leeper@mtgzz.UUCP (m.r.leeper) (08/24/85)
THE DREAMING CITY by Michael Moorcock
Lancer, ?, ?.
ELRIC by Michael Gilbert and Craig Russell
Pacific Comics, Issues 1 through 4, 1983.
A review by Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: A fairly simple little novel makes a very good comic
book by changing very little in the transition. One can expect more from a
novel and rarely gets more from a comic book.
A good while ago there was a small version of Mark Leeper who was a big
fan of comic books. Then when I hit the ripe old age of twelve I gave away
a collection which, if sold today, could pay off a nice piece of my
mortgage. (As usual for such stories, there was a mother involved in the
premature liquidation.) Then I did not read more than a comic book a year
until relatively recently. What I did read convinced me that comics were
maturing a little but were still silly and banal. Recently a friend who is
a big comic fan got me reading a few. My conclusion is that my distaste for
super-heroes rules out the vast majority of comics sold. At some point, I
will probably write a general article about my conclusions about comic
books.
A little more specifically, however, while I was gone on a recent trip
Evelyn bought me the first four issues of a 1983 series published by Pacific
Comics, ELRIC. This series is an adaptation from the novel THE DREAMING
CITY by Michael Moorcock. I read the comics and the novel almost in
parallel. My conclusions? It is far better to read the two in parallel
than to read either by itself.
Moorcock's writing style is ideal for adapting as a comic book. THE
DREAMING CITY tells one story, I suppose, but even more so it is a string of
short stories, not unlike THE ODYSSEY. None of the stories is particularly
good by itself though. The whole of the book is much greater than the sum
of its parts in that it makes a reasonably good story taken as one long
adventure with a number of interesting ideas and sequences. This
stringing-together of sequences, incidentally, is why it adapts so well as a
comic book. Each sequence is about the right length to base a 28-page comic
book on. And the comic books cut out some of the verbiage but very little
of the story or its ideas. THE DREAMING CITY is far better adapted as a
comic book than it could ever be as a film.
Moorcock has a really good imagination when it comes to visual images,
but I doubt that they would have come across as well without some of the
stylized artwork of the comic book. Michael Gilbert and Craig Russell (the
artists) have a style that is a little hard to get used to, but once you do
it is quite imaginative. In some ways it is reminiscent of the work of
Aubrey Beardsley. Sometimes it is simple; other times it is out-and-out
florid. Reading the book I might have noted quickly in passing the
description of characters like Dr. Jest, but the comic's pinched depiction
is constantly carried along with the character in the comic in a way that
would have been impossible in the book.
THE DREAMING CITY is not a very complex book. Yes, it is a little more
complex than a Conan story. Elric does go on a search to find his own
identity; I doubt Conan ever would. But just in case you missed that aspect
of the character, Moorcock has Elric say things like, "I feel that [this]
happiness cannot last unless we know what we are." The book has some
subtlety, but little profundity. It was made to be a comic book and
Moorcock is probably lucky that it was adapted as well as it was.
Rate the book a 0 and the comic book adaptation a +2 (due in part to
low expectations) on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
...ihnp4!mtgzz!leeper