Elric of Melniboné

is the Kevin Bacon of fantasy literature: every sword-and-sorcery author is at least a few degrees removed from him, either by tying their stories into the sprawling Michael Moorcock multiverse or drawing detailed inspiration from same. There are decades of stories wrapped around this character, not all of them Moorcock’s, and even if you’ve read other Elric comics, you’ve only dipped into the shallow end. This comic tries to takes us a little deeper, drawing together other incarnations of Moorcock’s Eternal Champion in what BOOM! Studios jokingly calls the Crisis on Infinite Earths of Elric stories.

Can this comic live up to that claim? It certainly tries. We get rapid-fire introductions to four different Elrics: The sword-swinging anti-hero Elric, the kindly veteran Dorian Hawkmoor, the weary warrior Corum and a cynical video-game developer in what seems to be our world. My prior knowledge of Elric is fairly limited to the early Moorcock stories (and from Elrod of Melvinbone, Dave Sim’s goofy caricature of Elric in Cerebus), so I have yet to care about the Hawkmoor or Corum stories. But it’s clearly set up for an epic cosmic crisis involving all the Elrics, so it’ll be worth paying attention for the time being.

If you’re easily scared by lots of Elvish-sounding proper nouns and bombastic talk about ORDER! and CHAOS!, this book won’t be much fun. But after wading through all that, you do get to see some of the things that make Elric cool: brooding, big ideas and blood. Monster blood. And lots of it. The reading experience would be much improved by relaxing in a bitchin’ panel van, listening to some prog rock and smoking heavy, heavy drugs. I tried only one of those things — I’ll let you guess which — and still enjoyed myself.