Looking for the Eppy Thatcher ‘prayer balloon’ quote for my IM available message. I found the exact quote on this site. Cooler still is that it’s active and people are still talking about one of the best comic runs EVER.

The quote btw is:

“I bought a prayer balloon the other day. Although I don’t know why I bother. I didn’t even watch it rise. I know God won’t receive it. And even if he does, he won’t listen. Because I know God hates me.”

Hunter Rose seems to be everybody’s favorite Grendel, and I like him, too, but after this, he’s always seemed a bit boring in comparison. Once you have the Grendel force, or whatever it is, infect the entire population of a planet, going back to the days when it merely inhabited a criminal mastermind is a bit of a letdown.

That’s not to say, however, that going back in time wouldn’t be interesting. Wagner has hinted that there were Grendels before Rose. It might be kind of fun to see how the force shaped society in the past.

Certainly Eppy Thatcher appealed to my sense of adolescent rebellion (for some people it’s Holden Caulfield…), which is probably the reason why I found him the most interesting part of the comic and wasn’t all that excited by Orion (or the next couple of story arcs, at least in comparison to this one). I’ll be interested to see if my reaction is different over 20 years later. (Sadly I no longer have the Eppy Thatcher T-shirt, which wore out and wouldn’t fit me anyway. The image on it was great, though.)

Eppy is an interesting creation in the history of the series, because he’s the only major Grendel who already starts out at the bottom (there’s another point that sets him apart as well, but it’s a spoiler and not all that important; I’ll just say that there’s a slight inaccuracy in the references to the characters’ fates). Hunter Rose was the man who had everything; Eppy’s his polar opposite on the spectrum of the depiction of geniuses, as someone with vast talent whose life is otherwise a complete mess.

Given the time the series came out, it’s also interesting to compare him to Rorschach; they’re both dedicated to their costumed activities at the expense of their daily lives and have very black-and-white worldviews, but they position themselves at very different places within those worldviews and proceed in opposite directions.

This is also the first (major) arc where the Grendel entity as a literal force really becomes manifest. Prior to this point, it can largely be treated as a metaphor or a manifestation of a character’s personal issues (i.e. Brian Li Sung’s inner voice). However, Eppy appears to be receiving information from it that he’d have no other way of knowing.

Those were the final words of the first issue of Grendel I ever read, and it began my life-long love for the character. It is also my favorite story arc and I don’t think it’s just because it’s where I started. I ordered the trade yesterday when I placed my February order and then ended up discussing Eppy at work today with a fellow comic reading co-worker. Thanks for the article.