Mike Sterling's Progressive RuinLiving my life like a canary in a coalmine since 1969

Just add this to all the other dumb hills I’m dying on.

§ September 16th, 2024 § Filed under grendel, indies, swamp thing § 12 Comments

As anyone who’s been reading this site for a while knows, due to the various eyeball issues I’ve had over the last few years, I fell behind on my comics reading, and I’m still behind even ’til today. While things have improved healthwise in regards to my eyes, I do read a little slower than I used to, and comics ain’t comin’ out any less quickly, so the backlog continues apace.

As such, sometimes — well, usually — I don’t read comics the very week they come out, which is even more sad considering that with the new distributors in play, I often get the new books a week ahead of their official release and I still don’t read ’em until a week or three later.

Which is a long way of me telling you “I just read the last couple of issues of John Constantine Hellblazer: Dead in America series.” Specifically, I wanted to talk here about issue #8 by Simon Spurrier and Lisandro Estherren, in which these panels appeared, with John complaining about the Demon saying his name wrong:

…and a little later, here’s the Demon mocking John by deliberately mispronouncing the name:

YESSSSSS. The battle, once conceded by me when the musician Sting, the inspiration for Constantine, pronounced the name with “-teen,” rages once again thanks to this beautiful, beautiful creative team.

The first salvo was fired back in 1988 in Swamp Thing #73 by Rick Veitch and Alfredo Alcala:

So the war is back on! Take that, too many media adaptations getting his name wrong! Yes, this is the hill I’m dying on.

• • •
Speaking of being behind on reading, I finally got around to a couple of graphic novels. First up was Palooka-ville #24, the latest in Seth’s volumes of comics and photography an’ such.

The series started as a standard black and white comic book in 1991, transitioning to a small hardcover with issue #20 in 2010. If you’re looking at the years and issue numbers there, yes, the publication is very sporadic, with the previous issue coming out in 2017.

This issue came out July of last year, and I just got around to reading it now, in case you’re wondering just how far behind I am on things. So, you know, it’s probably good it took several years for this come out. Now I’m ready for the next issue in, say, 2031.

With all this time passing just with the most recent volume, I’d forgotten details about it from when I originally ordered it in February 2023. I was reading the first part of the book, with Seth relating stories of his teenage employment at a small inn, in which he mentions someone recognizing him because of his “funny voice.” That had me thinking “huh, I wonder what Seth’s voice sounds like, I wonder if I can find a video with him talking and hear it for myself.”

Then I get to the next feature of the book, which is a series of photographs showing some behind the scenes stuff for the short film of Seth’s puppetry, included as a DVD in this book.

I’d completely forgotten there was a DVD. It’s been well over a year and a half since I ordered it, and over a year since I obtained it, so yeah, no duh I forgot. But I just thought it was amusing that I started the book with the thought “what does Seth sound like?” and then discovering that right here in the book is a way for me to hear what he sounds like.

This short film is good, by the way. It’s essentially one of Seth’s melancholy strips brought to life. And Seth’s voice sounds perfectly fine, not funny at all.

The next book I finally got to was Grendel: Devil by the Deed Master Edition, which is a new 200 page expanded retelling of the original Grendel by his creator Matt Wagner (and colored in a black, white and red palette by his son, Brennan).

Now this book came out last November, so it hasn’t been quite a year yet. And, being a very longtime Grendel fan, I went for the signed and numbered slipcased edition, with a tipped in autographed plate featuring a new Grendel illustration.

At 200 pages, it is something like five times the length of the original “completed” version of this story, the one that ran as back-ups in the first Mage mini-series. The extra pages, I believe, incorporate events from the various comics about the original Grendel, Hunter Rose, that were published after the Devil by the Deed story, though I’ve not read those in a while so beyond some vague memories I can’t say for certain.

This new version continues the conceit of the previous one, taking the format of a book examining the double life of Hunter Rose after his death and the revelation of all his secrets, via blocks of text accompanying illustrations. It’s not a traditional panel-by-panel, dialogue-and-captions, comic book, putting the reader a step removed from the story’s events. Which, I think, is an effective tactic, adding to the mystery and mythic weight of the proceedings.

Speaking of mystery, there is a point in the book where the “author” notes that some pages were removed from Grendel’s journals regarding a particular event. Enough detail of the event is given that I seem to recall it from one of the other, later stories, but I need to check (and actually have pulled out the comics themselves to look when I have a chance). If I recall correctly, this involved some supernatural elements which do exist in the Grendel milieu, but I’m guessing Wagner wanted to keep those to a minium in this mostly-grounded initial story. Argent, the wolf-like monstrous “hero” of the story, the counterpoint to Grendel’s elegant and attractive villainy, remains as the one outright fanciful aspect of this crime story…outside the guy in the costume leaping around the city, natch.

I still wonder what would have happened if Wagner had been able to finish the very first version of the story, intended as a six-issue mini-series but cancelled after three. It was…crude, but energetic, with what I still think are striking covers. It was told in the traditional comic book style, and it would have been interesting to see what story elements from the later retellings would have had their origins in the unseen chapters of this original comic. It’s hard to imagine the depth of the later twists and turns being conveyed quite as well with the standard comic storytelling, Wagner’s youthful abilities aside.

I’ll tell you one thing, though…the book ends with an “author’s credit” for the fictional writer of this tell-all of Grendel, who is the star of the first story of the 1986 series. Which of course made me want to pull those out and reread them. Sigh. And that’s how your pal Mike got even more behind on current comics, because he keeps wanting to look at his old ones again.