Fritz Leiber, fantasy master

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

J.R.R. Tolkien certainly deserves recognition in the fantasy genre for creating a fully-imagined realm, but he wasn’t the only one... or the first. Way back in 1939, Fritz Leiber gave us a glimpse of Nehwon--a land combining the Old West and the Arabian Nights--with his stories of the warrior duo Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser.

Over the last year, Darkhorse Comics has made a major rehabilitation effort for Leiber’s work starting with a graphic novel adaptation of the pair’s adventures pencilled by ‘Hellboy’s’ Mike Mignola. With inks by Al Williamson and the story adapted by Howard Chaykin, the graphic novel called ‘Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser’ seems like a bold new work, not something that had been around for more than 70 years.

There’s something special about the way stories affect you as a child; each of us surely has at least one memory of a book that enchanted our young adolescent minds like no other book. For Chaykin, it was his encounter with Leiber as a 13-year-old kid. ‘The Sword & Sorcery craze that [Conan creator Robert E.] Howard begat with his Cimmerian berserker brought me to inarguably the wittiest and most sophisticated writer working in the genre, Fritz Leiber,’ Chayin writes in the introduction.

Now, along with this Mignola/Chaykin/Williamson version, Darkhorse has published three of Leiber’s original novels (a fourth is on its way next month), grouped under the title ‘Lankhmar’ (the name of Nehwon’s principal city) and costing $12.95 each. These books lack any illustration--except for a rough map of Nehwon to help you get your bearings. But you know what? Leiber’s originals stand entirely on their own. The novels follow Fafhrd and Gray Mouser on a desperate journey after their happy lives with the women they love are violently destroyed. The prose is swift, imaginative, and clearly has endured the test of time. There’s his pseudo-antique syntax--’Likewise I shall never lift foot toward Lankhmar again’--and plenty of dramatic setpieces to fill a young boy’s imaginings or an adult who, confronted with suburbs and strip malls every day, just wants to dream awhile of a fantasy land far from office memos, fax machines and traffic jams.

Nick Owchar