This is a book we never expected to see: a collection of the very earliest adventures of Matt Wagner’s dark signature character Grendel, the stories that were reworked into Devil by the Deed more than twenty years ago. It’s the very earliest published work of Wagner’s, and – while he was quite good for a tyro – he still was very new to the field, and had a lot to learn.
Grendel Archives collects the Grendel story from Comico’s Primer #2 from 1982 and the first three issues of the subsequent first series of Grendel comics. (Those issues are all very expensive these days, so, if nothing else, Grendel Archives makes them available at a reasonable price to all of us who have discovered Wagner in the years since.) Grendel is not quite the seemingly omnipresent, omnicompetent near-future crimelord of Devil by the Deed and the more recent short stories; he’s mostly an assassin-for-hire in this story. Deadly, yes. Uncannily skilled and talented, of course. (This is comics, after all.) But he’s not yet the lord and master of all he surveys that he later became. He’s cockier and not quite as self-assured. He even, in the Primer story, corrects one victim who calls him merely Grendel: “That’s The Evil Grendel!”
Wagner stopped this series after issue #3; I don’t know, personally, whether it was by his choice or due to low sales. He launched his other signature series, Mage: The Hero Discovered, soon afterward, and the Grendel story, in a radically reconfigured form, appeared as a series of back-up stories during the second half of that first series of Mage’s run, and was then collected as Devil by the Deed. The reworked version of this story was Wagner’s first major success; Mage had some good parts and bad parts, though it got stronger as it went along, but Devil by the Deed was all of a piece and is still one of the high points of mid-80s comics.
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