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derives its existence from the hinterland of man’s mind—that suggests the abyss of time separating us from pre-human ages, or evokes a super-human world of contrasting light and darkness. It is a primordial experience which surpasses man’s understanding and to which he is therefore in danger of succumbing. The value and the force of the experience are given by its enormity. It arises from timeless depths; it is foreign and cold, many-sided, demonic and grotesque. A grimly ridiculous sample of the eternal chaos . . . it bursts asunder our human standards of value and of aesthetic form. The disturbing vision of monstrous and meaningless happenings that in every way exceed the grasp of human feelings and comprehension makes quite other demands upon the powers of the artist than do the experiences of the foreground of life. These never rend the curtain that veils the cosmos; they never transcend the bounds of the humanly possible, and for this reason are readily shaped to the demands of art, no matter how great a shock to the individual they may be. But the primordial experiences rend from the top to bottom the curtain upon which is painted the picture of an ordered world, and allow a glimpse into the unfathomed abyss of what has not yet become. Is it a vision of other worlds, or of the obscuration of the spirit, or of the beginning of things before the age of man, or of the unborn generations of the future? We cannot say that it is any or none of these . . . In a more restricted and specific way, the primordial experience furnishes material for Rider Haggard in the fiction-cycle that turns upon She . . .

It is in this more restricted and specific way that I intend to look at some of the more important works of fantasy in subsequent articles.

(Note: Most of this essay was originally written earlier for an unpublished magazine.)

ELRIC OF MELNIBONÉ:

INTRODUCTION TO THE

GRAPHIC ADAPTATION

INTRODUCTION

to Elric of Melniboné, graphic adaptation

(1986)

RIGHT FROM ELRIC’S earliest appearances (in Science Fantasy magazine, 1961) he has attracted the attention of some of the best fantasy illustrators. Indeed, Jim Cawthorn (who depicted him on the covers of Science Fantasy and the first edition of Stormbringer) was more than a little responsible for my descriptions, since Jim and I worked for years in very close liaison (including a commissioned illustrated serial done for the Illustrated Weekly of India in the late ’60s) and sometimes were hard put to say who had invented an image first.

I have always placed a high emphasis on illustration, both in my own books and in New Worlds, the magazine I edited for a number of years. I’m inclined to plan my books in terms of scenes and images. The fantasies in particular are always very thoroughly worked out in what I like to think of as a coherent pictorial vocabulary. This is singularly important to someone who works, when actually writing, at the kind of speed and intensity which has enabled me to complete the majority of my fantasy books in less than a week and frequently within three days. Everything must be “in tune”—there must be an internal logic of images, just as there is in dreams. This much, I think, I learned from the surrealists. Like the surrealists, too, I found Freud and Jung of great help in maintaining this coherence.

All of which is a roundabout way of reiterating just how much I care about illustration.

Over the years, since Jim Cawthorn’s first (and still in many ways the finest) portraits of Elric, there have been a number of interpretations of the albino. The first strip version to be published was actually in French, by Philippe Druillet, in an obscure magazine called Moi Aussi in the mid-’60s (reprinted as a portfolio, 1972; in English, 1973) which was given an altogether idiosyncratic cast, since Druillet spoke no English and the stories were told to him by a friend, whereupon he drew his interpretation! The second version was Jim Cawthorn’s black-and-white, large-format Stormbringer, which was published with somewhat limited distribution by