Elric: The Vanishing Tower by Roy Thomas & Jan Duursema

From the mid '70s through sometime in the '90s, Michael Moorcock's Elric series had six books, starting with Elric of Melnibonè and ending with Stormbringer, both from his first burst of stories in the '60s. The ones in between were all written later, and most of them were assembled from shorter pieces of fiction. Since then, Moorcock has continued to add more middle: I'm not sure how many books the Elric series officially has these days, since the stories have also been reconfigured into larger volumes at least some of the time. But there's more of it: some of which I've read, some I haven't.

Roy Thomas adapted, I think, all of that '70s version of Elric into comics - a graphic novel for Marvel first, then a series of book-by-book adaptations mostly from First Comics during the '80s. He worked with various artists over the course of more than a decade, and those series were collected originally by First and then later by others. Currently, Titan Books has a big Moorcock reprint program that also includes most or all of the comics adaptations, with the Thomas Elric books a defined subseries with unified trade dress and nice packages.

And I've been reading those books over the past year or so, returning to things I collected in floppy-issue form when they were originally released: Elric of Melnibonè, The Sailor on the Seas of Fate, The Dreaming City, and The Weird of the White Wolf.

The fifth in that series is Elric: The Vanishing Tower, adapting what was then the fourth of the then-six novels. Like the other books, it tends to fall into novella-length sections, though there is more of an overall plot in this one - and I see no indication that the sections were published separately originally; that may just be the way Moorcock plotted. The credits shifted somewhat for this book, which was a big deal at the time: Jan Duursema took over the art, with Roy Thomas continuing as adapter/scripter.

Duursema's art, as I recall, was not looked upon fondly at the time: one part the comics-reading audience's dislike of change, I think, and one part that her work was a bit rough, or maybe just less detailed, in the early pages here than her predecessors.

But the story, and Thomas's adaptation of it, is very much like the previous Elric volume or two: the middle of the series has always been the wandering-about era, with Elric whining loudly about his doom, tangling with various nasties, and sucking down souls by the thousand with his black sword.

The original novel has three major sections, which Thomas adapts here into a six-issue comics series: Elric and his sidekick Moonglum are chasing the evil sorcerer Theleb K'aarna (Moorcock's names were frequently silly in this era), then enlisted by the Sleeping Sorceress (an alternate title for a slightly different version of the book) Myshella, whose eternal castle is coincidentally being attacked by K'aarna. There's the usual epic-fantasy running around and hugger-mugger, with a lot of pathos for our doomed albino, but eventually Elric defeats the evil sorcerer, but not before the gorgeous Myshella is fatally injured by his forces. (Alas! Everything Elric touches will die! Alas!)

Along the way, there's another meeting of various avatars of the Eternal Champion, which Moorcock did more and more often in that era. And there's a lot of Elric yelling about his woe, stabbing various things to steal their souls, and so forth.

Duursema's art improves over the course of the book; I think she was very new to long-form comics, so this was something of a trial by fire. And her early pages here aren't bad: they're just somewhat less detailed (or maybe I mean rococo) and more directly story-telling than readers of the series had been used to from the likes of George Freeman and P. Craig Russell. 

Elric is, of course, Elric: whiny, self-destructive, self-pitying, and more dramatic than a thirteen-year-old-girl trying out for a school production of Les Miserables. But if you're not up for that, you're not reading Elric books to begin with.