Elric: The Sailor on the Seas of Fate by Roy Thomas, Michael T. Gilbert & George Freeman

To those confused by the attribution in my post title - this is the 1985 comics adaptation, not the 1976 Michael Moorcock novel. (Sidebar to the sidebar - the novel is divided into three novella-length sections, which are largely separate, but, as far as I can see, they were not published first as novellas as I expected, though two of the three seem to have been published later as novellas.)

See my post on Elric of Melniboné for more details on the adaptation series; I hope to read through at least all of the Elric books in comics form, and maybe then move on to other Eternal Champions stories, since Titan seems to have collected all of them in uniform trade dress these days. (And I am a major fan of big publishing projects and uniform trade dress, so I want to encourage that.)

By 1985 Roy Thomas had settled into the long haul in adapting Elric stories - he'd keep doing it through all of the extant novels at the time - and had landed at a publisher, First, that was somewhat more stable than Pacific had been. Elric: The Sailor on the Seas of Fate was a seven-issue comics series, adapting a novel generally running about 160-190 pages into 198 pages of comics. So this, like the rest of the Roy Thomas series, is a comprehensive adaptation, aiming to capture every word of dialogue and story beat of the original in a visual form.

Sailor, the novel, was the first of many continuity inserts by Moorcock: the initial run of stories in the mid-60s (collected slightly later as Elric of Melniboné and Stormbringer) gave Elric's origin and fate, so every other story since has been filling the middle with more and more detail. This particular story starts in sturdy adventure-tale fashion: Elric has been fleeing some other adventure, and finds himself alone, tired, and hungry on the shore of a desolate sea.

A mysterious ship appears, claiming to have come to pick him up for some equally-mysterious purpose. It turns out to be one of the periodic gatherings of multiple Eternal Champion avatars - by never-defined forces that are probably related to the Lords of the Balance that Moorcock would introduce years later - to defeat a major threat to the entire multiverse. So Elric meets, for the first time for him - others are at slightly different points in their personal histories - Corum, Hawkmoon, and Erekosë - along with a dozen-plus other sword-swinging types, most of whom will die during this section to show how dangerous this threat is. The whole group of twenty is delivered, by this universe-sailing ship and its blind captain, to an island where two creatures from outside this universe are gathering power to do the usual apocalyptic thing if not stopped. The four ECs have to merge into a giant four-headed figure with a really, really big sword to kill the creatures, and they do so. Then they all seem to mostly forget about it, for vague mystical reasons.

Elric goes on to have two more adventures, with Count Smiorgan Baldhead, a new sidekick he picks up along the way. First, they land in another world where a Melnibonéan exile is chasing the reincarnation of the great love he tortured to death (Melnibonéans are horrible people, pretty consistently), while the third side of their love triangle, the guy who did not torture her to death, is chasing them. Elric helps the pursuer catch up, and justice is done and love reunited, more or less, though the reincarnated girl doesn't seem to have much of a choice in any of this and is handed off to the guy who is, I suppose, at least less horrible. 

Elric and Smiorgan try to head back to their own world, and end up rescued by a ship searching for the ancient original home of the Melnibonéans, deep in the usual fantasy jungle somewhere. They come along for the ride, where Stormbringer kills more allies than those allies would have liked, a giant statue of Elric's patron god Arioch comes to life, and Elric kicks off the Law/Chaos fight on his world that will eventually kill him. But he and Smiorgan do manage to find a ship, with which they can get back to civilized lands and be available for another continuity-insert novel.

Moorcock never claimed his heroic-adventure stories were great literature - he did write other books with more nuance and depth; he knew the difference - but they are flashy and exciting and full of portentous dialogue and Big Fantasy Ideas that seem to be more profound than they really are. They can be electric when you're young and tormented, and can still be fun and zippy even once you're not. As long as a reader is clear on the tone and style of the stories - High Weltschmertz and Deeply Meaningful - it's all good.

Michael T. Gilbert uses an ornate, detailed style here, ably supported by George Freeman's inks and colors - this book looks detailed and full of depth, as it should. It's a tale over-full of self-conscious woe, but that's the deal with Elric: if you're not in the mood for woe, you should stay away from him to begin with.