Fenton: The Brother He Chose to Become

Fenton: The Brother He Chose to Become Fenton looks like the sort of man evil would put in charge of appointments. Suit, glasses, instructions from above. In the present-day frame of Grimm Fairy Tales #44, he is carrying a sword and waiting to collect on a contract. His employer is less concerned with the assignment than with the possibility that a visit to Knoxville might stir up old memories. That is the first warning that the tidy exterior is misleading. Fenton does not just work for the devil. He remembers what it cost him to become someone who could. “The Devil's Brother” takes him back to the Battle of Chickamauga. He is not introduced as a fearless warrior or a secret monster. He is frightened. His friend Clayton is much more enthusiastic about their adventure, but Fenton wants the security of a familiar person beside him. They have known each other long enough to think of themselves as brothers. Then the battle makes that promise inconvenient. Fenton is trapped, calling for help, while the retreat pulls Clayton away. Clayton looks back but leaves him behind. The devil finds a man who has already learned that the people he trusts might not save him. That matters. Fenton's bargain begins as a desperate attempt to survive, not a grand ambition to rule Hell. He accepts help when the alternative appears to be death. His new employer can spend the following years turning gratitude, dependence and fear into obedience. But the issue does not let us confuse that obedience with an absence of conscience. In its fictionalized Sand Creek sequence, Fenton tries to stop the attack. His eyes glow as he orders Chivington to take the troops back to the fort and forget their conversation. It is an unmistakable supernatural intervention, and it is directed against his employer's wishes. The attempt fails to prevent the massacre, but it establishes something important about Fenton: he is still capable of recognizing an atrocity and choosing to resist it. The comic embeds this invented devil narrative in a real historical atrocity. Its magic and demonic manipulation belong to the fiction, not to a historical explanation of Sand Creek. For Fenton's employer, the resistance creates a problem. A servant who retains the right to refuse is not entirely owned. That is where the fairy tale inside the issue becomes particularly cruel. The devil tells Fenton about another soldier who served him, tended Hell's fires and discovered familiar people in its punishment pots. The story offers wealth as the reward for continuing to obey, even when obedience reaches someone the soldier cares about. It is less a bedtime tale than a lesson prepared for a specific pupil. Fenton's own final test is waiting in a building. Clayton is tied up inside, grateful to discover that his old friend survived and begging to be released. There is lantern oil. There is a torch. And there is the promise that Fenton can be forgiven for disobedience if he proves he deserves to stand beside his employer. Fenton sets the building alight. The choice is disturbing precisely because the comic has already shown us that he can choose otherwise. He tried to prevent the massacre. Here, he accepts the reward attached to becoming someone worse. Clayton's abandonment gives the scene the bitterness of revenge, but it does not turn the killing into justice. The devil announces that they are now brothers. The title has changed hands. The relationship that once meant lifelong friendship has become a name for shared wrongdoing. Back in Knoxville, Fenton resumes his work. Volac arrives and reminds him, indirectly, that the past has not disappeared. The glasses and the professional manner are still there, but now we know what they cover. Fenton is frightening not because this issue gives him an enormous list of powers. It gives him a conscience, shows him using it, and then shows him accepting the price of setting it aside.