The opening scenes parallel (and prefigure) many Hollywood plots: Elric’s wife is abducted for unknown reasons so Elric has to take up his sword and go after her. Stormbringer begins with Elric having retired from adventuring his soul-stealing sword is locked away and he’s settled down to married life.

The Stormbringer commission was a result of the late David Britton’s obsession with Elric in general and the Stormbringer book in particular. Despite having created many Elric illustrations Cawthorn always seemed to want to draw comics based on other characters, notably Moorcock’s Dorian Hawkmoon whose adventures have recently been reprinted in three volumes by Titan Books. He not only illustrated the first Elric stories but also co-wrote the fourth one, Kings in Darkness. James Cawthorn was one of Moorcock’s oldest friends, and a frequent collaborator. (By coincidence, Leone was preparing to the upset the Western genre with A Fistful of Dollars just as Moorcock was finishing the first Elric stories.) Elric is like one of Sergio Leone’s characters: the difference between Clint Eastwood’s “Good” in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Lee Van Cleef’s “Bad” is merely a matter of degree both men are killers chasing the same hoard of gold coins. Over the course of ten stories Moorcock introduced a character and a world that acted as a riposte to the Tolkienite school of heroic fantasy, where the divisions between Good and Evil are clear and fixed. The original Stormbringer by Michael Moorcock isn’t a novel as such but a collection of the second series of linked novellas about Elric of Melniboné that Moorcock wrote for Science Fantasy from 1961 to 1964. This is a limited edition that’s unlikely to be reprinted so anyone interested is advised to pre-order. The Stormbringer Sessons is a resurrection by John Davey of a sketchbook created by James Cawthorn in the mid-1980s for an Elric graphic novel that Cawthorn was commissioned to adapt and illustrate for Savoy Books. One of the books I was designing last year is published next month.

Elric stormbringer