Fafhrd And The Gray Mouser Omnibus!

Despite the sales domination of Conan the Barbarian for many years from Marvel, other sword and sorcery properties discovered limited or little success in the market. They tried Thongor of Lemuria, Gullivar of Mars, and Elric of Melnibone. But never had they attempted Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, a series which had been adapted to comics once before by DC in the early 70's. Then in their Epic Comics brand they tried it out and brought back a much more experience and seasoned comic talent Howard Chaykin to do the writing. He'd been the artist on the early DC effort with uneven success and this time he was joined by the up and coming artist Mike Mignola and the respected veteran Al Williamson. And finally we see these two heroes as they should be in the four issue limited run titled Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and The Gray Mouser.

The first issue adapts "Ill Met in Lankmar" and we see the duo pair up for the first time to carry out raids on the Thieves Guild of Lankhmar. Spurred on by their loves Vlana and Ivrian and no small amount of drink they invade the thieves sanctuary and confront the leader and his resident sorcerer. But they fail to realize that for an earlier attack they were already being targeted for sorcerous destruction, a destruction which tragically claimed the lives of their lady loves. Filled with vengeful rage they attack the Guild again and blood is shed in abundance. Overcome by grief and regret the freshly minted team vow to leave Lankhmar never to return.

The next issue gives us "The Circle Curse" in which we meet Sheelba of the Eyeless Face and Ningauble of the Seven Eyes and we find that despite their best efforts our heroes eventually return to Lankhmar after a long time wandering across the varied and dangerous landscapes of Newhon looking for some measure of solace.

"The Howling Tower" is a properly scary tale which starts with the duo led by native guide encountering ghosts on the plains of Newhon. A mysterious disappearance leads the two of them and later just the Mouser (when Fafhrd too disappears) to an ancient tower in which a weird menace presents itself. Mouser must become a wraith himself to help Fahrd put down the threat but they escape just barely and justice served to some extent.

"The Price of Pain Ease" is adapted for a second time by Chaykin and this time with the proper back story of loss which gives it the emotional depth to the tale that it requires. The duo are in a contest to claim the mask of Death itself for their magical mentors and must compete with the depraved Duke Danius for the prize.

"Bazarr of the Bizarre" has the Mouser fall victim to an other-dimensional marketing scheme which sells garbage but makes the customer convinced it is of great value. Not only is he being swindled but he is about to die when thanks to Fafhrd and the intervention of their mentors he is saved barely.

"Lean Times in Lankhmar" is a classic tale, perhaps the single finest in the canon and is adapted here with skill. Fafhrd and Mouser have fallen out (over how to spell Fafhrd's name it is suggested) and since have followed separate paths. Fafhrd has become a zealous acolyte of the god Issek of the Jug and Mouser has become the top enforcer for the gangster Pulg. The two come into some conflict when Pulg for his own reasons wants to put the pinch on the priest of the cult of Issek and a bizarre and peculiar set of circumstances lead to one of the better finales in all pulp literature. This adaptation is not as deft as the original Leiber text (a masterpiece) but it does a good job nonetheless.

"When the Sea King's Away" closes out the four-issue run with Fafhrd and Mouser seeking treasure and a bit of romance at the bottom of the sea. They snake their way down through a weird tunnel of air and find strangely attractive women but have to make a dash for their lives when the sea closes in.
We leave our heroes adrift in a small bark seeking as always new adventures. 

And that's a wrap for the team. Dark Horse reprinted these stories in 2007 and that's the collection I read this time out. It's surprising that in all the time that has passed there have been no other attempts to adapt these tales. Over forty years since the first try and twenty-five since the second. Whole generations have come since anyone's tried. But maybe they don't think they can do better. It would be hard. But we're not done yet. 

Not included in the collection but rather in another which put together the last of Wonder Woman's Diana Prince stories is the debut of Fafhrd and his pal the Mouser. The story is bit of windy one and in the first part Diana and her mentor of the day I Ching seek to rescue their sometimes partner Jonny Double from the clutches of I Ching's daughter who has kidnapped him to motivate Diana to steal a certain gem. This gem along with its other-dimensional counterpart opens a portal to the world of Newhon. The Catwoman is involved as any decent jewel their might be. At the close of the first part of the story by Denny O'Neil and Dick Giordano the portal is opened and Diana, I Ching and Catwoman find themselves at the mercy of two distinctive swordsmen.

In the second part of the story Fafhrd and Gray Mouser introduce themselves properly and join forces with with our heroes (of a sort) to confront the menace and find a way back to Earth. The battle is at first between the comrades then shifts to the cavernous lair of a sorcerer and his weird machinery. This tale by Samuel R. Delany is magnificently drawn by Dick Giordano and at its end Fafhrd and Mouser find themselves in New York City (and not its Newhonian counterpart Lankhmar) but reject the noise, smell, and hubbub of modern machinery.

They want to return home and thanks to a jewel they still have they disappear. It's a rouser and sets up the series in a manner of speaking. Note that the series was called "Swords Against Sorcery" in this ad.

Under a lush action-filled cover by Mike Kaluta, the series dubbed Sword of Sorcery begins with an adaptation by Denny O'Neil and near novice artist Howard Chaykin of Leiber's "The Price of Pain Ease". This story is seriously clipped with the removal of the core tragedy which motivates the duo of Fafhrd and Mouser, the murders of their twin loves Vlana and Ivrian as a backstory.We get the raid on the Duke Danius and we get the mission by Sheelba of the Eyeless Face and Nignguable of the Seven Eyes for the mask of Death itself but without the underlying regret of those tragic deaths our heroes seem to lack a bit of motivation and sense they need to ease pain is all but lost. A young Howie Chaykin's artwork is merely adequate. and the storytelling is often clumsy with some truly peculiar character designs.

Things look a little bit better in the second issue under a Chaykin cover, this one inked by Berni Wrightson. The story O'Neil adapts this time is "Thieves House" and simplified though it is for comic book purposes most of the misadventure makes it to the page. The horror of the encounter with the bones of ancient thieves is largely lost but the action is ever present. Fafhrd and Mouser trade barbs and quips and they come across with the proper blend of adventure and satire which informs the stories themselves, but again missing the underlying gravity of lives suffering loss.

In the third issue we get an original story by Denny O'Neil and a new cover by Chaykin who is getting a wee bit better at the storytelling. We have our heroes waylaid by pirates who steal a girl. After some effort they find the one they thought did them dirt and discover it's more complicated. A beautiful and silent girl with magenta wings and feathers leads to the lout who killed their shipmates and they rescue the girl but find a surprise. With the aid of a dandy deck of cards they wind the day. At long last a death seems to impact the duo, but truth told this story seems to be missing a page or two in its finale. Not that reprint messed up, but I suspect the original dropped at least one page and it makes the end a tad clumsy.

The fourth issue gives us two stories. The first is The Cloud of Hate, an early Fafhrd and Mouser story about a cult which uses a potent fog to enthuse pliable villains to turn to violence in the streets of Lankhmar. The story is simplified a bit but the core remains and our heroes find a solution.

The second story is a tale from the teenage years of Fafhrd himself and tells of his early romance with a blonde beauty and how a Snow Serpent seeks to steal her away. Fafhrd saves her by chance though a prophecy might've shown him the way had he been more attentive. Denny O'Neil's script this time was illustrated wonderfully by Walt Simonson and immediately it's obvious that he should have been at the helm the whole time.

Simonson takes over the lead story in the next issue when the classic Leiber story "The Sunken Land" is adapted by O'Neil. Fafhrd finds a magical ring when fishing and soon enough he and Mouser both run afoul of a no account who is seeking treasure when the hidden land of Simorgya rises from the sea. They get out with their skins barely when dark magic takes over as it usually does in these affairs.

A second story written by George Alec Effinger and drawn by Jim Starlin gives us a peek at the apprenticeship of Mouse (not yet grown to Mouser) and his training in subtlety by a knife artist named Shendai the Deft. This is dandy little tale and features a few cameos, one by a certain Cimmerian is appears. Nice exchange for the appearance of Blackrat and Fafnir in an early Conan story.

(Is that a certain Cimmerian in your background?)

This series was not a success in terms of sales. Five issues seem hardly a worthy outing but it was for a very long time the only adaptation of these heroes to comics until Marvel took a tumble in the early 90's. As for DC, they dived deep into the barbarian craze. More on that next month. 

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Fafhrd And The Gray Mouser - Book Seven!

The Knight and Knave of Swords is the final volume in the official canon of the Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and Gray Mouser saga. The stories in this awkwardly named volume all appeared in the late 70's but mostly in the 80's. The saga continues to unfold as the duo have found a life of sorts for themselves on Rime Isle. Events of the last volume have not been forgotten by any means.

"Sea Magic" (1977 The Dragon)

Undersea goddesses seek to get back treasure which has found its way to Rime Isle and end up coming into contact and some clash with Fafhrd as he adjusts to life and archery with his new hook for a hand. 

"The Mer She" (1893 Heroes and Horrors)

The Mouser making a voyage for supplies, discovers an elusive mermaid and keeps her in his cabin away from the curious but prying eyes of his crew. It almost is the end of all of them as it turns out. 

The Curse of the Smalls and the Stars (1983 Heroic Visions)

Our heroes are stuck with strange curses. Fafhrd is obsessed with the big picture, staring endlessly into the maw of the night sky and elsewhere trying to drink in the landscape. Mouser on the other hand becomes weirdly focused on the tiny and spends his time looking always at that which is at his feet for fear he will miss some small detail. 

The Mouser  Goes Below (1988 first publication - portions first printed as "The Mouser Goes Below" (1987 Whispers) and "Slack Lankhmar Afternoon Featuring Hisvet" (1988 Terry’s Universe)

On Rime Isle, the Gray Mouser is sucked into the Earth and as he slides through the ground in a ghostlike fashion Fafhrd and the rest try to find him and dig him out before he is lost forever. It's a very near thing indeed as the race proceeds across the landscape of the island.

And that my friends is that. The adventures or perhaps more correctly called, "misadventures" of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser come to a rousing end. Our heroes have aged and to some extent matured as life has taken its toll on them. They have found some measure of peace on Rime Isle with Afreyt and Cif, the women who brought them there originally as mercenaries and they along with some of their crews have made a home of it. They seem different men on the island, less full of themselves and more sensitive to those who have fallen under their care. Less like pulp heroes and more like real people.

There are more Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories, specifically a novel written with Leiber's permission by Robin Wayne Bailey, but I haven't read it, and don't even have a copy. Maybe someday I'll get the urge to journey to Newhon again.

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Fafhrd And The Gray Mouser - Book Six!

Swords and Ice Magic is the first collection I bought when it first appeared. In fact some of the stories I'd read as they'd appeared in various collections and magazines. As Fritz Leiber created more installments in the Fafhrd and Gray Mouster saga during the 70's they eventually reached a critical mass where a new collection was necessary.  There is a certain lack of substance to many of the early stories here, but it gets better.

"The Sadness of the Executioner" (1973, in Flashing Swords! #1, ed. Lin Carter)

The gods plot to end the lives of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser but our heroes are too much for them. 

"Beauty and the Beasts" (vignette 1974, in The Book of Fritz Leiber)

Fafhrd and Mouser try to split a girl between them and end up with two villainous swordsmen. 

"Trapped in the Shadowland" (1973 Fantastic)

Our heroes look for lost loves in the land of death and find them thanks to Ningauble and Sheelba.

"The Bait" (vignette 1973 Whispers)

In a story which seemed very familiar the two heroes argue over a maiden who ends up becoming two warriors. 

"Under the Thumbs of the Gods" (1975 Fantastic)

The Gods have another go at our heroes as they relive some of their adventures, meet old loves, and learn new lessons from them. They also encounter oh so briefly Alyx the Picklock, a creation of Joanna Russ. I recently read a story by Russ in which her heroine Alyx muses on a lover she had who remind anyone familiar with Leiber's material of a certain red-haired barbarian. Fun little crossover it seems.

"Trapped in the Sea of Stars" (1975 The Second Book of Fritz Leiber)

While on a voyage of forgetfulness, the two heroes end up in a distant sea near the equator of Newhon which blends seamlessly into the very night sky itself. 

"The Frost Monstreme" (1976 Flashing Swords #3, ed. Lin Carter)

Fafhrd and the Mouser begin a new stage of their lives when they are hired by two determined and hard-minded and very lovely ladies named Cif and Afreyt of Rime Isle to gather warriors not unlike themselves and protect that distant land from pirates on a monster ship.  

Rime Isle (1977 Cosmos SF&F Magazine)

Still on Rime Isle and far from Lankhmar, Fafhrd and Mouser find some measure of love and a tiny jot of satisfaction as they appear almost to settle down. Two oddly familiar gods create no end of trouble for the often ungrateful and singularly avaricious people of Rime Isle and our heroes in particular. There is real cost as the threat to life and limb proves very real indeed. 

Aside from the Rime Isle material here, there's a lightness to the storytelling which to some extent undermines the adventures of our heroes. The threats they face are so vaporous that it's difficult to imagine them being under any threat at all. Leiber seems to want to treat his characters with an awareness of their literary reality which invades the stories and frustrates to some extent the suspension of disbelief. The first several stories lack any real depth and at least two of them seem to be two goes at the same yarn, a strange thing to include in a single volume.

But with the journey to Rime Isle that frothy approach settles down, and in a territory more intentionally realistic the heroes find real threats and consequently the ability to demonstrate true bravery.  We are able to care about them again as they seem really to have lives which seem to be grounded in a recognizable reality.

There is one more Sword to go.

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Fafhrd And The Gray Mouser - Book Five!

The Swords of Lankhmar is the one full-blown Fafhrd and Gray Mouser novel. It's the only one in the canon and it's rather a cobblied together affair in its own right. It is one of the oldest tales in the canon, originally beginning its existence as "The Tale of the Grain Ships" in 1936 but never seeing publication. It was later revised as "Scylla's Daughter".

The Swords of Lankhmar (novel 1968-first part published as Scylla’s Daughter (novella 1961 Fantastic)

"Scylla's Daughter" is the first half of the story which would become Swords from Lankhmar. It concerns itself with a small flotilla of ships carrying grain from Lankhmar to a neighboring territory. Aboard the ship are some bizarre representatives of that land but no less strange is the enormous sea serpent which accosts the ships. It's a serpent with a rider who hails from a far distant land and speaks German. After these events our heroes return to Lankhmar and discover that a whole subculture of rats (with human looking and quite attractive representatives) have invaded the city which leads to the Mouser getting small and investigating at rat size, but it turns out only some bizarre godlike cats can save the day.

It's a strange, strange tale which unravels at a rather leisurely and frankly uneven pace. The first half and the second half of the story are not all that cohesive save for the repetition of key characters. I wish I liked the novel better than I do, but despite being filled with some delightful and bizarre scenes it fails to deliver on a complete story which feels up to true novel length in narration or theme.

One thing which will become an increasing part of the Fafhrd and Mouser tales going forward is a real sense of continuity, a memory for what has gone before. To this point Leiber had sort of forced the tales into a framework of such continuity, but at this point with new material being produced all the time, that sense will only grow stronger.

More Swords to come.

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The Savage Comics Of Solomon Kane!

Aside from the two Kane appearances in Marvel Premiere, the six-issue run of The Saga of Solomon Kane is apparently the only color comic run featuring the Puritan from Mighty Marvel. I've never owned nor read them before getting them along with the aforementioned Marvel Premiere issues in the color trade collection from Dark Horse.

This is an odd set of stories because there's precious few of Howard's Kane stories to adapt and Marvel adapted some of them two separate times. One story is adapted twice in this very volume, a most strange happening, but interesting in that it allows a pretty close comparison of the interpretations.

 

"Red Shadows" is the first Kane story by REH and it was adapted first by Roy Thomas and Howie Chaykin and it's a great rousing version of the story. Chaykin's style is perfect for Kane and he's at his best in this tale. I'd love to see him adapt all of the Solomon Kane canon using his modern style. It would be a masterpiece I suspect. The story is adapted again by Ralph Macchio and Steve Carr and Bret Blevins. This one is more briskly paced, but a pretty good rendering. Macchio really has a solid handle on the Puritan.

There are several other stories here that are originals and I have to say they are quite smashing, especially one titled "The Prophet" which pits the Puritan zealot Kane against a Muslin zealot, both of them men of good intent but blinded by their faiths to some degree. It's got art by Mike Mignola and it's a darn fine story with a very effective ending.

Two other REH stories get adapted, "Hills of the Dead" and "Wings of the Night", both of which had been adapted previously by Marvel in black and white. These are decently done, but I prefer the black and white versions, especially the one by Alan Weiss for "Hills".

There's a neat little subplot that runs through the Macchio stories about Kane and his conflict of faith regarding a fetish staff he carries that clearly seems to contradict his Christian faith. At times he rejects it, but is drawn back to Africa and comes to embrace a larger worldview apparently. This storyline running quietly through the stories gives a neat texture to works.

These color Kanes aren't great, but they are darn good. And they look good in this Dark Horse reprint. 

Next up is the Dark Horse B&W reprint of Solomon Kane's adventures from Savage Sword of Conan and elsewhere. Aside from a few of these very early stories, I'd read almost none of this, so it was all new-old Marvel for me.

The earliest Kane stories with artwork by Alan Weiss are superb. Weiss gave Kane a distinctive flavor, similar but not at all aping what Smith did with Conan. Kane's stories under Weiss's hand were lush and had a crisp modern feel to them, even today. There's another great story by Howie Chaykin. The storytelling is by Roy Thomas and Don Glut. In fact, much to my surprise I learned here that Glut was the primary scribe for Kane's adventures, writing the majority of these stories.

The artwork in the later stuff is by journeymen. David Wenzel still many years from his Hobbit stuff is on board for several stories, but in nearly every case the storytelling seemed to suffer by insufficient page count. I'm not one who usually bickers about this kind of thing, but there was a distinct cramped quality to many of the middle stories, even those which got serialized. Following the action was hard at times, but perhaps that has to do with the reduction of the page for this format.

The latter part of the book reprints stuff from the 90's. At one point there's a jump from the mid-80's to the 90's and the change in styles is remarkable. Many of the later stories are well told with some artwork that grew on me as I read the stories. There's even a crossover with Conan to close out the volume. The pin-ups throughout are nice, especially from solid pros like the late Berni Wrightson. 

I'd give this volume a solid B. It's a decent read, it adapts most of the key Kane stories, but the artwork is suspect at times. The high romance that should permeate a Kane story is often missing in these. The first few stories with Kane encountering Dracula are fantastic, and there's a sequel to this classic clash that I'd never read. All in all, not that bad, it opens and closes very strongly.

More Kane later today. 

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