New Batman volume successful despite flaws

By Jake Meltzer

Published April 11, 2008

One could say that Bruce Wayne and Hunter Rose are mirror images of each other. They’re handsome, wealthy and charming, and they also have masked alter egos. The story of how Bruce Wayne became Batman is more than well-known, but the origin of Hunter Rose, who eventually becomes one of Batman’s fiercest foes in “Batman/Grendel,” is less so, but equally intriguing.

Rose is Grendel, a highly skilled fighter with ninja-like quickness and agility who dresses in black with white gloves and boots. In the early years of the comic book originally published ten years after the first “Grendel” comic, Rose, then known simply as Eddie, was an extremely gifted child who excelled at everything he did. Everything came too easily to him. In despair, he threw a world championship fencing match and began a serious relationship with a woman, Jocasta Rose. After she died of a terminal illness, Eddie left his old life behind and assumed two new personae — Hunter Rose, a successful novelist and man about town, and Grendel, a ruthless assassin and crime boss.

In this particular story, Rose comes to Gotham City from New York to try to steal a priceless artifact from an art museum and pit himself against Batman to prove his worth. Caught in the middle of these two are a pair of roommates, Rachel and Hillary, who are each experiencing problems at work and in love. Rachel soon falls for Wayne, and Hillary falls for Rose. But the presence of these two female characters seems to get in the way of the Batman/Grendel confrontation. Writer and illustrator Matt Wagner uses them as unnecessary plot devices to move the story along. He never gets the reader to feel anything for these characters, and by the end of the story what happens to them is irrelevant.

On the other hand, Batman and Grendel prove to be compelling rivals. Though Grendel is quicker and Batman is stronger, they both prove to be equally intelligent, stealthy and skilled fighters. Their final confrontation on the rooftop of the art museum was wonderfully executed with panache.

By the second part of this volume, it is four years later and Hunter Rose is dead. His skeleton has been put on display in a controversial museum exhibit highlighting famous Gotham City murderers such as the Joker and the Penguin.

One night, with hundreds of protesters outside the museum, an enormous flash of light comes from inside. There stands Grendel-Prime, a scientifically enhanced Grendel from the future who has come back in time to find Rose’s skull. Immediately after he arrives, a dozen armed policemen surround him. Grendel-Prime disposes of them with incredible efficiency and brutality.

He then flees and kidnaps a Wayne Industries engineer to help him build a device that will send him back in time and kill thousands of people as a sacrifice to contact Hunter Rose’s soul. Naturally, it is up to Batman to save the day.

The art in this half of the volume is drawn much more clearly, and the story moves along at a much faster pace than the first.

The focus is also much more on Batman’s quest to stop this unstoppable killing machine, and the clashes between him and Grendel-Prime are incredibly well-crafted and violent.

However, Wagner makes a huge mistake by bringing Robin into the story toward the end.

His inclusion in the story ruins the magnitude of the confrontation between the two main characters and makes Batman seem like a much weaker character.

The two-part tale is a flawed but entertaining collision between two fascinating protagonists.