Have a look a little way up the page for a picture of the cover, can't find it on Google...
The first time I came across the 'Conan/Elric' story was in a psychiatric hospital, in Northampton, some years ago now. Before you ask, I was working there... ;o) The plan was always to grab my own copies but they proved pretty much impossible to come by. I thought I'd finally cracked it when I came across the issues in 'Orbital' (worth a look whenever you're in London) but they went in the time it took to get some money and come back...
You can forgive me then for practically jumping on this small collected edition when I saw it at Nine Worlds last weekend. Not only did I finally get to read the story (finally!) but I get a nice little buzz of nostalgia seeing it collected in the same kind of format that we used to read war comics when I was at school :o) Happy days...
It felt a bit odd then to feel ever so slightly disappointed after reading the story then. Don't get me wrong, I did have a lot of fun reading and there is plenty happening here. An impossible quest, the machinations of Xiombarg and two heroes against the chaos pack of Gaynor the Damned. And not just that, we're talking two heroes who are used to being top dog and are constantly fighting not to fight each other; the dynamic between Elric and Conan does keep things ticking along nicely which is good as I have a feeling that the actual story wouldn't have done the job all by itself. It's just a little too straightforward for my tastes, full of spectacle (that Barry Smith could have perhaps illustrated a little better than he did and he can’t seem to draw eyes at all...) but no real twists. And I don't know, with two such iconic characters meeting on the page, for the first time, it just didn't feel like much of an occasion. While things like this do happen fairly regularly in the worlds of sword and sorcery, it just felt a little too casual here.
'A Sword called Stormbringer' and 'The Green Empress of Melnibone' combine to give the reader a tale then that is fun but not a lot more...
What was a nice surprise though was to see Howard's 'The Hyborian Age' as part of the collection. The format makes this history a little easier to follow and a whole lot less dry than it was in the book.
'The Blood of the Dragon' though...? While the other three stories hint at epic strokes of history (or cosmic history in the case of Elric...) this story is strictly a one off that keeps things very much in the here and now. So to speak, you know what I mean :o) 'The Blood of the Dragon' does its job well enough but really stands out as the 'odd one out' here.
All in all then? I'm kind of half and half. These tales are fun reads that don't really stand up to a great deal of scrutiny; maybe we shouldn't be asking that much of them?
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