Elric of Melnibonè by Roy Thomas, Michael T. Gilbert, and P. Craig Russell

When I started reading Michael Moorcock, around 1980, there were six Elric books, and Elric of Melnibonè was the first one. The series has been reassembled several times since then, and I think at least one new piece inserted earlier in the timeline than the 1972 novel - but this is still, I think, roughly, the beginning by internal chronology.

Well, the novel is. I didn't read the novel this time.

Moorcock's stories of the Eternal Champion - Elric being the most popular and best-known of his avatars - have been adapted into comics, directly and as inspiration and with new stories scripted by Moorcock himself, many times over the past fifty years. Almost as soon as there were Moorcock Elric prose stories, there were comics adaptations - the guy just called out for dramatic pages, with his bone-white skin, howling black sword, and endless woe-is-me affect.

The most sustained adaptation series started in the early 1980s, scripted by Roy Thomas and drawn by various sympathetic artists, and I think it covered all six of the novels that teen Andy would consider "real." It started at Pacific Comics, and, when that company died, moved with most of the rest of the Pacific publishing program to First, where the project expanded to do some adaptations of other Eternal Champion stories as well.

I don't know if I can get through all of the Eternal Champion material, but Titan Books, out of the UK, has been reprinting it in uniform editions for about the past decade. And I can at least take another look at those Elric adaptations, about forty years after the last time I read them.

The comics version of Elric of Melnibonè was originally a six-issue series, adapted by Thomas from Moorcock's novel, and illustrated by Michael T. Gilbert and P. Craig Russell in a detailed, Rackham/Beardsley-esque style that worked very well for the decadent-aristocrat atmosphere of Melnibonè, and adds a lot of visual interest to the book. This edition seems to keep the original coloring, which was subtle and careful and very detailed for its day but can look a bit garish now due to advances in computer coloring and printing technology. From the credits, it looks like Gilbert did the pencils, Russell did layouts and inks, and both worked on the colors.

Thomas could be an inventive comics-writer, but here the gig was to take as much Moorcock prose as possible and present it on the page, and Thomas does that well. This is still in the caption-clotted era of comics, and Thomas was one of the masters of that form. This Elric is wordy, but not in a bad way: both the rococo illustrative style and the long dialogue and captions serve to slow down the reader, to focus attention, to allow the story to flow at a slower pace.

Elric of Melnibonè is a tragedy that doesn't quite happen before the end of the book. Elric himself is the emperor of his decadent people, once world-dominating but now happy to scheme and live on their one small island in the middle of the world, while the human nations of the Young Kingdoms wax in power and threaten Melnibonè itself more and more. Their assaults used to be separated by centuries and repelled easily; now they come multiple times in one life and Melnibonèan resources are beginning to be stretched to destroy them. At some point - Elric thinks within a century - Melnibonè will lose one such battle.

Elric is an albino, physically weak, the only son of the previous emperor, his mother dying in his birth and his life only possible through a combination of sorcerous and pharmaceutical supports, which luckily his nation can provide. But his scheming cousin Yrkoon wants to depose him, and Elric can't bring himself to deal with the rival as his ancestors would. (Have him tortured to death on a whim, on some trumped-up or true charges.) And Yyrkoon's younger sister Cymoril is Elric's love - though not yet his Empress, mostly because the grand celebration of their marriage would traditionally entail the sacrificial death of more Melnibonèan aristocrats than Elric is comfortable with.

So this is the story of Yyrkoon's schemes - he tries to kill Elric during one battle with a human invading force, and fails. Then he flees to the Young Kingdoms, with Cymoril as captive, and Elric chases him, through more battles. This all is, readers who have read the written-earlier but set-later stories know, being stage-managed by the Lords of Chaos, particularly Arioch, the traditional patron deity of the Melnibonèans, to bring them back to power on this world.

For the climax, Elric and Yyrkoon end up on another plane of existence, holding two famously powerful swords - Stormbringer and Mournblade - and fighting each other, with Elric having already pledged his loyalty to Arioch to get to that point. As the narration makes clear, his doom is already set - though it will take much longer to work out. Melnibonè has not yet fallen as this story ends - but we know it will, and that Elric will be one of the few survivors.

Readers new to Elric should hit the novels first - depending on your tastes, either starting with the original Elric of Melnibonè or using one of the reprint projects that puts the stories in the order they were originally published. (The latter is reasonable, but does mean you hit Stormbringer, with Elric's death and the big climax of the series, practically at the beginning - most of the history of Moorcock writing Elric is him adding more stuff in the middle.) Adaptations should come after that, for readers who want more pictures and color and decadent atmosphere - all of which this edition provides in abundance.