First appearing as a short preview in AWA Comics’ Upshot Now $3, Jeff McComsey and Tommy Lee Edwards’ Grendel Kentucky (2020) adds some unique twists that are much different from previous comic adaptations.. A four issue series (with variant covers for each issue), writer McComsky explains at the end of the first issue that he “wanted to do a Southern fried retelling of Beowulf” and “wanted Beowulf and his band of warriors to be an all-female outlaw motorcycle club.”The story begins in 1971 with the death of Clyde Wallace, who years earlier had largely adopted a girl named Marnie (Beowulf) and who comes to the funeral along with her biker gang. Later that evening, following what appears to be a failed attempt to placate a monster who lives in the local mines, a series of murders begins and Marnie is revealed to have had some type of contact with the monster as a child, but was told it was just her imagination. In fact, Randall Wallace (Hrothgar), Clyde’s father, had a long running pact with the monster and that as long as he occasionally provided human sacrifices, the farmland in the area would grow fertile enough to make them wealthy farming marijuana.
Marnie and her gang set out to ambush the monster and, with the use of an axe that had been heated in a campfire, they manage to chop off an arm and bring it to Randall’s house, which is filled with stuffed animals and numerous mounted stag heads. As in the original, that evening they learn that there was more than one monster as the mother attacks, killing everyone inside. Marnie survived because she had gotten drunk and was sleeping outside some distance away. This leads to a final confrontation where the mother is killed but there is no clear resolution as she also finds a now orphaned baby monster.
Marnie and her gang set out to ambush the monster and, with the use of an axe that had been heated in a campfire, they manage to chop off an arm and bring it to Randall’s house, which is filled with stuffed animals and numerous mounted stag heads. As in the original, that evening they learn that there was more than one monster as the mother attacks, killing everyone inside. Marnie survived because she had gotten drunk and was sleeping outside some distance away. This leads to a final confrontation where the mother is killed but there is no clear resolution as she also finds a now orphaned baby monster.