The first comic based on Beowulf, called "Beowulf: Dragon Slayer," in 1975, for instance, illustrates Grendel's mother as a weak, wolf-like humanoid. She doesn't even get to battle Beowulf.

Yet while the original text’s 3,182 alliterative lines were unlikely to have been appreciated by such a demographic in an English Lit class, they were made far more palatable while interpreted ...