Savoy Comics: The Stormbringer Sessions

		The Stormbringer Sessions James Cawthorn 2021 b/w graphic adaptation 302mm x 215mm Hard covers First publication, in collaboration with Jayde Design 272pp ISBN 978-0-9575764-3-8

Elric of Melniboné — proud prince of ruins, kinslayer — call him what you will. He remains, together with maybe Jerry Cornelius, Michael Moorcock's most enduring, if not always most endearing, character…

This book is not a finished graphic novel, as such. Neither is it merely a book of rough sketches. While organising the late, great James Cawthorn's archive for deposit at Oxford University's world-renowned Bodleian Library, two boxes were discovered labelled "Stormbringer Roughs" and "Stormbringer Strip Photocopies". In combination, they comprised a complete set of the artist's incredibly detailed preliminary sketches for an ultimately unrealised, brand-new graphic adaptation — some two hundred and fifty pages, in total — of Moorcock's classic Elric of Melniboné novel, Stormbringer.

Entirely unpublished previously, that is what this book is… A "work of powerful and sustained imagination" and the "most perfect collaboration between artist and writer that there has ever been".

It should be noted that the book's afterword, by Savoy Books co-founder David Britton, was his last completed piece of writing before his death in December 2020.

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"Jim Cawthorn and I have been inseparable for over twenty-five years, sometimes to the point where I can't remember which came first—the drawing or the story. It is his drawings of my characters which remain for me the most accurate, both in detail and in atmosphere. His interpretations in strip form will always be, for me, the best."

MICHAEL MOORCOCK