Grendel: Devil’s Crucible — Defiance

Five hundred years ago, Grendel Prime was given a mission to find a replacement Earth to re-establish the Grendel name.  The short version is that he failed and has now returned to his homeworld, only to find it far more hostile to his kind.  Anything relating to or bearing the mark of Grendel has been outlawed by humanity’s new rulers, the Necro-Lords.  Ruling from on high in their casedrals, they have ground humanity down harder than any of the Grendel Khans ever did.  Yet even if Prime is the greatest warrior his people have ever created, how can he take them on all by himself?  No, he’s going to need some friends who are both new, and very, very old.

“Defiance” is the first part of a new trilogy of “Grendel” stories promised at the end of creator Matt Wagner’s last one,“Devil’s Odyssey.”  While I’m glad to see that he’s continuing to push the story of the characters and world he created decades ago even further, this is only an okay start to things.  What’s good is that Prime remains ever the taciturn badass and stacking the odds against him only makes it easier to get involved with his struggle.  Though his run-down future dystopia has some decent visuals and eccentric touches, it also comes off as somewhat derivative of other such setting even with the callbacks it has to past Grendel iconography.

One of those callbacks is too familiar for its own good.  While the big bads are initially identified as Necro Lords, we soon find out that they’re simply the latest coming of a threat that will be very familiar to longtime “Grendel” readers.  Yeah it’s These Guys again, because having an Earth ruled by humans who have rejected everything Grendel after five hundred years would’ve been too interesting, I guess.  At least Wagner ends this volume with the ballsy return of a character whose story was supposed to have concluded long ago.  We’ll see if that’s a smart idea when “Sedition” kicks off.