In 1992 Matt Wagner (writer and inker) and Pat Mckeown (penciler) started publishing Grendel Warchild with Dark Horse, the latest iteration of Wagner’s Grendel character started 10 years earlier with Comico. The 10 issue series was a Lone Wolf and Cub shaped post apocalyptic epic crammed with vividly reimagined sci-fi tropes held together by palace intrigue plot.
Two years later Dark Horse would collect the series into a trade paperback but in the meantime, Wagner started organizing Grendel Tales, a collection of miniseries set in the War Child universe but telling discreet self contained stories. Hitting comic book stores in ‘93, each miniseries is helmed by a different creative team and the project as a whole displayed a commendably large range of artistic voices, all visually and tonally distinct from one another. Thirty one years later its possible to page through the Grendel Tales two volume Omnibus edition by Dark Horse and get a sense that this limited run project had all of the independence and new creativity the equally vaunted and derided ‘Image revolution’, happening at the same time, was trying to tell us it had.
Of the Grendel Tales series, Grendel Tales: Homecoming is the only one to not only directly involve Wagner and McKeown but also follow one of the characters from Warchild. Susan was a minor yet pivotal character in Warchild. After the events of that story we follow her aimlessly wandering back to her childhood home and reconnecting with an old would-be flame. Over the course of three issues the ill-fated love affair transitions into a story of revenge that is direct, efficient, and mean with a no-frills commitment to genre story telling reminiscent of straight to home video movies releases of the 80’s and 90’s.
The thing that elevates the whole affair, and the reason why I’m writing about it decades after I read it is the color work by Dave Cooper.
Dave Cooper is a Canadian artist who started working in comics in the early 90’s and eventually took his leave of the medium to adventure in the worlds of Fine Art oil painting and Hollywood animation. He has thankfully recently returned to the world of comics but his meandering career can best be explained by the fact that Cooper grows bored of his work easily. In his 2019 Taschen monograph “Pillowy”, Cooper confesses…
“Whenever something I’m working on becomes too polished, I need to stop and do something else, or experiment with a new style or discipline. I need to return to that position where I don’t feel like an expert. I don’t like the feeling of being so comfortable creating that I’m like a well-oiled machine. When that happens an alarm goes off inside.”
‘Well-oiled’ is a descriptor that seems better suited to Chris Ware’s vector-like ink work or Charles Burns’ megalomaniacal control rather than Cooper’s quivering line and his ubiquitously biological forms. However it is difficult to imagine that Cooper was ever out of his depth, that he ever struggled too mightily with that gulf between intention and ability all ‘developing’ artists struggle with. It is this lack of friction that has pushed him, throughout his career, from mastery of one particular medium or rendering style to another. He is an artist that craves the shaky legs of an amateur rather than the ‘well-oiled acumen of a master. The irony is he’s always been a virtuoso.
It is this constant restlessness that makes his work on Grendel Tales: Homecoming a fleeting expression, a one-off utterance in the middle of a wide ranging career.
Homecoming is the only example I can find of Cooper making comics as part of a collaborative team rather than sole creator. Here he is responsible for “painted art” and the result is completely different than anything Wagner and McKeown did in Warchild and anything any party has done since.
The color in Grendel Warchild is handled by the recently deceased Bernie Mireault, who himself colored two other Grendel Tales series, and Kathryn Delaney. Working in solid, largely flat opaque color (presumably acrylic or gouache) their color has a certain volume to it, a weight that digitally colored comics have simply never had. Utilizing a wide palette and tonal range the entire book has the type of super saturated easily parsed dynamism one assumes none comic reader reflexively associate with the medium.
In contrast, Cooper’s work on Homecoming uses this weighty application of color as its base, both figuratively and literally, and then proceeds to slather color pencil texture on every surface in every panel. Where Mireault and Delaney’s work felt tangible and most likely smooth to the touch, Cooper’s panels are rough, grimey, spongey, chipped, corroded, and worn…always. There’s an ever presence of texture here that presages Cooper’s oil color work where layers of a transparent mark making compound into a dense haze. In this earlier form this infatuation with texture would seem manic were it not counterbalanced by an astute black line that describes form more than it does simply contain fields of color.
Cooper also takes a designer’s eye to color. For instance- Susan’s chief visual characteristic is her white skin (alabaster, not Caucasian) and green hair. Cooper chooses to (though perhaps Wagner had some input on this as well) bathes the scenery, people in the background, and even props in similar shades of purple.
Both Homecoming and Warchild make effective use of color as a diegetic narrative tool
but in Warchild they fade seamlessly into the storytelling (a feat that requires its own sort of mastery) where as, in Homecoming, every image is so convincingly weighty that they sometimes threaten to gum up the works of narrative momentum. It is only McEown’s expert action blocking and pervasive geographical clarity that keeps us moving. There’s a push pull tension here that balances out into a perfect symmetry.
Another tension is the ‘cartoony’ quality that McEown’s mostly realistic (if slightly large headed) figures take on with Cooper’s “color artwork”. There’s an understated squash and stretch on these pages, as well as a certain exaggeration in character design that is more cartoony than most things in the still post Dark Knight, Image revolution contemporary, ‘indie-but-not-quite-Fantagraphics’ landscape of the time. Yet the miniseries is also bolted to the ground by a pungent violent realism that evokes mud, blood, and sexual violence. The two tendencies make for an odd pairing that balances like a see-saw.
Grendel Tales: Homecoming as a whole straddles two paradigms. Wagner and McEown’s workman-like commitment to plot and genre storytelling are anathema to some of the farther flung reaches of the art comix/small press/alt comics/why-don’t-we-have-a-better-term-for-this world Cooper’s work is comfortable in while Cooper’s outre command of craft makes the series stick out like a sore, pulsating, recently hammered, disturbingly glistening thumb- astounding considered how off the beaten path some of the approaches to comics making in the other Grendel Tales series are.
After this Wagner and McEown would go their separate ways. Matt Wagner has since returned to the world of Grendel Prime (the main character of Grendel Warchild) to some notably interesting results but nothing looks or feels quite like Homecoming. Dave Cooper continued working in comics for several more years, shifting through an array of rendering approaches before eventually taking a hiatus from comics that only recently came to an end. In that time he never worked with another collaborator in his comics work and, like Wagner, never made anything quite like this again. The closest we come are some painted (Weasel) covers that sport a similar heavy opaque paint textured by color pencil approach but the effect is different when applied to his own cartooning rather than McEown’s. Pat McEown has gone on to other projects as well but I am less familiar with his output. It is however doubtful anything feels like Homecoming– a series that was the momentary result of an artistic ‘three body problem’- an odd ephemeral merging of styles and sensibilities easily lost in the shifting sands of time in a disposable medium.
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