You may remember when I looked back at 2025, I was displeased by how fewer comic books than usual I’d read. As you can see, I’m workign to up my game for 2026.
THE FAFHRD AND THE GRAY MOUSER OMNIBUS reprints the Bronze Age DC series Sword of Sorcery by Denny O’Neil and Mike Mignola and Marvel’s series from two decades later with Chaykin writing and Mike Mignola’s art. In the introduction, Chaykin tells how he worked on the DC series with no idea of what he was doing and little familiarity with Fritz Leiber’s characters, whom he later came to love (he describes them as fantasy hardboiled-crime stories and I think there’s some truth to that). For that reason he jumped at the chance to get a second shot.
I remember passing this up at the time, possibly because money was tight, possibly because I didn’t trust Chaykin to do it better. It’s excellent, with a much better sense of character and of the world, and Mignola’s art is perfect in its grotesque style. The only story that doesn’t quite work is “Lean Times in Lankhmar,” an amusing one in which the lack of any adventures or treasure to steal forces the two swashbucklers to get day jobs. It’s one where Leiber’s narration is really needed to carry off the humor.
As the Chaykin/Mignola stories include “The Price of Pain-Ease” a sequel to the heroes first encounter (in “Ill Met in Lankhmar”), I reread the first Sword of Sorcery story, which tackles the same material. In the context of the original series, this is a downbeat one that has the guys dealing with, and overcoming, their grief for their murdered first love. That carries over in the Marvel story but O’Neil’s script for some reason makes it a straight swashbuckler with no emotional heft. And he way overwrites the dialog — Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser can’t seem to do anything without quipping about how amazing what they’re doing is. Still, most of the book is made up of the early series and that’s very good indeed.
MURDERBURG by Carol Lay is a comedy set in Muderburg, a Maine coastal town whose mayor, Leo Scazzi, is a professional hit man and most of the town seems to be underworld adjacent (providing fake IDs, disposing corpses). Over the course of several stories, Leo and his beloved wife Antonia deal with unwanted visitors, rivalries with the neighboring town, people trying to bump one of the Scazzis off and similar trouble. This was a lot of fun; if Lay wasn’t influenced by The Addams Family I’ll be surprised (the lead couple have very much a Gomez/Morticia vibe).
Al Ewing and Steve Lieber do an absolutely amazing job with the six-issue METAMORPHO, THE ELEMENT MAN — not simply reviving the Bob Haney/Ramona Fradon creation from the Silver Age but recreating the madcap style of the original, with some updated details (AI, Sapphire as a social media pop star) and cameos from multiple later iterations such as Element Dog and the New 52’s Element Woman. It’s incredible fun, though as I discuss over at Atomic Junk Shop it’s the fourth version of Metamorpho in the past decade and it bugs me there’s no continuity between them.
ALPHONSE MUCHA: The Artist and His Masterpieces by Terasa Barnard is a coffee table book devoted to the Czech art deco painter/sculptor/glass-worker, lavishly illustrated as such books are and covering his life as well. Mucha was a passionate supporter of the Slavic revival of his day (a movement I’m not familiar with) which explains things like him designing currency for the new nation of Czechoslovakia. As a fan of Mucha’s work I enjoyed this, though some of the Slavic figures and stories he’s working with are unknown to me.
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