The comics version, Elric: The Weird of the White Wolf, came out in five issues from First Comics in 1986, scripted by Roy Thomas (like all of this era of Elric adaptations) with art duties shared out in a complicated way (this one on that issue, this other one laying out this other issue, and so on) among Michael T. Gilbert, P. Craig Russell, and George Freeman. White Wolf was the third book at that point, following Elric of Melnibonè and The Sailor on the Seas of Fate, in what was at that point a six-book series. (It's longer now, and has been reshuffled by various reprinting projects, too.)
The current project reprinting the comics Elric is from Titan, for example, and this is #4 in their count, since they popped in an earlier adaptation of The Dreaming City (a 1961 novella that is also part of the White Wolf "novel") as third in their sequence. It makes sense there - that's where it fits by internal chronology - but it points out how much the stories about Elric started with Moorcock writing the beginning and the end (literally) and then spending fifty-ish years filling in more bits in the middle.
These are pretty good bits of middle - the original Moorcock stories are from early in his career, "Dreaming City" and "While the Gods Laugh" from 1961 and "The Singing Citadel" from 1967. The frame story, here (and in the "novel") credited as "The Dream of Earl Aubec," was a 1964 short story under the title "Master of Chaos," but I think Moorcock reconfigured and possibly rewrote it to work as part of Weird.
Anyway, Aubec is another one of Moorcock's heroic-fantasy heroes - not explicitly an avatar of the Eternal Champion, but that kind of guy. He's the champion/lover of a hottie queen - Eloarde of Klant - for whom he's led armies to conquer all of the lands south of Klant. Well, all but the mysterious citadel Kaneloon, which sits right on the edge of the sea of chaos that borders the normal Earth and which is reportedly inhabited only by a mysterious sorceress. Aubec's queen tells him to go grab that fortress, too, which Aubec must do alone, since no soldiers are crazy enough to go with him to the edge of chaos.
The sorceress of Kaneloon is another hottie - women in Moorcock's heroic fantasy are either seductive hotties or nonexistent - who praises Aubec for being so brave and true and getting through the various creepy horrors defending her castle. She shows him the sea of chaos, and says that really amazing warrior types can march right out into it, creating brand-new lands behind them. Aubec is intrigued, but needs the sorceress (Myshella) to show him scenes from the future to psych him up.
Those scenes from the future are the three novellas about Elric, which are the bulk of the book - interspersed with a few pages of Aubec reacting and Myshella shrugging and saying "well, that's the future, bub."
"Dreaming City," as adapted at greater length in the previous book, is the one where Elric leads a flotilla of human pirates to loot his people's nation and kill every last member of his own race, mostly because he's pissed at his cousin. As always with Elric, it does not go well: he wants to save his One True Love (also his cousin and sister of the evil usurper cousin, because decadent aristocratic race), but does not. His allies don't survive, either. In the end, he manages to destroy an ancient (if cruel and decadent) civilization and has nothing at all to show for it but another helping of woe.
The other two novellas are more standard Elric adventures - go to this place, looking for a thing or person that will tell him something important, only to be foiled in that as well. [1]
Anyway, Elric meets and foils the Jester of the Gods (well, specifically the gods of Chaos, his patrons) and then hares off in search of a fabled book that he thinks will tell him all of the important secrets of life. It doesn't, of course, for the usual dying-fall reasons, but Elric gets to travel with his own hottie for a while, kill a bunch of things, and mope about at length.
As far as I can tell, this edition has the art exactly as it was in the First Comics days, down to the dialogue balloons occasionally colored in strange hues. It may have been slightly cleaned up or reshot from the original art, but the coloring is the 1986-era style, which is entirely appropriate. All three artists work in a detailed, almost rococo version of '80s adventure-comics style, full of strange vistas and creepy creatures and weird menace - and their styles, though somewhat distinguishable, do work well together to tell this overall story.
I'm finding that I have more trouble taking Elric's doomy woe-is-me act seriously the older I get, but I still enjoy the stories, even if my reactions are more sardonic now. This is a nice package of some of the earliest, most classic stories in that sequence - I don't know if I'd recommend starting Elric with a book that has a big number 4 in its descriptive copy, but it's fun and amusing and adventurous.
[1] The Elric stories are doomy overall, but also on a micro level - every last thing he does goes wrong, in a way that could become comedy with just a slight tweak. I wonder if anyone has ever done an Elric-and-Moonglum story in the vein of Wodehouse's Wooster-and-Jeeves?
I say, old hat, you know that cursed runesword I have? Been in the family for yoinks, eats souls, all that kind of rot. Well, I wanted a new scabbard for the dashed thing, but Moony thought enameled obsidian was too "showy." Well, I tell you...
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