Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser by Howard Chaykin

A few linking panels would have gone a long, long way, even if they were just added for the trade. That made my problems worse, since I wasn't exactly digging them to begin with. This series did not do that at all, leaving my scratching my head between chapter breaks trying to figure out where I was in these character's lives. After all, that's what happens in comic books-the end of comic 1 starts the beginning of comic 2, and so on. As Roy Thomas and Kurt Busiek can tell you, when you're adapting things to the comic medium, you must find a way to link stories together. Because Chaykin and Mignola just chose these stories at random, there's no sense of consistency. The careless treatment of the girlfriends wasn't the only problem with this collection, however.

But like watching an episode of a TV show and not finding it compelling, further reading just didn't motivate me to get over my annoyance back on page twenty-two or so. Two magical beings, ghost wolves (the only story in the collection I rather liked), and religious cynicism are thing I'd normally like in a comic, combined with the two men's growing friendship. Thus, no matter how potentially interesting things got, I just wasn't ready to enjoy myself. The women didn't matter at all to the story the author wanted to tell, other than as furniture, and I didn't care for it. These deaths were just thrown in there, made the main characters angry, and we moved on. Gwen Stacy's death wasn't tossed away as a minor plot point-it still resonates today. I can deal with the damsel in distress if it's done the right away but this one's so ham-handed (either by Chaykin or his source) that I can't get around it. The deaths of the women before we even get a reason to care is so senseless and typical of so many fantasy stories-and yes, I include comic books in this-that my feminist-leaning side said, 'this sucks' and nothing could get the story back on my good side. Typing this, I realize that's the problem. After the typical revenge, they then just sort of plug away as though they'd lost at cribbage or something and had to kill a few people to make up for it. Fafhrd and gthe Grey Mouser are rogue thieves who mess with the thieves' guild and lose their sweethearts violently. I just could not get myself interested in the two protagonists. Now perhaps that's the failure of Chaykin to translate it to the comic medium, but I think a lot of it has to do with the source material. Well, not always, at least not for me in this case.Ĭhaykin and Mignola both have a strong attachment for Fritz Leiber, a writer who came after Robert Howard and Lovecraft and wrote sort of a hack-and-slash-meets-noir world that works great for them but frankly falls flat for me. Illustrated by Mike Mignola and Al Williamson

Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser by Howard Chaykin