Owen, loved couching their stories in styles influenced by Chinese tale-tellers. Other Weird Tales writers even pretended to be translating from Far Eastern sources. I remember coming across a story by Tennessee Williams which purported to be, as I recall, a previously untranslated Greek scroll. Weird Tales, which had published almost every major fantasist including Lovecraft, Howard, and Bradbury, inspired Carnell. He always saw Science Fantasy as the most literary of his magazines (though Science Fiction Adventures published The Drowned World and several other Ballard or Aldiss classics) and ran the best of John Brunner’s Society of Time stories; Thomas Burnett Swann’s tales of the Greek gods and demigods; together with stories by H. K. Bulmer, John Phillifent, Keith Roberts, E. C. Tubb and a few others, all at the top of their form. Science Fantasy also published some Mervyn Peake stories for the first time as well as some beautifully done covers by Gerard Quinn, Brian Lewis and James Cawthorn. Admittedly, Lewis’s hefty Elric was painted before the story was completed. There was worse to come. Jack Gaughan’s illustrations for the first U.S. Elric paperbacks of The Stealer of Souls and Stormbringer, with their strange, spiky hats, influenced Barry Windsor-Smith’s depiction for a later Conan-meets-Elric comic story drafted by Jim Cawthorn and myself. I’m never sure where Jack got those conical hats, which looked like dunce caps to me, but he seemed very proud of them and I never liked to complain too much, at least until it couldn’t hurt him. Soon after the British edition of Stormbringer appeared there came a number of other creations called “Stormbringer.” At least two music albums (by John Martyn and by Deep Purple), a band, some comics and even TV shows have borrowed it. Other bands around the world have also referenced the sword. That Stormbringer failed to appear in the movie Red Sonja was thanks to some swift footwork by lawyers. While I’ve watched as people lift stuff like the Chaos symbol, created as the opposite of Law’s single arrow, and murmured “be my guest” as the multiverse term and concept is cheerfully appropriated, I’ve always felt especially proprietorial when people rip off my big black sword. The fully-loaded Raven Armoury version has to be kept in a gun cupboard, just in case….
I’m often asked who my favourite Elric artist is. There have been so many good ones from Cawthorn in England to Phillippe Druillet in France (both have also done graphic novel versions), to Michael Whelan and Robert Gould in the United States. Frank Brunner, Howard Chaykin, Walter Simonson. Rodney Matthews, Jim Burns, Chris Achilleos and, of course, the great Yoshitaka Amano. And now it’s John Picacio’s turn. It might be worth mentioning here that Elric does not, of course, exhibit human albinism but an alien condition that occasionally produces a “Silverskin” of Melnibonéan royal blood. He has no real equivalent amongst the races of the Young Kingdoms, with whom we have much more in common. That human albinos have had something of a bad press in our world, frequently cast as villains (cf. The Da Vinci Code) is demonstrated in Anthony Skene’s description, also reprinted here, of how he was inspired to create Zenith. Monsieur Zenith came into existence less than a decade after Gaston Leroux’s Phantom of the Opera, but over a half century before him came Jean Blanc in Le Loup Blanc, creation of Paul Féval, the prolific feuilletonist who supplied the French public with a considerable amount of its popular fiction in the middle of the nineteenth century. It came as something of a shock to realize Elric had such a long pedigree. I am indebted to Jess Nevins’s extraordinary Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana and to Jean-Marc Lofficier, of The Black Coat Press, for details of Le Loup Blanc. Anyone who would like to investigate this wonderful world any further can do so by reading Lofficier’s Tales of the Shadowmen series. I might feel a little astonishment at the title, Stormbringer, being used by others so frequently, but Terry