A Grand Master’s Greatest Character Reborn

By Ron Hogan on May 2, 2008 9:00 AM

Betsy Mitchell of Del Rey sent this photo she took last week at the Science Fiction Writers of America‘s Nebula banquet of author Michael Moorcock with his Grand Master award, which reminded me that I’ve been meaning to talk about how her company is reissuing perhaps his greatest fantasy series, the chronicles of Elric of Melnibone, beginning with The Stealer of Souls earlier this year. You remember how, when Dungeons & Dragons creator Gary Gygax died earlier this year, the New York Times described him as one of the universe’s hidden architects? The same holds true for Moorcock: In addition to his obvious influence over the literary development of fantasy and science fiction over the last forty years, you can make a persuasive case for his role in shaping the style of rock music, especially heavy metal—Elric is, I would say, the common thread between Blue Oyster Cult and David Bowie (a truth Alan Moore alludes to by titling his introduction to the stories “The Return of the Thin White Duke”).

The Elric stories have been out of print for a while, Mitchell emailed me recently, “and as classic fantasy literature simply had to be brought back into print.” Del Rey’s six-volume series rearranges the material slightly, adding some material that has never been collected in book form before. Each volume will also feature original illustrations—and I was fortunate enough to have a phone conversation recently with John Picacio, the artist on The Stealer of Souls, about how he came to reimagine a character who has gone through several iconic looks over the last four decades.

Picacio was working as an architect and self-publishing comic books on the side back in 1996, when Mojo Press invited him to do the cover art for a thirtieth-anniversary edition of Moorcock’s Behold the Man. ( “John’s work stood out from a bunch of pretty good people,” Moorcock said in a statement forwarded from Del Rey, and on a subsequent assignment illustrating Tales From the Texas Woods, “he showed his versatility with an entirely different style for that book.”)

“I don’t think my reaction was immediately yes,” Picacio said, “which was stupid on my part.” He ended up acquiring creative control over every aspect of the design on Behold the Man, and “the joy I felt in doing that book all the way through… was a pivotal life moment.” He began accepting assignments from other publishers, and five years later quit his day job: “I didn’t have savings… I had no Plan B,” he told me. “If Plan A didn’t work, there was Plan A.” But he had just enough clients to scrape by until he got more work, and did he ever—enough to support a coffee table retrospective of his first decade’s work back in 2006.

When Del Rey (which had been his first “big corporate New York” client) asked about the Elric books, he didn’t hesitate. Looking back at previous versions of the character—a doomed antihero locked in an addictive relationship with Stormbringer, a mystical sword that feeds on the souls of those it kills—Picacio asked himself, “What can I add to the vocabulary?” At the same time, he tried to maintain a balance between illustrations that directly depicted scenes from the stories and more evocative imagery. When the words are already powerful enough to inspire the reader to see the story in her imagination, he explained, “the best I can do is just match that.” So, instead, he tries to set his images “a moment before the text or a moment after the text.”

One of his favorite illustrations from The Stealer of Souls, a full-page image informally known as “Elric the Damned” (see below), plays with that dynamic, depicting one of the final scenes of the character’s first adventure, “The Dreaming City,” but in a way that becomes emblematic of his tragic flaws. “You can’t tell if he’s drowning, if he’s washed up on shore, or if he’s in a purgatorial limbo,” Picacio says of the drawing, and the “rapture and also an exquisite pain” that sums up the complex relationship between Elric and Stormbringer.

Even before the Elric deal came together, Moorock had prompted Lou Anders at Pyr to commission a Picacio cover for another collection, The Metatemporal Detective, featuring a Moriarty-like adversary named Monsieur Zenith—who, because Moorcock’s stories take place in a “multiverse” where characters in one series can frequently be avatars of characters in another series, bears a deliberate resemblance to Elric. “We had already locked down John first,” Anders told me, “but really benefited from all the research John got to put into Elric/Zenith for all the marvelous interiors he did for the Del Rey book. And, since I really think John’s artwork has become the new ‘definitive Elric,’ I’m very happy for Zenith and Elric to have a real continuity of look.”

Picacio won’t be doing all six volumes in Del Rey’s Elric series—the edition of To Rescue Tanelorn coming in a few months features Michael W. Kaluta, and other artists are lined up for subsequent issues until Picacio returns for the sixth and final volume to be published in late 2009.