Review by Frank Plowright
P. Craig Russell has devoted much of his 21st century career to adapting Neil Gaiman short stories into comics, with creatively successful results. However, his primary muse lay in bringing the works of others to a comic audience long before then, with topics as diverse as opera, the fairy tales of Oscar Wilde and the sword and sorcery of Michael Moorcock’s Elric. That passion for variety is very evident in this slim volume collecting nine short stories published between 1977 and 1997, with the surprise being that Russell also conceives much of the content.
As tempting as it may be to skip straight to the art, don’t avoid Will Pfeifer’s introduction. Pfeifer raises aspects you may miss, such as Russell not being known for his sense of humour, and pointing out how wrong that is.
What Russell has been known for since his earliest days at Marvel is the delicacy of his art and the detail in his compositions, and both are much in evidence in what’s a chronologically sequenced collection. Some inclusions are black and white, some have the colour supplied by frequent collaborator Lovern Kindzierski, some are coloured by Russell, and the 1981 title strip is reproduced from incredibly detailed pencils.
Topics are equally varied from the opening, strangely poetic contemplations of Japanese ritual suicide to Steven Grant scripting the legend of Hassan ibn Saba and the promises made to assassins he employed. There’s a dream, the title story’s soaring tragedy, adaptations of H.P. Lovercraft’s horror and O. Henry’s clever Christmas story and the absurdity of Cyrano de Bergerac, and to each Russell brings the appropriate mood. The most experimental inclusion is ‘The Insomniac’, the failure of sleep inducing fragmentary pages of recollection in assorted styles, some so far removed from Russell’s regular work that you’d not recognise the pages as his in isolation.
The sample art combines pages from ‘From Beyond’ and ‘Breakdown on the Starship Remembrance’. The first is an interpretation of Lovecraft slicing through the barriers of perception, with Russell bold in delivering brightness rather than the darkness associated with the writer, while the second swerves wildly between insanely detailed technology and the beauty of nature in an over-written story of escape. Russell the writer doesn’t match Russell the artist, who is able to deliver his ideas with clarity and precision, but this is often absent when Russell resorts to his own words.
Beyond any script Russell offers no explanations, so it may not be the case that ‘Isolation and Illusion’ is his most heartfelt inclusion, but love is certainly poured into the fourteen pages. The only words are a quote from pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti repeated at start and finish, but the composition, detail and feeling are exquisite, and classical romanticism the target.
There’s no indication as to where the content originally appeared (although the Grand Comic Database provides that service), but there’s immense value in having such delights available in a single collection.