The Sleeping Sorceress (32 page)

It is in this more restricted and specific way that I intend to look at some of the more important works of fantasy in subsequent articles.

(Note: Most of this essay was originally written earlier for an unpublished magazine.)

ELRIC OF MELNIBONÉ:
INTRODUCTION TO THE
GRAPHIC ADAPTATION

INTRODUCTION

to
Elric of Melniboné
, graphic adaptation
(1986)

R
IGHT FROM ELRIC’S earliest appearances (in
Science Fantasy
magazine, 1961) he has attracted the attention of some of the best fantasy illustrators. Indeed, Jim Cawthorn (who depicted him on the covers of
Science Fantasy
and the first edition of
Stormbringer
) was more than a little responsible for my descriptions, since Jim and I worked for years in very close liaison (including a commissioned illustrated serial done for the
Illustrated Weekly of India
in the late ’60s) and sometimes were hard put to say who had invented an image first.

I have always placed a high emphasis on illustration, both in my own books and in
New Worlds
, the magazine I edited for a number of years. I’m inclined to plan my books in terms of scenes and images. The fantasies in particular are always very thoroughly worked out in what I like to think of as a coherent pictorial vocabulary. This is singularly important to someone who works, when actually writing, at the kind of speed and intensity which has enabled me to complete the majority of my fantasy books in less than a week and frequently within three days. Everything must be “in tune”—there must be an internal logic of images, just as there is in dreams. This much, I think, I learned from the surrealists. Like the surrealists, too, I found Freud and Jung of great help in maintaining this coherence.

All of which is a roundabout way of reiterating just how much I care about illustration.

Over the years, since Jim Cawthorn’s first (and still in many ways the finest) portraits of Elric, there have been a number of interpretations of the albino. The first strip version to be published was actually in French, by Philippe Druillet, in an obscure magazine called
Moi Aussi
in the mid-’60s (reprinted as a portfolio, 1972; in English, 1973) which was given an altogether idiosyncratic cast, since Druillet spoke no English and the stories were
told
to him by a friend, whereupon he drew his interpretation! The second version was Jim Cawthorn’s black-and-white, large-format
Stormbringer
, which was published with somewhat limited distribution by Savoy Books in the mid-’70s.

Thereafter, all the other versions have originated in America. One of the best of these was Robert Gould’s original Elric tale (with Eric Kimball) published by Star*Reach, 1976. I have always been a huge admirer of Gould’s work and am especially delighted that he is now illustrating virtually the entire Eternal Champion cycle on recent paperback editions (chiefly by Berkley). A very odd version of Elric came from the pen of that excellent Conan illustrator, Barry Windsor-Smith, in a Marvel
Conan
comic. Jim Cawthorn and I were responsible for the scenario, Roy Thomas wrote the script, and Barry, having no clear idea of what Elric should look like, based his interpretation on the early U.S. covers of
Stormbringer
and
The Stealer of Souls
by Jack Gaughan, not knowing that I had heartily disliked Gaughan’s Elric! This was not Barry’s fault, but it meant that the Conan meets Elric story, “A Sword Called Stormbringer” (
Conan the Barbarian
Nos. 14 & 15, March & May 1972), always remained something of a disappointment, visually, for me.

In 1979 Frank Brunner produced a tremendously powerful twenty-page story in
Heavy Metal
magazine (reprinted in
Star*Reach Greatest Hits
, together with the Gould story)—a rendition which almost got Elric into his first movie. I was approached by a film producer to do an Elric movie entirely on the strength of having seen Frank’s story. Sadly, the project fell through for a number of reasons. Another Hollywood proposal came from Ralph Bakshi, but I wasn’t prepared, in the end, to subject Elric to his kind of trivialization and I pulled out very early. I am also disappointed that although Howard Chaykin and I have worked together on projects (notably
The Swords of Heaven, The Flowers of Hell
) Howard’s only Elric work remains the early portfolio he did in the mid-’70s.

It seemed for some time that Elric projects were doomed to founder after one or two enthusiastic attempts. Mike Friedrich, who was offered control of U.S. comic rights to the Eternal Champion in 1976, had worked very hard to get a regular Elric series running in America and at last things began to come together in the 1980s when Roy Thomas and P. Craig Russell first teamed up to produce the Marvel Graphic Novel version of “The Dreaming City” (1982) and then (in
Epic Illustrated
No. 14) “While the Gods Laugh.” With Friedrich as editor, Thomas as writer, and Russell and Gilbert as illustrators, a winning team had finally been fielded.

In April 1983 the first regular Elric comic book began to appear, published by Pacific Comics. The fey, eery quality—especially experienced in the large set-piece pages—is like no other version of the Elric stories, and the strangely etiolated figures make the characters seem genuinely of another, more magical and alien world. Some of the work is extraordinary, both in detail and colour, in the originality of imagination which the artists have brought to their interpretation. I was greatly impressed and, in looking through the pages again, continue to be surprised and delighted by subtle touches which I had not taken in at first reading. I have never had the opportunity to congratulate the artists before, but am glad to do so now.

Elric of Melniboné
is chronologically the first in the Elric series, although it was written as one of the last (in 1972). With the comic’s first publication in paperback form I very much hope it will lead the way to the entire Elric saga being eventually available in illustrated versions. First Comics, who have already produced a further Elric series (
The Sailor on the Seas of Fate
by Thomas, Gilbert and Freeman) and who are, as I write, beginning an excellent interpretation of
The Jewel in the Skull
(featuring Dorian Hawkmoon) by a new team (Gerry Conway, Rafael Kayanan and Rico Rival), continue to prove themselves both reliable and conscientious in their treatment of writers and artists and this, in itself, is fairly unusual in the world of comics.

A long time ago I used to edit and write comics myself. I have lost track of the vast number of science fiction, Western and historical stories I produced in the ’50s and ’60s, chiefly for Amalgamated Press (later Fleetway Publications), but I well remember how I longed to be able to expand my imaginative range, how I tried to convince conservative editors and publishers to do something a bit different and how frustrated I used to feel when I was refused. Eventually I gave up my attempts to talk people into doing more interesting comics and looked elsewhere for a living. Now, through the new generation of comics publishers, writers and illustrators, I can at last feel encouraged that the old frustrations are ended and enjoy work which expands the medium and actually revels in the possibilities of the form.

My thanks, as ever, to Mike Friedrich, to Roy Thomas, to Messrs. Russell, Gilbert and Freeman and, of course, to Rick Oliver and all at First Comics (who nobly took up Pacific’s fallen banner) for these wonderful pages. They have succeeded in making a fairly old man pretty damned happy . . .

EL CID AND ELRIC:
UNDER THE INFLUENCE!

EL CID AND ELRIC:

Under the Influence!
(2007)

E
LRIC AND EL Cid! The similarity between the two names is not entirely coincidental, since the legends and romances of El Cid were a huge influence on my juvenile imagination.

I was brought up, like most British boys—I suspect like most boys of my generation everywhere—on stories of idealism, heroism and self-sacrifice. Macaulay’s
How Horatius Held the Bridge
, Tennyson’s
The Charge of the Light Brigade
, Newbolt’s
Vitai Lampada
, Chesterton’s
Lepanto
and many, many more were the stirring narrative poems we recited not to please teachers but for our own delight. Much of our history was already mythologized—the cool courage of Francis Drake and the brave death of Nelson were mixed in our minds with the fictional death of Sidney Carton in
A Tale of Two Cities
and a whole army of heroes who, in true Christian tradition, gave their lives for the benefit of others. Usually these heroes were depicted, like Robin Hood, as underdogs, fighting against the rich, the powerful and the thoroughly unjust!

The movies were the same. The stories were often of brave “ordinary” men who sacrificed themselves for the good of the many.
High Noon
represented this theme in Westerns while
Quo Vadis
and
Ben Hur
offered it in what were known as “toga and sandal epics,” Humphrey Bogart sacrificed his own desire in
Casablanca
and in the urban thrillers which eventually were given the generic name of “noir” by French critics. These were the popular entertainment of my day, but I had another enthusiasm, not shared by any of my peers. This was for all the books on myth and legend I could find, as well as for the few adult stories which in those days were still to be given the name of “Fantasy,” including Lord Dunsany, Edgar Rice Burroughs and, when I came across them, the American pulp magazines with names like
Planet Stories
or
Startling Stories
, specializing in a Burroughs-influenced “sword-and-planet” fiction. Early on I came across a series which told the stories of Greece and Rome, Scandinavia and Britain, most familiar to English children, but also included a volume on Peninsula Romance and it was in that book I first came across the story of Rodrigo Díaz, El Cid Campeador, whose story especially thrilled me.

Perhaps I was impressed by the fact that Díaz was an historical figure living at one of the most colourful and romantic times in Spanish history, when Christians and Moslems were enjoying perhaps the highest level of civilization either had ever known, when chivalric knights on both sides exemplified the highest ideals, irrespective of religion, while on the other hand there were villains amongst both communities, and El Cid fought with Moslem allies against corrupt Christians or with mixed armies of both religions to secure Valencia for himself. I was thrilled when Díaz was named El Campeador—“The Champion”—bearing his sword Tizona in man-to-man combat and I am sure all this went to inspire my own character Elric and the background of his world. When I wrote, at seventeen, the first draft of my story “The Eternal Champion,” there is no doubt that El Cid was influencing it. Like Elric, the Champion fights first for one side and then another, turning “traitor” as he learns more about those he fights for and against. He is moved not by loyalty to a certain flag, but by loyalty to a certain ideal. And in the end he perishes as a result of the destiny he sets in motion. But, in perishing, he saves the world for others!

Noble self-sacrifice still brings me to tears to this day, irrespective of the loyalties of the man or woman who performs the deed. Their loyalty is to a higher ideal, to a noble ethic. To this day epic films, like Ridley Scott’s recent
Kingdom of Heaven
, have shown the noblest hero to be the one who rises above simplistic loyalties to serve what is best in mankind and what is universal in mankind’s religious or political systems. When, long after I first read of his exploits, I saw Charlton Heston as El Cid have the arrow pulled from his body and strap himself to his horse in order to rally his troops against the invader (even though I knew that in real life Díaz had died in his bed) I enjoyed the same sensations. All this went to inspire my own troubled characters who wonder, in the words of E. M. Forster, whether it is best to betray one’s country or one’s friend—or, indeed, oneself.

To me, no attempt to mirror the great epics of our ancestors can succeed, even marginally, without an understanding of death. My quarrel with many of the fantasy romances written in the past fifty years or so is precisely that they do not understand the issue of mortality. All they do is keep us wondering
whether
the protagonist will live or die. This is scarcely important to us or Malory would not have called his work “Morte d’Arthur.” “All death is certain,” says the Hospitaler over his shoulder as he goes to certain doom against Saladin in Scott’s film. It is the
meaning
that we give our deaths (and, of course, our lives) that is important. This idea is at the root of all our great chivalric epics. How the hero dies is as resonant as how he lives. This is the point I have tried to make in my own stories. El Cid’s legendary end at the battle of Valencia reminds us that courage without sacrifice is an empty quality. Elric’s death, to herald in a new and better era, must be equally meaningful if I am to do even modest justice to those great epics which meant so much to me when I was a child.