Michael Moorcock's Multiverse

Rating:
Summary: Flawed format.
Review: As an immense fan of Michael Moorcock, I picked this graphic novel up as a completionist tendency. Comics are not my usual choice of reading, yet it was written by Moorcock, so I really did not know what to expect. What I found was something doomed to failure from the beginning. It is the comic format that kills this experiment in mediums. The story itself is actually three initially insular tales that ultimately weave together. If written as three separate short stories and published in a pure textual format they would have constituted rather typical Moorcock "Eternal Champion" tales. In one story we have Rose from his novel "Revenge of the Rose", and Sam Oakenhurst from "Blood". In another we have Sir Seaton Begg heralding from Moorcock's much chronicled von Bek/Begg family histories. In the third we have his most famous character, Elric. And tying them all together in a narrative frame we see Jack Karaquazian (once again, from "Blood") and Moorcock himself. If one were not already intimately familiar with Moorcock's vast works chronicling the many facets of the Eternal Champion, I am not sure any sense could be made of this rather opaque telling.

The prominent flaw of this work is the miserly allowances for textual explanation in the comic format. Moorcock is a rather verbose author with a tendency for flourish and poetry. When reduced to word balloons on a handful of panels per page, all of his stylistic strengths are annihilated. The end result is quite frankly a mass of confused hokum. It becomes impossible to understand what he was really attempting to communicate as the story panels sweep us along much too expeditiously. Compounded with the maelstrom of psychedelic artwork, I found myself unable to take it seriously as a narrative. The three stories as told by the narrative frame seemed more the destruction of a skilled raconteur than an entertaining romp through the multiverse. While I am not a connoisseur of comic art, I felt that the images by themselves were often striking and powerful statements, but failed as proper tools of story telling. Often I wished that one of the more striking images could have been painted in a more serious manner and used as a frontispiece for one of Moorcock's novels instead of as another page in a confounding comic.

My frustration with this work perhaps stems from the fact that I do not read comics and thus found it bewildering. I would be very interested in reading a review from someone who picked this up because they are a fan of the graphic novel medium, and not necessarily Moorcock. And more so, I would be interested in knowing if someone without prior knowledge of the Moorcockian Multiverse could actually make heads or tails of this. I hypothesize that one could not, and that those who can will not like it because of the medium. And that leaves no real audience.

Rating:
Summary: www.multiverse.org
Review: If you want to sample some of the artwork before you buy, please visit my website, where I have a few scanned in images of the comic. But I'm not making it easy on you; you'll have to hunt them out on the official Michael Moorcock website.

Rating:
Summary: www.multiverse.org
Review: If you want to sample some of the artwork before you buy, please visit my website, where I have a few scanned in images of the comic. But I'm not making it easy on you; you'll have to hunt them out on the official Michael Moorcock website.

Rating:
Summary: Moorcock the Merrier
Review: This is a classic Moorcock irony, to bury much of the core material of his multiverse theories in a graphic novel. Where another might have written a philosophical text, or at very least a novel, Moorcock decided that the place to set out the fundamentals of his multiverse theories was in a monthly comic book (collected here without the letters and features, which is a pity). The final sequences are faultlessly coherent as they move towards the central redemption, showing how, why and where the Cosmic Balance is at last restored. And there's some wonderfully off-beat humor -- the vast battles which involve different types of music (rock and roll versus Andrew Lloyd Webber) -- the London trams on which the aliens arrive for the Final Game -- the introduction of Moorcock himself (and Walter Simonson -- here with his best work to date -- though his current Orion work is also superb -- maybe even better) into the stories as the game within a game within a game is played out. This is RPG for keeps! Great, stuff. Moorcock will hide the key to a theme in a rock and roll song, a comic book or a throw-away newspaper piece but sooner or later, if you read for long enough, you'll come across it -- or it won't matter, because sometimes you didn't even know there WERE answers to those questions. Or that the questions were there to be asked! Check out the WW2 Lancaster bomber crewed entirely by existentialist philosophers (including Wrongway Heidegger); check out the rhyming couplets frequently found in the dialogue. Read in conjunction with The War Amongst the Angels and the books in that sequence, this is the work of a brilliantly original mind as able to draw characters as he is able to come up with stunning scientific notions! Brain candy, maybe. Addictive, maybe. A bizarre stimulant, maybe. But nourishing, through and through. A metaphysical meal at Mr Moorcock's Terminal Cafe always leaves the customers satisfied!

Rating:
Summary: Moorcock the Merrier
Review: This is a classic Moorcock irony, to bury much of the core material of his multiverse theories in a graphic novel. Where another might have written a philosophical text, or at very least a novel, Moorcock decided that the place to set out the fundamentals of his multiverse theories was in a monthly comic book (collected here without the letters and features, which is a pity). The final sequences are faultlessly coherent as they move towards the central redemption, showing how, why and where the Cosmic Balance is at last restored. And there's some wonderfully off-beat humor -- the vast battles which involve different types of music (rock and roll versus Andrew Lloyd Webber) -- the London trams on which the aliens arrive for the Final Game -- the introduction of Moorcock himself (and Walter Simonson -- here with his best work to date -- though his current Orion work is also superb -- maybe even better) into the stories as the game within a game within a game is played out. This is RPG for keeps! Great, stuff. Moorcock will hide the key to a theme in a rock and roll song, a comic book or a throw-away newspaper piece but sooner or later, if you read for long enough, you'll come across it -- or it won't matter, because sometimes you didn't even know there WERE answers to those questions. Or that the questions were there to be asked! Check out the WW2 Lancaster bomber crewed entirely by existentialist philosophers (including Wrongway Heidegger); check out the rhyming couplets frequently found in the dialogue. Read in conjunction with The War Amongst the Angels and the books in that sequence, this is the work of a brilliantly original mind as able to draw characters as he is able to come up with stunning scientific notions! Brain candy, maybe. Addictive, maybe. A bizarre stimulant, maybe. But nourishing, through and through. A metaphysical meal at Mr Moorcock's Terminal Cafe always leaves the customers satisfied!

Rating:
Summary: Approaching this as a SIMONSON fan....
Review: To be perfectly honest, I'm not what you would call a Moorcock fan. Oh, he writes the kinds of things I find interesting, to be sure, but there's always been a point in the story where he leaves me cold, where the inherent flow of the story dictates one direction, but Moorcock goes another, and this always has made him seem undisciplined and unprofessional to my literary eyes. I view him as a genius who never really pushes himself enough or disciplines his craft enough to utilize more than a tenth of his natural ability. It's like he enjoys plotting or verbose tangents more than the chore of actually writing the darn stories.

For that reason, I approached MULTIVERSE with a bit of trepidation. However, I certainly trusted Walter Simonson to always deliver an excellent comic worthy of reading. He's one of maybe three creators in the medium who will NEVER FAIL to deliver excellence under any circumstances. His ORION, despite being a part of a shared superhero universe and being an all-ages read, is probably the most literate and intelligent comic ever written, surpassing even the more "mature" fare of Sandman and various indy tales.

So, how did I like it? Well, I was pretty good. I thought it was the most "digestible" Moorcock story I've read. The graphical format kept him honest in ways he normally wouldn't have been, I think, and the narrative flow is much the better for it, as are the dramatic sensibilities of the conclusion, which unlike some other Moorcock endings, really delivers.

Walt only drew a little over half the book, but his pages are excellent, some of his better work, and yes, the Simonson "feel" definitely is present in the story itself. It reads at times like a Walt Simonson adaption of the source material, which could never be a bad thing.

Rating:
Summary: Approaching this as a SIMONSON fan....
Review: To be perfectly honest, I'm not what you would call a Moorcock fan. Oh, he writes the kinds of things I find interesting, to be sure, but there's always been a point in the story where he leaves me cold, where the inherent flow of the story dictates one direction, but Moorcock goes another, and this always has made him seem undisciplined and unprofessional to my literary eyes. I view him as a genius who never really pushes himself enough or disciplines his craft enough to utilize more than a tenth of his natural ability. It's like he enjoys plotting or verbose tangents more than the chore of actually writing the darn stories.

For that reason, I approached MULTIVERSE with a bit of trepidation. However, I certainly trusted Walter Simonson to always deliver an excellent comic worthy of reading. He's one of maybe three creators in the medium who will NEVER FAIL to deliver excellence under any circumstances. His ORION, despite being a part of a shared superhero universe and being an all-ages read, is probably the most literate and intelligent comic ever written, surpassing even the more "mature" fare of Sandman and various indy tales.

So, how did I like it? Well, I was pretty good. I thought it was the most "digestible" Moorcock story I've read. The graphical format kept him honest in ways he normally wouldn't have been, I think, and the narrative flow is much the better for it, as are the dramatic sensibilities of the conclusion, which unlike some other Moorcock endings, really delivers.

Walt only drew a little over half the book, but his pages are excellent, some of his better work, and yes, the Simonson "feel" definitely is present in the story itself. It reads at times like a Walt Simonson adaption of the source material, which could never be a bad thing.

Rating:
Summary: The Zeitjugo- the mythical game of time
Review: To call this an ambitious project would be an understatement. That is because this is an attempt to express the totality of Moorcock's conception of the multiverse in graphic novel form. In other words, it describes not only our somewhat familiar universe, but also all possible universes. Not only that, but it describes them all, over the entire range of time, because as the author points out, all of time exists simultaneously. It is only human consciousness that organizes it in a linear or cyclic fashion. In fact, that is what the main protagonists of the story, the Chaos Engineers, do- they range the entire multiverse, upscale and downscale, in their living organic vessels. They do this in the service of complexity and diversity. They do this in opposition to their sworn eternal enemies the lords of sterile, dead, and static Order.

Now, operating on the margins of this great eternal conflict between Chaos and Order are the Jugadors, who are the Great Players who play the multiverse as a game- or is it as an instrument? They maintain the great dynamic equilibrium between Order and Chaos. This is because one must never be allowed to totally triumph over the other- that would spell the end of the whole. It is the Balance, the perfect equilibrium, which is the ideal. Most of the sentient and nonsentient universe is rooted in this struggle. This includes a majority of Moorcock's major characters, from Elric to the Rose, to Begg, Von Bek, Keraquazian, Cornelius, Bastable, etc.

This is not an easy story to follow. The logic is complex, but it is consistent. You almost have to be a metatemporal detective like Sir Seaton Beggs to follow it. Indeed, the principle artist makes an appearance in the story proclaiming that he doesn't understand the rules! That is what makes fiction like this so enjoyable- it is so utterly challenging in the way that Moorcock has thrown away all the rules of conventional fiction. It is a grand jazz riff of metaphysics of flow of consciousness- or higher consciousness. It is no wonder that this has been described as the crowning achievement of all the decades of his work.

See you on the moonbeam roads....