Elric: The Dreaming City by Roy Thomas and P. Craig Russell

Most of the Roy Thomas-scripted adaptations of Michael Moorcock's Elric novels came out as individual comics issues - five or eight or so for each novel - and were eventually collected into book form. But The Dreaming City was instead a single graphic novel from Marvel in 1982 - maybe because this is the original 1962 novella "Dreaming City" rather than the alternate-title-for-the-first-novel Dreaming City, which has confused several generations at this point.

To be clearer: the novella "Dreaming City," when I first read the Elric books, was collected in The Weird of the White Wolf, at that time the third "novel" (actually a fix-up, like many of them) in the series, and now I think fourth. There have been remixed editions of the series since, so it also sits in different books with "Elric" in their titles.

I suppose the important thing to note about this adaptation is that it is the third in the recent Titan unified-covers reprinting of all things Moorcockian and Eternally Championing, Elric sub-series - third by internal chronology - but that it was first in the sense that Thomas wrote it first, P. Craig Russell drew it first, and it came out into the world four years before the adaptation of the first novel in the series, Elric of Melniboné.

(Also see my posts for the first two books in this Titan series: Elric of Melniboné and The Sailor on the Seas of Fate. Though both the original Moorcock stories and the vicissitudes of publishing adaptation series makes the timeline and details too convoluted to easily follow.)

I should also note that the next volume in this Titan series reprints the Thomas-scripted adaptation of The Weird of the White Wolf, which I expect - I haven't read it since about 1986 - also includes an adaptation of "The Dreaming City," in the context of that fix-up. So I have that to look forward to.

"Dreaming City" was one of the very earliest Elric stories, and, as many have noted repeatedly since then, Moorcock started out with the most dramatic, central story of his doomed albino hero, and has spent six decades since filling in smaller, lesser stories around them. What that means is: if you only read one Elric adaptation, it should be this one: it's early enough to be unfussy, it has some of Russell's most energetic artwork, and it's early-80s full-of-captions style captures the feel of Moorcock's prose well.

So this is shorter than the other Elric adaptations, tells a story of tighter scope - originally a novella, not a fix-up of short-fiction like the "novels" - and is one of the major events of this doomy, gloomy albino's life.

In Dreaming City, for good and sufficient reasons which are not provided here, Elric leads a large force of Sea Lords - pirates, basically - from the Young Kingdoms to plunder his homeland, sack its capital city Imrryr, slaughter basically all of his people, and depose his evil cousin Yyrkoon. He does succeed in those things, though he also intended to save his cousin and lover Cymoril, who does not survive this story.

He also does not succeed in getting more than a tiny fraction of his human forces back from Imrryr alive, in keeping with Elric's usual results to his actions: pretty much everybody but him dies, usually in horrible ways that make him sad. But that's the deal with Elric, and this was one of the first stories to codify that. Thomas and Russell turn Moorcock's often-purple prose into equally grand and exciting pages here; I'll repeat that, if you're interested in either Elric in general or the comics adaptations thereof, this is a great place to start.

Jim Henson's The Musical Monsters of Turkey Hollow adapted by Roger Langridge

I knew I was going to be writing this post on Thanksgiving morning, so I picked an appropriate book. Of course, since time flows forward, you're reading this much later, untethered from any holiday (unless you celebrate Three Kings' Day, in which case, go you), but that's the reason for it.

Jim Henson was the kind of creative personality who generated a lot of ideas. My sense is that most of them never happened; I don't know what that meant for his focus on the projects that did happen, but the work was generally top-quality, so I don't suppose it matters. He generally worked with screenwriter Jerry Juhl, who put Henson ideas into a usable form, and they were credited together with scripts for a lot of projects that did come to fruition.

As well as a lot of things that are still sitting in trunks at the Henson Company, or Disney, or wherever.

One of those was a script from the late '60s for a Thanksgiving special, to include both Muppets and live-action actors. So not quite an early precursor to Emmett Otter's Jug-Band Christmas, but clearly coming from the same strand of Henson's creative output. The special was never made; it's '60s enough that I doubt it ever would get made now.

But, about ten years ago, the Jim Henson Company decided, for whatever reason, they wanted to get this project out into the world somehow, and connected with cartoonist Roger Langridge. Langridge took the Henson/Juhl script, turned it into four issues of comics, and drew it all, with colors by Ian Herring.

And that's how we got to Jim Henson's The Musical Monsters of Turkey Hollow.

Somewhere fairly rural in New England, in a region with a lot of turkey farms, is the small town of Turkey Hollow. Living there is Timmy Henderson, a boy who wants to learn to play his guitar but is finding it difficult, his hippie-ish older sister Ann, their aunt and guardian Clytemnestra, the grocer/mayor/sheriff/postmaster Grover Cowley, and nasty evil landowner Eldridge Sump.

Sump wants to drive the Hendersons from their land, for the usual I'm-evil, I-want-to-take-everything reasons in stories for children. He is thoroughly one-note, and you probably can already picture him in your mind: black clothes, white hair, little round glasses, goatee, sharp face, always scowling and declaiming.

Timmy is out practicing his guitar in the woods one day near Thanksgiving, and a meteor - which we saw crash-land three hundred years earlier in a prologue - opens, with five furry "monsters" emerging. They don't talk, but they're musical Muppets - each one makes a particular sound/note, and they help him with his song. He tries to hide the monsters from everyone else, but Ann and Aunt Cly soon find out, and love them just as much as he does, including at least one musical number. (This was going to be a musical, so the cast breaks into song every ten pages or so.)

Meanwhile, Sump has heard the monsters, and wants to use them to force the Hendersons off their land. He's also got a plot - possibly originally unrelated - to steal all of the other turkeys from all of his neighbors for unspecified reasons, which he puts into action, framing the monsters. The monsters are thrown into jail for eating turkeys, even though we readers know they only eat rocks.

Timmy helps the monsters escape jail - because it's difficult to hold rock-eating monsters in a stone building - and it all comes to a head on Thanksgiving, with a thug hired by Sump running around with a shotgun trying to kill the monsters, Grover investigating both real crimes and the ones Sump alleges, and other tomfoolery.

In the end, there's a song, good wins out, and the missing turkeys are found unharmed and stolen in Sump's house - so they can all be slaughtered and eaten in the final scene. (I mean, yes, that's how it works, but you don't expect it to be so blatant in a story for kids.) Oh, and Grover finally admits he's hot for Aunt Cly, so they start dating.

This would have been a perfectly cromulent 1968 TV special, which would have been re-run annually for much of the '70s and then probably half-forgotten, with revivals now and then. It wasn't, but it's a comic now, so that's close enough. It's not a lost classic, but it's a very Henson-y thing, with all of the music and found-family stuff, and this package also includes photos of the puppets Henson's team built for the network presentations back in 1968 and some other historical material, which adds to the package.

If you're looking for a Thanksgiving-themed comic to read - and I was - there's not a lot to choose from, but this is a solid choice. Langridge always does good work, particularly when trying to depict music on the page or when doing Muppet-adjacent stories, so this fits well with his strengths.

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.

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.

Snow, Glass, Apples by Neil Gaiman and Colleen Doran

I've mentioned the short story "Snow, Glass, Apples" before - it's both one of Neil Gaiman's best, most pointed short pieces and one of the most successful of the Ellen Datlow/Terri Windling-inspired burst of revisionist fairy tales from the early 1990s. (I see that my memory was slightly false - I thought it originally appeared in one of the "Red As Blood" anthologies, but it was a standalone chapbook and then reprinted in the 1995 Datlow/Windling annual.)

As so often with successful things, it's part of different clusters - all those anthologies of nasty fairy tales, first, and then more recently an odd program that seems to be trying to turn every one of Gaiman's best stories into individual graphic novels. (See How to Talk to Girls at Parties and Troll Bridge; I'm pretty sure there have been several others that I missed.)

So, in 2019, Colleen Doran adapted "Snow, Glass, Apples" (the short story) into the standalone graphic novel Snow, Glass, Apples - which is what I've just read. Like most of the "Neil Gaiman Library" and similar projects (the Coraline adaptation, the two-volume Graveyard Book adaptation.) that I've seen, it's a very respectful adaptation, using as many of Gaiman's original words as possible and just illustrating them rather than attempting to transform the prose story into something new.

Which, somewhat ironically, is the opposite of how Gaiman works when he adapts things - he's always been deeply transformative - but he's a Big Deal and his fans want Pure Gaiman, so I assume his editors and publishers know exactly what they're doing.

Snow, Glass, Apples is thus pretty much exactly the short story, or at least very large chunks of the prose of that story (which is pretty short to begin with), illustrated in a detailed, mostly Art Nouveau style by Doran, on mostly flowing, panel-less pages full of gorgeous, evocative art. If you know the story, this is it, literalized and illustrated by Doran. If you don't know the story, this is nearly as good a way to discover it. (I'm enough of a purist to insist on that "nearly" - the original precise prose is better.)

Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness by Peter Kuper

I'm not crazy about adaptations, by disposition. I'd generally rather see new stuff in Creative Format X, rather than a Format X version of a story that worked well in Format Q.

I seem to be in a pretty small minority in that, though. The world demands movies from their comic books, TV shows from their novels, opera from their stories about historical figures, stage musicals assembled from random songs. And vice versa: look at the deeply incestuous "casting thread," in which random observers squee over which actors in TV-shows-based-on-books should be their favorite characters in a potential movie-based-on-a-comic-book.

On the other hand, I don't mind as much with old stuff. A new movie based on a Shakespeare play? Yeah, OK - that's closer to the point to begin with. A graphic novel based on that hundred-year-old book everyone has heard of? Well, I suspect it's because the publishers want to get in on that sweet, sweet adopted-by-a-million-school-systems money, but it's closer to the original format, and might bring in new readers and...OK, why not?

That's how I came to Peter Kuper's adaptation of Joseph Conrad's short novel Heart of Darkness, which has the usual quirkiness in its title common to adapted GNs. (It always reminds me of "Rod Torfulson's Armada! Featuring Herman Menderchuck!" for a reference none of you will get.)

Kuper has a detailed, inky art style and goes in for fleshy, unpleasant faces a lot of the time, which are all strengths with this material. He also is adapting the story basically straight: it's not transposed to the modern world and moved to another continent or "reversed" or anything like that. He even maintains the fussy frame-story element, though I'm unclear whether the benefits (believability, collegiality) of that ever outweighed the vast lost of immediacy.

Kuper's introduction is about one-half process description and one half responding to Chinua Achebe's mid-70s declaration that Heart is inherently racist and colonialist. Kuper disagrees with "inherently," and emphasizes Conrad's anti-colonialist credentials, but responding to that kind of criticism in his frontmatter tends to undermine the book. Remember: if you're explaining, you're losing. Kuper starts explaining, and explaining something he didn't have to bring up in the first place, before the reader gets a chance to see the story itself. Afterwords, says Andy who is not actually the King of the World of Books despite his grandiose visions, is the place for material like that if you absolutely must include it.

Otherwise: this is Heart of Darkness. Marlowe goes upstream on a river the text does not name (but is clearly the Congo, and Kuper shows it as such on a map) in a continent equally unnamed (also put into clearer images by Kuper), first to be captain of a boat on that river but eventually to find the mysterious and central Mr. Kurtz. He tells this story to a group of others, including one who is officially our narrator, lounging on a boat in the estuary of another big river (the Thames) on another continent (Europe) that the text also pointedly does not name.

Kuper does his best to give the (entirely unnamed, mostly background) Black characters more stage business, agency, and importance here than exists in the raw text - this is their world, and the various fat, stupid, and greedy white people are invaders - but they're not really part of Conrad's story, so this is not always successful. They're still scenery, even in Kuper's version: there to make changes on white men, the ones worth telling stories about.

Achebe's criticism is still valid: that's what I'm saying. Kuper does what he can, and the story is not in favor of colonialism, but it's still a hundred-year-old story by a white guy about another white guy going crazy from the jungle atmosphere.

But that's Heart of Darkness. That's the story. Kuper does a good job of retelling it, of moving all those Black people at least closer to the center of the story, but it's still about one relatively good white man thrown into a milieu of horrible white men and going through a transformative journey to find the one iconic white man who embodies the place.

H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness by Gou Tanabe (2 vols)

Adapting a book is always a tricky thing, especially in a format where you're turning words into pictures. (Radio dramas, I suppose, have somewhat different issues.) And when the author you're adapting is...um, shall we say overly fond of long, ornate, elaborate words in general and detailed descriptions in particular, getting those pictures to resemble the mental images from those words gets even tougher.

And that's just for just the adaptor -- every reader will interpret "partly squamous, partly rugose" a little differently, so how will they take your pictorial description?

All of that is to say that adapting H.P. Lovecraft into a visual medium is a tricky thing. There have been some movies, a few of which have been more-or-less successful. He's been a bit better served in comics, which is much more of an auteur medium to begin with -- for example, I.N.J. Culbard adapted four long Lovecraft stories into graphic novels about a decade ago, each in its own style, and all successfully. (Well, successfully to my eye, since that's the point I just made.)

Not long afterward, the manga-ka Gou Tanabe embarked on a longer adaptation of Lovecraft's novella "At the Mountains of Madness" in 2016-17, in twenty-three chapters (plus prologue and epilogue) and over six hundred pages. That was published as two volumes in English translation last year: The First Volume and The Second Volume. I'm not clear on what the original Japanese publication schedule was, but my guess it was the usual: the chapters appeared individually in some magazine or other (weekly or monthly), and then objects closely resembling these two books came out as tankobon.

This is a very faithful adaptation -- Tanabe uses a lot of chunks of Lovecraft prose, both to set up chapters and as narration over his pages, and the length allows him to get all of the events of the novella into his adaptation. He also keeps the 1931 setting and all of the technical details the same, which other Lovecraft adaptations don't always do. So, if you're familiar with the Lovecraft story -- and that's the audience for this book, obviously -- Tanabe's version won't surprise you in the storytelling.

The art, though, might surprise you, particularly if you have an outdated view of what "manga art" looks like. Tanabe uses a very detailed style here, with lots of blacks and washes, and he clearly draws the fantastic elements of Lovecraft's story while often keeping them in shadow to suit the dark caves and cyclopean ruins the characters wander through. For Western readers, getting used to manga-style "reading backward" might be an issue to begin with, but Tanabe's panel flow is clear and he sticks to boxy, square panels with occasional splash pages -- there's nothing here to throw off people who aren't regular comics readers.

As for the story itself: it's that Lovecraft staple, the man of science describing events that led him (always him, always a very particular kind of him) to learn Things That Man Was Not Meant to Know and putting them down on paper in hopes that everyone else will listen and never go back there again. In this particular case, it's an Antarctic expedition, out of Lovecraft's fictional Miskatonic University [1] in Arkham, Massachusetts, with specialists in a variety of disciplines (geology, biology, and so on) planning to explore, collect samples, and do some basic science.

But instead they find calamity and an escalating series of discoveries: bodies of a totally unknown type leading to a giant previously unknown mountain chain leading to a vast ancient city beyond those mountains where two of the team will find....well, that would be telling.

The thrills and joys of Lovecraft are in those moments of discovery, where the veil is lifted, bit by bit, on visions of deep time and unexpected creatures. Tanabe is good at translating that feeling into comics, and his page count and the generally unhurried pace of manga pages serves him well here -- there's enough space and time to go step-by-step with Lovecraft through all of the stages of disbelief and dawning understanding.

So this is a good adaptation. "Mountains" is one of Lovecraft's less-problematic major stories, and Tanabe silently eliminates any vaguely racist stuff about the swarthy crewmen of the expedition's ships. (I don't remember anything specifically, but Lovecraft was vaguely racist all the time, so I'm assuming there's at least a few sentences to make a modern reader wince in "Mountains.") And Tanabe's art style is a great fit for Lovecraft: he's detailed in a dark, horror-tinged way, and can make the ancient architecture and alien creatures creepy and menacing rather than just funny-looking.

I understand Tanabe did one book of shorter Lovecraft adaptations before this, and has been adapting other Lovecraft stories since then, so, odds are, if this sounds appealing, you'll have more than just this story to enjoy.

[1] Go, Pods!