Fritz Leiber, among his other accomplishments, invented sword and sorcery. Well, no, he didn't invent the genre. To give proper credit for that involves a trip back through world literature to The Epic of Gilgamesh, with many stops along the way. Leiber did, however, invent the term. Leiber himself built on the stories of Robert E. Howard and Edgar Rice Burroughs in his series of tales of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, still among the most popular in the genre, as witness their many compilations, including this adaptation in graphic novel form.

What set Leiber's stories apart is their assumption of the seamier aspects of life, including a view of morality as mutable. I mark Leiber as the beginning of what I call "fantasy noir," a tradition that stems from these stories and flows through the books of Michael Moorcock, Glen Cook and Steven Erikson and probably owes as much to 20th-century detective fiction as to Leiber. They are marked by a blunt acknowledgement that people are not always good and by strongly delineated representation of what goes into making moral decisions -- a mix of self-interest, ideals and expediency.

Fafhrd, a giant red-haired Northern barbarian, and the Gray Mouser, a small, slender Southern thief, are an unlikely pair of companions who wander the world of Nehwon, although they stick mostly to the city of Lankhmar. (Traces of Lankhmar itself can be found in Terry Pratchett's Ankh-Morpork, Robert Lynn Asprin's Sanctuary and Steven Brust's Adrilankha.) Their lives are complicated by two "patrons," the sorcerers Ningauble of the Seven Eyes and Sheelba of the Eyeless Face, who serve to keep things even more interesting than they might have been otherwise.

The current issue from Dark Horse is a compilation of four treatments by Epic Comics from 1991 that included seven of the Fafhrd/Gray Mouser stories. The adaptation and scripts by Howard Chaykin are excellent, keeping the feel of the original Leiber stories and producing a smooth continuity that carries through the several stories. Mike Mignola's drawings are perfect: they have the rough-edged elegance of Leiber's stories and, while there are no bells and whistles as far as layout goes, there is a good, clear narrative flow that I think is necessary for stories as complex as these tend to be. The whole thing is a treat, whether you're a fan of graphic novels or a fan of sword-and-sorcery fantasy.