James Cawthorn: The Stormbringer Sessions: Sketches for a Graphic Novel compiled by John Davey

(Jayde Design/Savoy Books, 2021)

Reviewed by Andy Sawyer

It must be difficult for contemporary readers—even those who are fans of the work—to get their heads around what reading Michael Moorcock’s “Elric” series in the 1960s was like. The sudden flash of discovery in the mid-1960s was largely created by the fact that there really was comparatively little of that kind of fiction available, but it was quite clear to even the most naïve reader that Moorcock was picking up a genre and trying to pull it into the modern world. In 1965 J. G. Ballard—that’s J. G. Ballard, the darling of ‘experimental’ literary theorists—called Stormbringer “[a] work of powerful and sustained imagination which confirms Michael Moorcock’s position as the most important successor to Mervyn Peake and Wyndham Lewis… a world as fantastic as those of Bosch and Breughel…vast, tragic symbols… [a] metaphysical quest.” Not bad for a sword-and-sorcery novel. Moorcock’s ‘Eternal Champion’ series (of which the Elric sub-series is but a part) is perhaps too hastily constructed from its individual units to be entirely successful as epic, but if it has the feel of epic it’s in the doomed anti-hero Elric himself, who in these earlier works is like the heroes of Homer or the Norse sagas, self-aware enough to know that he is a tool of greater powers even as he shatters the world around him.

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Review from BSFA Review 14 - Download your copy here.