Beowulf - Dragon Slayer adapts the famous Old English epic poem into comics form. It was not first to do so and far from the last. Michael Uslan and Ricardo Villamonte are the creative team on this effort. Save for Beowulf getting a strange superhero-like visual treatment (his helmet is supposedly a minotaur skull), the story begins much like it does in the original Anglo-Saxon poem. A monster named Grendel assaults the hall of King Hrothgar and when Beowulf gets wind of this, he heads out to help.
Once again, this series was part of DC's attempt to grab some of the Conan the Barbarian business with a raft of heroes from various mythological settings. Beowulf stands up quite strong amongst this company which saw most all of them gone after a year.
Beowulf and his men along with Nan-Zee head off for a quest into Hell where they fight all manner of creepies and even a tame dragon and ultimately do encounter Satan. The point of this meandering lost on me, save that it prolongs the story. The upshot is that he is sent on a quest by Satan to find two things to perk him up sufficiently to defeat Grendel.
The quest through Hell continues. Grendel is still threatening Hrothgar's kingdom while Beowulf and his compatriots confront sundry menaces including a serpent. It is from this serpent's venom that Beowulf derives some powers enough to face Grendel, almost. Now he must find called Zumak.
Having survived the rigors of Hell, Beowulf and his band run into warriors dedicated to fighting Vlad the Impaler and they get swept up in that conflict. They discover that the Zuman is not there.
The introduction of flying saucers well and truly jumps this little series off the rails. Not unlike the earlier Charlton series we get sci-fi tropes dumped into a Beowulf environment. Strange to say the least. In this instance we get Atlantean servants of the space gods who pick up Beowulf and Nan-Zee just in time for the to witness the destruction of the advanced city. Beowulf even meets another epic hero from an even earlier tradition.
Cast adrift the pair eventually arrive in Crete where they are led to the famed Labyrinth in which they find a Minotaur and ultimately the Zumak. Beowulf is now fully-charged and ready for Grendel as he and his gal head for Heorot at last. Meanwhile Grendel who is plotting against Satan. The arrival of Ric Estrada on layouts made this the most readable issue of this benighted series.
This little series was a major disappointment for me. I'd hoped they had told a good yarn about the great Anglo-Saxon hero, but that's not what happens. Uslan's script is meandering, and Villamonte's artwork is at times bewildering. The addition of Nan-Zee affects the story not at all, save that it gives Villamonte the chance to draw a chick in a bikini for the entire brief run. The character I'm most interested in is Grendel, who we do get at length dragging away victims and bellowing about his sad lot to Satan. One character called the Shaper is a magician and some of his spells are fun to decode as they are the same variety as what Zatanna uses. One reads "Happy Birthday Cindy".
But comics were not done with Beowulf.
Beowulf is one of those pieces of classic literature to speaks to my fanboy heart. Not unlike the mythology of the Greeks and Romans, or the Nordic sagas, we have a story which bonds reality with myth in a way which makes it immediate and potent. The poem serves a lot of masters, but at its core it's the story of a noble man who wants to defend people from predators and who wants to make the society better. The story has not been adapted to comics all that many times. Classics Illustrated never touched it (to my knowledge). But the first time I ever chanced across the poem itself being adapted to comics was when Jerry Bingham produced it for First Comics as their initial graphic novel in 1984.
I've never been completely satisfied with the result. To be fair, I'm not a huge Jerry Bingham fan, always considering him a workmanlike talent who was able to produce pages which successfully evoked both Neal Adams and John Buscema without the immediacy or drama of either. But compared to the soulless stuff I see on the stands today, he was a master. Still, he was above average of the day, and I like his stuff more and more as the years grind away. It turns out Beowulf was a labor of love, produced by Bingham pretty much on spec and finding a home at First Comics when he bargained to draw some of their books for them. I like that a lot.
Bingham discussed the "graphic novel" several years ago on his blog here. He discusses how he came to be aware of the poem and how he finally was able to bring this remarkable work to fruition. He also discusses some of it weaknesses, weaknesses I agree make it less than a work which was completely successful. To my mind it lacks the grit and necessary darkness of the poem, allowing superhero tropes to overwhelm a story which is at its core a horror tale. You can also see quite a bit of the artwork from the series.
But whatever the deficiencies might have been to my mind, Jerry Bingham was able to bring Beowulf to the page and then bring it to the newsstands and that's no mean accomplishment. I congratulate him and wish him well. He seems to have done well for himself outside the world of comics and for a guy who I considered a middle of the road talent has become quite a compelling painter. But when the name Jerry Bingham comes up for this comics fan, the first thing I will think of is Beowulf. I rather think he'd like that.
Here are later adaptations of the poem that I've come across.
Rip Off
(2006)
(2007)
(2008)
(2016)
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