‘Elric – The Dreaming City #1 & #2’ – Blondel, Cano, Telo (Titan Comics)

I haven’t had the best of days today, turns out that your mouth can hurt just as much after the offending tooth has been extracted as it did beforehand… Oh well, nothing that repeated doses of paracetamol won’t eventually fix 😊 In the meantime though, I haven’t really been up to much as far as reading goes but luckily, I had a couple of comics on hand for a situation just like this…

‘The White Wolf’ did take an unexpected turn at the end (that had me wondering if I’d strayed into ‘What If…?’ territory) but there was still enough there that when I saw that ‘The Dreaming City’ was going to be a thing, I knew I had to pick up the first couple of issues. And me being me (and never getting round to picking individual issues up on time…), I was able to pick up the first couple of issues when I was in Forbidden Planet the other day. I love fantasy comics (there really need to be more though) and Moorcock adaptations tend to be a lot of fun more often than not so I was keen to see where things went here. And as it happened… I’m still wondering if I’ve strayed into a ‘What If…?’ story. It’s fun though and that’s what I needed today.

‘The Dreaming City’ tells the tale of Elric’s return to Imrryr but it’s not the tale that you may have read already. That’s not a huge issue in itself but if you’re not expecting this, you’re going to be in for a lot of ‘what…?’ and ‘hang on a minute…’  Events from ‘The Jade Man’s Eyes’ are incorporated into the story, as a series of flashbacks in #1, and I liked how that fleshed things out without requiring a whole other series to be collected (Marvel, take note). You almost feel like you’re getting another series for free and while you don’t get the whole story, you get the point of it (at least in relation to this retelling of ‘The Dreaming City’, little bits are changed here and there) and that’s key. A part of me was asking myself if this was what Moorcock had intended but the main part of me just enjoyed seeing Blondel and Cano’s take on the setting, really getting into what makes Elric tick and providing some possible insight into the machinations of Arioch. Fun then, a lot of fun.

Issue 2 though… I’m undecided, purely because I’m used to ‘The Dreaming City’ going a certain way and it doesn’t quite work like that here. Cymoril has a bigger part to play here and that’s cool. Sticking with the ‘What If…?’ angle, it’s great to see how things could have gone had one little thing worked out differently. The thing is though, the ending is the same and while that has to happen (it’s really the whole point of Elric’s tale and why he goes on to be what he is), I couldn’t help but wonder what the point was of giving Cymoril that little extra if she never really got to use it. I feel like I’m missing something incredibly bold and obvious but I just can’t see it this time round, in the same way that my dodgy eyes wouldn’t let me quite decipher the red writing in solid black boxes (dammit!) The rest of it is brilliant and that’s in no small part due to Julien Telo’s amazing artwork that continues to capture the look and feel of Imrryr and the surrounding Young Kingdoms. Just that one little thing niggles though…

The good news is that this niggle has intrigued me enough to follow this series and see where it ends up. How faithful will it stay to the source material and does it really matter if it doesn’t? I’ll let you know… 😉