While the stories are still strong, and the quality of the art and writing are pretty good, there's something missing from Epic Illustrated that I see in the early issues of Heavy Metal with which its competing. There's something vital about the European science fiction and fantasy that elevates it just a bit above this more North American version of the adult fantasy genre. The article I noted last week suggests that European fantasists go in one of two directions: either into myth and fairy tale, and the more traditional fantasy, or into the future, and a world of technology so far advanced that it acts like magic in the narrative context, and therefore the stories are fantasy and not science fiction.
I think the stories that one might call science fiction in Epic are actually science fiction, rather than technologically-inflected fantasy. I wonder if this is because in North America we're brought up to be very rational in our beliefs. This is perhaps one of the detriments of the hard separation of Church and State. Such a thing is more fluid in many European countries, giving the imaginative literature more scope to accept the irrational as simply a part of the everyday. The stories in Epic Illustrated almost implicitly ask you to believe that what's happening in the story is scientifically explainable. The Heavy Metal stories don't care if you don't understand. You don't need to.
Though I'm not a fan of the Elric stories of Michael Moorcock, it's lovely to see an adaptation of one of them here from P. Craig Russell. I don't think I've ever seen anything he's done that I haven't marveled at, even if I didn't read it. Certainly one of our great comics artists.
Onward!
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