Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser
Dark Horse
Comics
The current revival of barbarian and sword-and-sorcery genre comics, led by Dark Horse Comics’ excellent Conan series, has had two unforeseen consequences on the rest of the comics market, one good and one not so good.
As for the not so good, it’s led to a lot of imitators trying to cash in on the formula and coming up extremely short (Red Sonja, Claw the Unconquered, Warlord, even a new Xena comic, and so on). As for the good, it’s led to reprints of great old, half-forgotten comics, like Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser (originally published by Marvel in 1991, but never collected for the enjoyment of the graphic-novel audience).
The big, burly, red-haired Fafhrd and the small, dark, wily Gray Mouser first appeared in the prose fiction of writer Fritz Leiber, an influential author who emerged from the same movement as Conan creator Robert E. Howard and shared many of Howard’s fans.
Two of those fans were Howard Chaykin, the writer/artist responsible for American Flagg and Black Kiss, and Mike Mignola, the writer/artist responsible for Hellboy. Chaykin scripted the adaptation of Leiber stories that constitute this volume, and a young, pre-Hellboy Mignola provided the pencil art.
The heroes are not your average fantasy heroes. Sure, there’s plenty of swordplay and dealings with thieves guilds and wizards, but the characters are cynical, sarcastic and more than a little anachronistic; seemingly ancestors to Bing Crosby and Bob Hope’s Road To ... personalities more than any characters of their own genre, the pair of rogues needle one another in a pleasing pitter-pattering dialogue.
Mignola’s stripped-down art had yet to reach the level of expressionistic abstraction he’s since perfected on Hellboy (and is evident in the new cover he provides for the collection), but is here nicely balanced between minimal lines and shapes and representation. Each panel is simple, yet perfectly designed, with a high level of detail for a Mignola comic.
Fans of Mignola’s later supernatural nuttiness will find plenty to like here—giant spiders, an army of carnivorous rats, ghosts, jackals, an octopus with eight swords in its tentacles, and so on.
Chaykin (adapting Leiber) likewise finds plenty of unique takes on stories within the now rather tired genre, filling the episodic adventures with parallel actions, a balance of character-driven comedy and circumstance-driven adventure and a surprisingly clairvoyant tale about interdimensional merchants destroying the universe by selling people garbage they don’t really need or want.
Essex County Vol. 1: Tales From the Farm
Top Shelf
Productions
Canadian cartoonist Jeff Lemire is a creative force to be reckoned with, as his elegiac graphic novel set on a lonely farm in Southwestern Ontario so eloquently attests.
The “tales” of the title star Lester, a 10-year-old boy who is forced to move to his uncle’s farm when his mother dies of cancer. He spends his time dressed in a cape and mask half-heartedly playing superhero between chores, while his relationship with his uncle gets more and more strained. The only other person in his life is the big, supposedly a little slow gas-station owner Jimmy, who treats Lester as an equal (offering him smokes and inadvertently dropping f-bombs, but also playing superheroes and aliens with him).
Lemire’s story is short, the narrative composed of individual scenes like beads on a string, but strong, thanks to the highly evocative black and white art that subtly shifts depending on storytelling needs.
Lemire’s sense of design is fairly abstracted when it comes to character but super-tight on the settings, and the lines all have a splashy, painterly look about them. Flashbacks are softened from black and white to gray and white, and the visual highlight might be the part of the story that takes place inside Lester’s own homemade comic book, which the title page credits to the cartoonist himself, at age 9 (and it looks like it).
While the overall tone of the book is somewhat sad and subdued, despite a fairly magical realism-style climax, I found at least one part of it tremendously exciting—the words “Vol. 1” on the cover, which means there’s more work from Lemire to come.