Elric Swords and Roses - Michael Moorcock [4]
At the age of sixteen, I began to contribute to the professional weekly Tarzan Adventures and Jim illustrated my features and fiction. A little later, I became editor of the magazine and Jim not only illustrated much of it, he also began writing for it, contributing a sword-and-sorcery series and a comic strip, among others. When I left Tarzan and went to work for “the longest-running detective series in history,” the Sexton Blake Library at the old Amalgamated Press (now Fleetway publications, publisher of 2000 AD and many others), Jim produced illustrations for the monthly novels and collaborated with me on a classic locked-room (only it was a locked bathysphere) murder mystery which was published eventually as Caribbean Crisis. Originally through those contacts at Fleetway Jim began a long career as a freelancer, writing strips and educational features and illustrating children’s books.
While I was still at Tarzan, I had begun to discuss with Jim the idea of a new kind of fantasy hero who would be neither noble and decent, like John Carter; barbaric and moody like Conan or Brackett’s Eric John Stark; nor a pseudo-juvenile, like Tolkien’s hobbits. Influenced by the old gentleman adventurer crooks, like Hornung’s Raffles and Skene’s Monsieur Zenith, he would not battle against sorcery but embrace it, not shun aristocratic decadence but be part of it. There was a dash of Shakespeare’s Richard III in there, too! As we discussed this character, Jim sketched out ideas and passed them back to me. And so Elric and Stormbringer were born. For me, Elric’s appearance will always be the one Jim drew in the late 1950s; when I came to write my first story, at the editor’s request, for Science Fantasy, he was already there, the moody prince of decadent Melniboné. When editor John Carnell asked for more and more stories, Jim even came to my aid then, giving me the outline of “Kings in Darkness.” Jim produced covers featuring the albino. He did the covers for my Kane of Old Mars books. He produced the first-ever cover for the hardback novel Stormbringer. He drew the first Elric graphic novel. He illustrated the DAW editions of the Elric novels, with the Whelan covers, and he illustrated many other DAW titles. He was commissioned to do Elric interiors for my German editions and his work appeared in the first omnibus Elric editions produced in England. Our collaborations lasted as long as our friendship, which remained strong and free from argument.
When, in 1964, I became editor of New Worlds magazine, I had to put my first issue together in a very short time. I commissioned a serial from J. G. Ballard, “Equinox,” which became The Crystal World, and short stories from John Brunner, “The Last Lonely Man” (one of his best); Barry Bayley, “The Star Virus” and others, while asking Jim to do the cover and interiors. I did an editorial on the Beat writer William Burroughs, saying how I thought his absurdist, unrationalized work, with its scientific metaphors, was “a new literature for the Space Age.” It was, I still think, a brilliant and influential issue, created from scratch in about two weeks. I was used to working at such speed, having produced weeklies, but the others were not! Jim did the next cover, illustrating my then wife Hilary Bailey’s early Hitler-won-WW2 story “The Fall of Frenchy Steiner” while also doing most of the interiors. He would continue to illustrate New Worlds throughout my editorship and later ownership, doing wonderful work for The Dancers at the End of Time novellas and a magnificent double-page spread for The Warlord of the Air, which he would later