Grendel Tales: Four Devils, One Hell - A Tale of Two Artists

So here’s something interesting (I hope you all agree). I’ve spoken in some interviews about how my run of Grendel Tales: Four Devils, One Hell was supposed to be published by Comico, back in day, to the extent that I wrote four plus issues and Philip Bond drew two before Comico went bust. The run was supposed to come after Grendel #40 too, giving Matt Wagner a break before he started War Child. (Fantastic opportunity given to me by Matt, right? I had only done my first GN London’s Dark by this point.) Anyway, when Dark Horse took over the property, it was a year or so later and Matt felt he needed to relaunch with his own work not mine, which was totally understandable. My Grendel series followed straight after. By then, however, Philip had moved onto other projects and so the brilliant Teddy Kristensen was brought in to do the wonderful full color job that he did. Anyway, the image you see if one of the Gloria, one of the “four devils” as drawn by Philip in my sketchbook.

I don’t have the photocopies of Philip’s art anymore, but I recall it was wonderful in the way that he draws. In fact, I’ve always imagined a collection of Teddy’s finished arc with Philips’ pages in back of it, to show how two equally talented artists but with very different styles and perspectives handled the exact same script. The last time I spoke to Philip about it, maybe twenty years ago, he said the pages were in storage in England. Things vanish from storages all the time, so who knows nowadays. Anyway, here’s a tease of my idea with Teddy’s depiction of the same character to compare. Dare to dream.