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Heavy does it

Redrawing comic-art's boundaries for two decades

by Sean Glennon

HEAVY METAL: CELEBRATING 20 YEARS At the Words & Pictures Museum of Fine Sequential Art, 140 Main Street, Northampton, through November 16.

They're filled with drawings of naked women. Beautiful, large-breasted, round-hipped women on virtually every page, most of them heavily armed -- warrior women, every one of whom could stomp Xena twice daily without the aid of so much as a hearty breakfast -- and just about all of them either naked or damned close to it. Yeah, they're cartoons, but sweet Jesus are they sexy.

That's what every teenage boy in America knows about Heavy Metal magazine. Hell, it's what just about everyone knows about the comic-anthology publication.

How could it be otherwise? Imaginatively rendered images of buxom battle babes have been a Heavy Metal staple since the magazine began publishing in 1977. They've had a place in every issue of Heavy Metal printed in the past two decades. And they were more than well represented in Ivan Reitman's 1981 Heavy Metal movie, the vehicle through which most Americans derive their familiarity with the HM name.

Of course, the movie, like the magazine, had a lot more to offer than cheap thrills. For more than a few of those teenage boys, not to mention adult men and women, who have read the magazine -- and possibly one or two of the stoners who have made the movie a cult favorite -- Heavy Metal has been the source of a significant awakening, a reminder, particularly in the magazine's early years, that sequential art (or comic-book art) and animation can be much more than mechanisms for entertaining children. Indeed, it's no exaggeration to say that 20 years ago Heavy Metal saved American cartooning from the stunted growth from which it had suffered for some 33 years.

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Sequential art was forced to do most of its growing up in Europe and Japan during the middle years of this century, thanks in part to the US comic industry's puritanically motivated bout with self-imposed censorship.

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An American invention, sequential art was forced to do most of its growing up in Europe and Japan during the middle years of this century, thanks in part to the US comic industry's puritanically motivated bout with self-imposed censorship, which began with the adoption of the Comics Code in 1954. But the code, which imposed severe, mostly silly, restrictions on the content of mainstream comic books, was as much a symptom of the real obstacle cartooning faced in reaching its potential as an art form as it was part of the blockade. Designed to protect children from images of sex, violence, drugs, and all variety of horrors (sound familiar?), the code was a product of the notion that sequential art is and can only be kids stuff, a notion that never took hold outside the medium's birthplace.

Call it an outgrowth of that great American tradition of artistic self-loathing. You don't have to, but that's what it is -- an expression of that same determination to undervalue homegrown art forms that continues to motivate the best players and composers in jazz to take up residence -- or at least part-time residence -- in Europe, where they can continue to experiment with their music, to move their art forward, without losing their audiences.

To the American mind, jazz is (or should be) what it was: swing, for the most part (we shell out big bucks for Harry Connick Jr. records), be-bop, and hard bop for the more "adventurous" portion of the Lincoln Center crowd. That the music's great innovators -- from John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, and Archie Shepp to modern out-jazz heroes such as William Parker and John Zorn -- have been embraced virtually everywhere on earth except at home is more than a national embarrassment, more than an expression of racism, it's a symptom of our utter inability to accept American-born art forms as significant, worthy of respect, capable of growth.

We can accept Americans as important artists, but only as long as they work in Old World media. Our own art is almost invariably viewed as throwaway stuff, light entertainment at best, subversive and corruptive to high culture at worst.

And jazz has had it easy in comparison to sequential art. Face it, rock and roll has had it easy in comparison to sequential art. While both music forms have been branded products of Satan, and both at various times pointed to as potential sources or moral decay in the young, neither has been saddled with the kind of embarrassment factor that continues to plague comic art. Very few people (if any) have ever faced the question, "Aren't you a little bit old to be listening to those stupid jazz records?"

Adults who appreciate comic art are confronted with such questions regularly. Forget that a comic might contain beautifully rendered artwork, the belief that those images can only convey goofy stories about talking animals, teenaged witches, and superheroes, stories unlikely to appeal to any properly matured adult, prevail. And until 1977, no one in the mainstream American comic-book business could be bothered to challenge that idea. The best American comic artists either maintained their artistic integrity by laboring in the obscurity of the underground, as R. Crumb did, or bit the bullet and did the best they could with Batman and the Fantastic Four, the path chosen by the late industry giant Jack Kirby.

Meanwhile in Europe and Japan, sequential art was in its golden age. Japanese manga artists created works specifically geared to adult audiences (though not at the expense of kid-oriented cartooning, which also thrived), presenting pulp-fiction stories centered around science fiction, fantasy, and action themes but with distinctly adult content -- depictions of sexuality included. Intelligent storytelling accompanied painstakingly rendered artwork. And in Europe, artists such as Moebius (the pen name of Jean Giraud) and Jean-Claude Mézières were exploring the poetic potential of sequential art, creating surreal picture stories, each frame a painting worth a million words. The work was never intended to appeal to kids.

Part 2