GRENDEL is a long-running series of crime-noir comic books from the mind of creator Matt Wagner and other contributors, featuring the Grendel alter-ego. The Grendel identity began as the masked identity of criminal mastermind Hunter Rose (a sort-of evil version of Batman), but through successive comic book series that jumped further and further into the future (and sometimes backwards), the identity was assumed by others and morphed into a semi-sentient force (synonymous with the Devil himself) which would take over the dystopian far future as the Grendel-Khan and an army of samurai-like warriors, including the cyborg paladin Grendel Prime. There is more material on Hunter Rose--the first Grendel--than any other successive 'host,' and the 'transfers' grow more abstract as the timeline extends from him, becoming--as Wagner himself puts it--'a study of the nature of aggression.' Comics were originally published with Comico--including a long-running, 40-issue series--before that company went bankrupt, and the property was continued with Dark Horse. GRENDEL TALES was a series of series from other writers and artists set in Wagner's Grendel universe. The original, literary Grendel is a monster from the Old English epic poem, Beowulf. This literary Grendel is the basis for the 2007 Sci Fi channel original movie and has no relation to Matt Wagner's comic book concept. Comic book fans continue to await a movie adaptation of any actual comic book material, as new Grendel mini-series continue to be published sporadically.