After the break, check out the latest episode of Comic Books Are Burning In Hell with Tucker Stone, Joe McCulloch and Chris Mautner!
In this episode, we're talking about Matt Wagner's Grendel--well, as much of it as we could fit in before we reached emotional capacity for...the devil! That turned out to be basically Grendel as it was published by Comico in the 1980s, which means "everything Grendel up until you get to Grendel Prime"). There is a little diversion into a Dark Horse mini-series written by Diana Schutz and drawn by Tim Sale, and as few cursory mentions of Grendel Red, White & Black as we can get away with, but neither of those take up so much time that we can't safely call this one "The Comico Years".
Missing Matt Seneca on this one? You don't have to! In fact, you can catch up with Matthew right now over at TCJ, where he's sitting atop a stack of accolades, enduring the jealous stares of Risograph freaks from across the globe: our very own CBABIH wildcard interviewed the great Olivier Schrauwen. Read it now, if you haven't already. And in that case? Read it again! But before you read it a third time, check out the other big bad TCJ interview of late that is connected to this podcast (we didn't plan it this way!) which is Zach Rabiroff talking to Mr. Grendel himself, Matt "Fucking" Wagner!
You think that's it for the links? Buddy: you gotta get with the program. Joe wasn't just spitting Wagner history this week, he was also delivering the official TCJ review of Monica, the first new book from Daniel Clowes since that one that was...about time travel, I think? Somebody wears a blue outfit? When I googled it I found the name "Patience", but I swear it was called something that had the word "blue" in the title. Anyway: Monica is a lot better than that one, buddy! And in a delightful bit of syncronicity, Tucker (that's me!) made a return appearance as Punisher Expert over at Roach Koach, the best nu-metal podcast in the world! While the first time around I was talking about the Thomas Jane Punisher movie (which sucks!), this time around I was talking about Punisher War Zone, which doesn't. Will I return to talk about Dirty Laundry? No!
What else? Well, there's this: if you want to read these comics we're talking about, we do think the best versions are the versions that require the most legwork to track down and are the most expensive, which is the original back issues published by Comico in the 1980s--that's Grendel 1-40. Or you can read the versions that Dark Horse published years later, with updated coloring and on different kinds of paper and new titles and...well. Or, you can read them the way Chris did, and Tucker has, which is the Grendel Omnibus volumes, specifically #2 (which has the Pander Brothers stuff, Matt Wagner going full Frank Miller and Brian, the stage manager who had a no good very bad couple of days) and #3 (which is where you see how the world ends and get to hang out with Tim Sale and John K. Snyder) and if you're a glutton for unnecessary comic book prequel kinda stuff, you can read Omnibus #1 as well. (You will need to read Devil by the Deed, which is also in Omnibus #1, but maybe you should just wait for this all new version that's coming out) Buddy, it's all up to you! You could also never read them: we won't know unless you tell us, and there's only one guy who ever tells us, usually by sending an email to Joe. (He used to leave a comment but Matt put a stop to that.) Anyway: that's that! The links above go to Bookshop, which isn't Amazon, it's an affiliate link, which means that if you buy from it, there's a kickback to CBABIH. We're on Instagram if you want to try to guess what we'll record on next: good luck out there in the world to come! (And speaking of Instagram, I'll be trying to break the ten minute barrier on my ingestion of a dozen Krispy Kremes on Sunday, October 15th at 3PM EST. Be there to show some love!)
For the record, the Pander Bros. inker whose name I couldn’t remember is Jay Geldhof. The second artist on Silverback whose name I couldn’t remember is John Peck.
Posted by: Joe McCulloch | 2023.10.15 at 10:43
You guys keep saying art deco when you really mean art nouveau
Posted by: Dylan | 2023.10.15 at 13:31
"Maw Green!" I scream into the void. "The name of the strip was Maw Green! Maw Green"
Posted by: "jeet heer" | 2023.11.09 at 00:55