Duke Elric - Michael Moorcock [3]
In the late ‘90s I would begin writing a new kind of Elric story, some of which was set in the historical past, and it seems appropriate to include it here. I decided to break the rule of trying to include material as it originally appeared. It would, we realized, overload future volumes if we saved Duke Elric, so we decided to include it here. One episode can't be traced, so John Davey kindly restored it from the published version that ran three parallel stories as Michael Moorcock's Multiverse, brought out in 1999 by DC. There have been discussions about creating a complex musical version of the story, but so far nobody has had the time and energy to do so.
Writing was my primary profession, so it would be some while before, with Hawkwind, I would start work on the two-disc concept that first toured and then appeared as The Chronicle of the Black Sword. The record is generally available, but I also hope to reprint some of those lyrics in à later volume.
The 1970s were a heady time for my friends and me. We were in our pomp. We wore wild, romantic clothes derived from the Pre-Raphaelites. Artists, too, were rediscovering all the great nineteenth-century romantic painters and illustrators. The first goths were coming into their own; the punks, a whole new shot in the arm for English culture, had turned up. Yet somehow, in spite of a few punks using me as an ikon of their disgust, Elric seemed to move smoothly into the new era. Indeed, through the ’70s there were more comics, posters, postcards, games, and the rest than ever before. The great Michael Whelan covers still adorned the DAW versions of the U.S. Elric books (and others), and Rodney Matthews's images of Elric dominated the U.K. Rock songs continued to be written about him. Readers continued to ask for new stories. I sympathized with anyone who felt they were suffering Elric overkill.
Famously, Conan Doyle became heartily sick of Sherlock Holmes, the character on whom his fortune was founded. He cursed having to write new episodes of the Great Detective's adventures. Many less popular authors have continued to bemoan the burden of successful characters and books, apparently forgetting that they have done something quite remarkable in adding significantly to the world's myths and folk tales.
Interviewers frequently ask if I, too, feel sick of Elric, and I can honestly say that I have never regarded Elric as a burden of any kind. I never saw him as an embarrassingly rich, vulgar relative on whose bounty I live in rather higher style than otherwise. I continue to write about him, if I have an idea that suits him. My only fear is that readers will stop finding the stories as vital as before. I'm heartened by his continued translation, sometimes retranslation, into most European languages, from the Balkans to the Baltic and many other languages, including Hebrew and Japanese. I have never, as far as I recall, won a literary prize for Elric, and Elric is rarely listed when people mention my literary accomplishments. Yet I did my best with him, in the circumstances, and I tried to improve the writing, widen the horizon, develop characters, and fill in backgrounds, histories, and cultures, as well as, in some way, I hope, widen the possibilities of epic fantasy as it was then constituted.
As readers will see, Elric continued to attract first-class illustrators, some of whom I chose to work with and some who were commissioned by publishers. I have admired Justin Sweet since I saw his illustrations for Howard's Solomon Kane stories and was so pleased to find that Betsy Mitchell, my editor at Del Rey, also liked him and was happy to commission