Elric - The Eternal Champion Collection!

I imagine the very first time I ever heard of Jim Cawthorn was when he and Michael Moorcock supplied a plot for a few issues of Conan the Barbarian which co-starred Elric of Melnibone. (More on that collaboration tommorow.) That was my first taste of Elric too, so it's likely that was my first exposure to any of the work of Moorcock in any respect. Years later I'd gather up all the Moorcock I could find whether it was Elric, Hawkmoon, or even Jerry Cornelius, and I read all of it. But Cawthorn remained something of an enigma until I was able to read about his early contributions to Elric and other Moorcock concepts. When I saw this Titan tome reprinting work by Cawthorn featuring Elric I picked it up immediately. 

It didn't hurt that the book also features early work by Phillipe Drulliet, a name I first chanced upon in the wild and weird pages of Heavy Metal. I don't claim to have fully understood Drulliet's work but there's no denying his imagery on things like his Lone Sloane is compelling and a perfect fit for the decadent world of Melnibone. And it's this earliest raw stuff which pokes the eyeballs best in my opinion.

Melnibone differs from Robert E. Howard's Hyborian Age in that the former is defined by its excess and malignance. That a person like Elric could be considered a hero tells more about the decay and depravity of the time and place. 

And Drulliet captures that excess and vile opulence better than any artist I've ever encountered. His vistas of statues too large for actual human comprehension suggest a world dedicated not to humanity but to other forces beyond the scope and even ken of humanity. 

I often find Elric stories bewildering in their baroque use of names and likewise Drulliet's artwork is at once compelling and confusing. He makes drawings that make you feel like you are experiencing Melnibone. 

Cawthorn on the other hand gives up a world which does offer a greater degree of immediate apprehension. While the story of Stormbringer is a complex and detailed outing and at times I lose my place in Cawthorn's storytelling, I never lose interest in his images, even though some of those images are rough hewn at best. 

Drulliet's line is sinuous and serpentine while Cawthorn's resembles a network of slashes and cuts, as if they were not ink but rather cuts in a piece of wood. Given this rustic appearance it's fascinating at the depth of field he can sometimes create in the stronger imagery. 

These are not perfect works by any means, as they reflect talents capable but still growing and developing, but they are works which capture the imagination and that's the strongest aspect of any of Moorcock's writing. 

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The Chronicles Of Conan-Volume 3

The third volume of the Chronicles of Conan records a somewhat tempestuous period in the comic book's early history as the artist formerly known as "Barry Smith" becomes increasingly aloof from his comic book origins.

The volume kicks off with a great two-parter which has that classic kitchen sink approach to plotting. We get the return of the sorcerer Zukala and his daughter Zephira. They are now good guys (sort of as these things are always rather suspect in the Hyborian Age) and are battling an other dimensional witch called the Green Empress of the distant land of Melnibone. This calls for Conan to suit up to be Earth's protector as other-dimensional warriors crash in and seek to carry on their deadly queen's mission. That also leads the anti-hero Elric (likewise of Melnibone) to cross over to the Hyborian Earth and hook up with Conan to beat back the enemies they both share.

This was my first-ever encounter with Elric and he's quite the exotic character in his peaked red hat (apparently a hold over from the Jack Gaughan's paperback covers). He and Conan don't really get along, but then neither of them really get along with anyone, but they do successfully battle together and defeat the Green Empress though at a terrible cost for everyone.

And that was supposed to be that for Barry Smith as he intended to move on to other projects.

Roy Thomas taps Gil Kane, an early fan of Conan and a guy who had expressed interest in the title. With inks by Ralph Reese  Kane kicks out some wildly kinetic pages for Conan as he meets up with the pirate Fafnir (previously encountered with his partner Blackrat) who develops beyond his one-off homage to Fritz Leiber's Fahrd and becomes one of my favorite Conan characters. While Conan is always brave and bold, he's often humorless. Fafnir gives him that, a trustworthy companion who has a little perspective.

The two of them become embroiled in an isolated island city's politics, especially helping a duplicitous young beauty who wants to stay being queen. They battle monsters and disembodied suits of armor and barely escape with their lives when the whole place literally explodes beneath their feet.

Barry Smith returns to the book and produces some of his best work ever. Gil Kane hadn't liked the time it took him to produce an issue and apparently Kane needed work that he could churn out fast. It's probably for the best, since while I'm an unabashed Kane fan, I found his work in Conan not the best, lacking the necessary atmosphere the book had developed.

Conan and Fafnir end up in the Turanian navy who are lead by Prince Yezdigerd and are headed to the city of Makkalet to rescue their stolen living god. In these stories we get a real solid epic with Conan behaving in his most realistic manner. He's a mercenary for sure, a hired sword, but such a capable one that he poses a threat and an opportunity for many who are around him. Somewhat less so is the luckless Fafner who falls in the first foray against the walls of the city. Though saved by Conan he loses his arm and is apparently later killed by a feckless and uncaring officer who sought to gain a measure of revenge on Conan with the slaying.  (Fafnir got better in later stories.) That officer of course ends up dead almost immediately when Conan returns from a mission in which he had to battle a deadly hound. Conan also ends up wounding Prince Yezdigerd before making his escape from the Turanians.

That puts  Conan on the other side of the war literally and he ends up hiring out to the citizens of Makkalet, specifically its beautiful queen. He though appears to have chosen badly again as he is sent off to become a sacrifice on an altar which calls down a very Lovecraftian frog-like monster. Conan survives and seeks to put the war behind him but that will prove more difficult than he expected.

There's something so compelling about this period for Conan as he tumbles along. The sense of realism in this series continued to fascinate me. How a fantasy like this set in an imaginary world from long ago could feel more potent and of the moment than stuff like Spider-Man or the Fantastic Four is strange but it did. Conan was just a soldier fighting a war he neither sanctioned nor had much affinity for, but he did his duty. That his duty took him to either side of the conflict proved just how arbitrary the rightness of war could be. In those days such messages about war were heady indeed.

Also is was one of the comics in this collection which really made feel part of a larger community. I was sitting in a local hangout getting a bite to eat when a young man, my elder in his twenties or something like that, came over to me and asked about the Conan comic I was reading ("The Black Hound of Vengeance") and commented how much he admired the book. I never got his name nor saw him ever again, but that brief exchange weirdly validated a young boy who loved comics and now knew for certain that someone else older (and presumably wiser) did also. It was a strangely affecting moment, as small and relatively insignificant as it seemed. I remember that moment often when I interact with teenagers and always try to understand that what might seem small time to me might loom larger to them. That's just one lesson I learned reading Conan. 

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The King Of Swords!

Of the many many genres Jack "King" Kirby is associated with (superheroes, romance, war, westerns) he is not so much identified with the signature breakout genre of the 70's - Swords and Sorcery. (With one exception I'll touch on at the bottom of this post.) But there are some few examples as can be seen above in this cover for Comixscene's "Sword and Sorcery" issue in 1973.

Kirby drew Conan very few times, but one time was in his seminal book Heroes and Villains, a collection of Kirby pencil splashes which have been the source of countless inkings and re-inkings over the decades by many talented folks.

He included Conan in this illustration for one of Marvel's myriad subscription ads as the Cimmerian is nestled in with Spidey, The Thing, Howard the Duck and many other Marvel luminaries of the day.

Johnny Romita either heavily inked this piece or re-drew it entirely for the final product.

Kirby produced exactly one Conan cover, for the fifth and final issue of Giant-Size Conan the Barbarian which reprinted Conan's crossover with Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melnibone. This gave the King the chance to draw two S&S icons though Conan's head has been clearly redrawn by the production staff at Marvel.

The evidence is clear in the original artwork seen here. I frankly prefer Conan's somewhat more wistful expression in the Kirby original to his more aggressive mood in the fixed-up version.

Perhaps one of the King's greatest contributions to the genre of Sword and Sorcery was Thundarr the Barbarian, which he designed for Ruby-Spears animation. That cartoon blended the apocalyptic post-holocaust sci-fi genre with the magical S&S  to offer up something which had been never seen on home TV's before.

There is an exception to this though - Tales of Asgard. Though not technically Swords and Sorcery, the series which ran in the back of the Thor comics for years do indeed have many of the same tropes as classic S&S, especially some of the later story lines. Look for much more on Jack Kirby and his work on that series thoughout the month.

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The Stealer Of Souls!

Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melnibone is a fascinating character, a hero for sure, but also a villain to many. He is a traitor to his own people in order to fulfill his own desire for vengeance on his enemy and as a result his beloved dies, and his ancient city falls. He becomes a nomad, and his people lose control of the ancient and sorcery-rich lands that had been theirs for countless generations.

I recently re-read the first few Elric "novels" in the first edition of the most recent series from Ballantine Books which offers up the texts as they originally appeared in magazine serial form in issues of Science Fantasy in the early 1960's. I can't say much for the John Picacio illustrations, which frankly left me rather cold, but the stories bristled with the youthful energy Moorcock was able to muster in these early outings of sword and sorcery. Elric is more in the wizened tradition of Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and Grey Mouser rather (which Moorcock likes a lot) rather than Robert E. Howard's seminal Conan (which Moorcock likes somewhat less). The stories are sardonic in tone at times and Elric is a protagonist always, but often far from a hero in any sense we might casually understand that term.

The "Stealer of Souls" referred to in the title is a sword, a sword named "Stormbringer" and it is this sword, a black blade which contrasts so starkly with the albino white skin of Elric himself which completes the character Michael Moorcock created so very long ago. Inspired to some extent by the anti-villain Zeno the Albino from the adventures of Sexton Blake. Stealer of Souls really is made up of five connected novellas, each complete in itself but moving the Elric story along as he meets a supporting cast of sorts, in particular his partner Moonglum.

More cohesive as a novel is Stormbringer, which brings the Elric saga to a close and follows up on the themes established in the earlier collection. In this saga, again comprised of four linked novellas, the action is more focused in time and the action in each follows on pretty much immediately from its predecessor. In this story Elric battles the sorcerer Jagreen Lern who is using the forces of Chaos, which Elric also serves, to conquer the known world. The Lords of Chaos and of Order actually appear in these stories and do battle directly as Elric is thrown into their midst. Death is the commonplace in these stories as the intent is to bring the story to a finale.

But of course Elric proved too popular to finish, so though we see his end, we are still left with a broad and sprawling life to explore and Moorcock has been doing that ever since.

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The Fashionable Melnibonean!

Jack Gaughan
When Michael Moorcock's sorcerous albino hero Elric of Melnibone first appeared in American print, the covers to the paperbacks were illustrated by the late great Jack Gaughan. Gaughan has a style which is compelling, sleek, modern and beautiful. But it can be weird too.



These two paperback covers by Gaughan apparently were the only reference for the character that Barry (Not-Yet-Windsor) Smith could get hold of when it came time to render the Melnibonean for his guest-starring role in Conan the Barbarian. So it's understandable that Smith topped Elric with a rather tall peaked cap.



And while the cap looks okay in the Gaughan images, rendered by Smith, the hat looks somewhat silly to be honest. Moorcock apparently is not pleased with this look, neither in the Gaughan originals nor the Smith variations.


But for many years this became my image of Elric, because it was the only image I saw. Dave Sim reinforced this notion with the creation of Elrod in Cerebus, a spoof of Elric, or at least the Elric seen in the Conan comics.



It would be several years before I saw another interpretation of the hero. This time by Michael Whelan, who painted some outstanding covers for the DAW paperback series.


And it would be many years still before I got to see James Cawthorn's original interpretation of the Melnibonean, the classic look. It's certainly more flattering, but perhaps less memorable.


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Elric Of Melnibone!

Frank Brunner
I've been fascinated by Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melnibone since I found the bizarre albino character co-starring with Robert E. Howard's Conan in Marvel's superb comic book series.


Barry Windsor Smith
Suddenly, thanks to Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor Smith, in among all the Hyborian hubbub was thrown this rather different fellow with a really really funky hat. Despite the hat, I got the sense from that two-part story of a universe fundamentally different than Howard's, a place where magic was more fragrant and more varied.

I snagged up some Elric books when I found them later in the 70's under some exquisite Michael Whelan covers. When I found out Elric was part of a grander scheme of an "Eternal Champion" who is resurrected in different times under different names, I had to scarf up as many of Moorcock's books as I could lay my hands on. Elric's world reminded me of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast more than any other sword and sorcery world I'd visited. It seemed rather peculiar and somewhat alien.





Michael Whelan
It's been decades since I read those stories, but now Del Rey is putting out Moorcock's saga, a story that has grown and altered over the years, in a series of books. I've yet to get the last two, but I want to sit down and mingle with the odd folks of Melnibone once again. They're like those very odd neighbors down the road, the kind you want to be polite to because you're not quite sure what they're capable of.







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