assumedly-best human beings ever) to re-establish the human race somewhere else. Prime agrees to fly on this ship to find New Earth (no one calls it New Earth).

The ship launches, and, of course, to do that the besieged palace of the Last Good Ruler needs to drop its shields, which means this is not only the Last Best Hope of Grendel-kind, but also the immediate death of the Last Good Ruler and all of his loyal lackies.

Most of the series is taken up by a series of planetary visits. Prime is immortal, and it's not clear how long this is taking during the bulk of the series - at least months between planets, maybe longer if this universe is more relativistic and less skiffy. (We do get a how-much-further-in-the-future-it-is update near the very end.) He lands on planets, meets the natives, assesses the situation, and usually ends up killing a lot of creatures, many of which are sentient.

The first two major worlds we see are resource-constrained: the first has plants that sequester water in fantastically efficient ways, and the second is an icebox with a massive sophisticated population that each spends 99% of their time in coldsleep. Then we get a planet where, essentially, virtual-reality AI took over and then everyone died from a vaguely-defined "virus," leaving a robot-populated world still chugging along. Prime does not understand these worlds as well as he thinks he does, but comes to realize they're bad candidates, and so moves on.

Next up is a medievaloid world with three sapient races living in harmony, which is nice, but it's under a regime where trial-by-combat is the only way of adjudicating anything. We get a little Heinleinian "an armed society is a polite society" chatter, but Wagner - and, more importantly, Prime - thinks this is not a good thing, so Prime turns himself into the leader of a movement to get rid of this central tenet of the entire global civilization. It does not go wrong because of that, though, but instead because the head of this culture - at least the big guy locally; the global situation is very vague - is a very obvious Trump parody, and Prime's tactics don't work on idiots.

So Prime and his flying robot buddy have to leave that planet, too.

Last, they're zipping through the ether when they get confronted by a vast Armada from the Consortium, the vastly more technologically advanced mega-civilization of the galaxy, which has been watching Prime for some time and now have come to judge him. It does not go well; the Grendel mindset assumes physical force is the best option, and he's vastly outclassed. So Prime is shooed back to Earth and his mission quietly cancelled by the actual adults of the galaxy.

There, he gets a quick glimpse of what new crapsack thing has happened there in the intervening centuries - spoiler! it still has to do with goddamn Grendels, who are the cockroaches of this particular future. And we assume the next series will be Prime fighting to free this world, once again, from some non-Grendel tyrant and installing a proper Grendel tyrant, the way it's supposed to be.

Wagner's art is strong, his dialogue is quirky and specific, and his characters are interesting. This is an episodic story that doesn't really move anything forward, but it's told well and is entertaining in that cynical Grendel manner throughout. I could wish that Wagner would finally get beyond Prime, but that clearly is a vain hope. I'm not even going to pretend that a Grendel story with a happy ending, or a functional human civilization, is even possible: the point of the series is entirely in the opposite direction.