“In a distant past shrouded in the mists of time;
When man lived savagely in the the shadow of all-mighty Wyrd, the God of Fate, and in terror of Satan, Dragon-Lord of the Underworld.”
Thus begins DC Comics’ Beowulf: Dragon-Slayer. Not content with merely adapting the story of the Anglo-Saxon hero to a comic context, scribe Michael Uslan and artist Ricardo Villamonte drive the seventies comic book Sword & Sorcery muscle car straight over a cliff into Gonzo Gulch.
Everybody remembers the basic story from English class, right? Prince of the Geats, Beowulf, does a solid for Hrothgar, King of the Danes, whose got a problem with a monster named Grendel. In this version, Grendel is being explicitly egged on by his dead-beat dad, Satan. Beowulf, for symmetry, is a tool in the hands of the Wyrd (who sometimes seems to be a stand-in for Yahweh, but other times more ambiguous in goodness).
Anyway, Beowulf also has a companion/love interest in the form of Swedish amazon Nan-Zee. He’s on his way to Daneland; She’s a siren-esque “slave-maid of Satan.” Once they do their “meet cute” it’s off to battle Grendel...only first they’ve got to contend with swamp-dwelling reptile men, dwarfish trolls, and a door to the underworld. There Beowulf kills Satan’s three-headed sabertooth tiger watchdog and then busts right to Satan’s throne room.
When man lived savagely in the the shadow of all-mighty Wyrd, the God of Fate, and in terror of Satan, Dragon-Lord of the Underworld.”
Thus begins DC Comics’ Beowulf: Dragon-Slayer. Not content with merely adapting the story of the Anglo-Saxon hero to a comic context, scribe Michael Uslan and artist Ricardo Villamonte drive the seventies comic book Sword & Sorcery muscle car straight over a cliff into Gonzo Gulch.
Everybody remembers the basic story from English class, right? Prince of the Geats, Beowulf, does a solid for Hrothgar, King of the Danes, whose got a problem with a monster named Grendel. In this version, Grendel is being explicitly egged on by his dead-beat dad, Satan. Beowulf, for symmetry, is a tool in the hands of the Wyrd (who sometimes seems to be a stand-in for Yahweh, but other times more ambiguous in goodness).
Anyway, Beowulf also has a companion/love interest in the form of Swedish amazon Nan-Zee. He’s on his way to Daneland; She’s a siren-esque “slave-maid of Satan.” Once they do their “meet cute” it’s off to battle Grendel...only first they’ve got to contend with swamp-dwelling reptile men, dwarfish trolls, and a door to the underworld. There Beowulf kills Satan’s three-headed sabertooth tiger watchdog and then busts right to Satan’s throne room.
That’s just the second issue.
What follows is a quest to gain magical “zumak fruit” to best Grendel. Along the way, they’ll encounter pygmies, druids working for Sumerian space gods in flying saucers, Dracula menacing a lost tribe of Israel, and finally the Minotaur.
A pivotal point of the drama arrives with this scene:
That’s right: Grendel stabs Satan with a stalactite and seizes the throne of Hell because he’s mad his infernal majesty chose Dracula (literally Satan’s son) as heir instead of Grendel.
Tragically, the whole high-concept saga that would have made history and literature professors loose sanity points like a character in Call of Cthulhu (if they'd read it) only lasted six issues. Why, oh why, hasn’t DC collected this?
4 comments:
I'm going to have to track these down.
Ditto! I love a good quest!
I picked these up on the cheap at last year's Emerald City Comicon and I can verify that they are mind-bendingly good. A few years back, Gail Simone brought back Beowulf, Claw, and Stalker in the pages of Wonder Woman. And I think I heard the Great Geat is due to resurface in DC's Sword of Sorcery title soon to hit the racks.
@jon - You are right. Beowulf was in S&S #0. No indication it's the same version of Beowulf, though--at least not yet.
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