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Heavy does it

Part 2

by Sean Glennon

In 1975 Moebius helped launch the French publication Métal Hurlant (Screaming Metal), a magazine that presented adult-oriented sequential art in a format modeled after the long-dead pulps, anthologizing several works in each issue. Along with the familiar -- action, sci-fi, and fantasy stories -- Métal Hurlant presented the work of artists whose take on sequential art diverged from the typical technique of telling linear stories through words and pictures. Moebius and his peers demonstrated issue after issue that cartooning could indeed be approached not just as functional adult art but as art for art's sake, as worthy a vehicle for the traditional artistic attempt to uncover basic truths about human existence as it is for telling stories.

Heavy Metal got its start two years later when National Lampoon publisher Leonard Mogel secured permission to reprint works from Métal Hurlant in the United States. Mogel, who sold the magazine to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles co-creator Kevin Eastman five years ago, was certain there was a market for European-style adult comics in the US. And he was right. Within months of its launch, Heavy Metal's circulation had surged to more than a million. That success allowed Mogel to begin commissioning works specifically for HM, which gave artists from the United States, South America, and Asia a chance to get in on the act. Heavy Metal quickly became a focal point for the development of comic art, an avenue of discovery not only for fans of the form but for the artists themselves. And as the works that appeared in the magazine during its early years inspired the artists who viewed them, Heavy Metal became the catalyst for the fusion of European, Japanese, and American cartoon-art techniques, spurring a new period of development for the art at home.

And, of course, the beautiful, naked women were everywhere.

"I remember when it first came out," says George Pratt, one of a generation of American comic artists whose work is inspired by Moebius and other early Heavy Metal contributors. "It's a good thing my parents didn't care what I was reading, because they probably would have taken it away."

Pratt, who has worked in mainstream comicdom and who is best-known for his DC Comics graphic novel Enemy Ace: War Idyll (a work so thoroughly researched it has been used as a text at West Point), is one of several contributors to Heavy Metal's upcoming 20th-anniversary issue. The 250-page special issue, which will be published next month, European style, in both hard- and soft-cover editions, will feature new works from an array of Heavy Metal contributors, including Moebius, Joe Kubert, Olivia, Serpieri, Mark Bodè, Richard Corben, Rick Veitch, and Caza.

The anniversary also will be celebrated in an exhibit at Northampton's Words & Pictures Museum of Fine Sequential Art, an entirely appropriate venue given that the six-year-old entity is devoted to furthering the acceptance of comic art as a serious undertaking. Featuring new and classic works by some 40 past and present Heavy Metal contributors (all of the above-mentioned artists plus the likes of Eastman, Royo, Dave Sim, Angus McKie, Mike Ploog, and Jeff Jones), plus original animation cels from the Heavy Metal movie, the exhibit will run from September 18 to November 16. On November 8 the museum will host a reception and creator signing event for which Eastman, Sim, Jones, Kubert, Bodè, Pratt, Veitch, Jon J. Muth, Dave Dorman, Stephen R. Bissette, Berni Wrightson, and Scott Hampton will be on hand.

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Heavy Metal became the catalyst for the fusion of European, Japanese, and American cartoon-art techniques, spurring a new period of development for the art at home.

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For Pratt and many of the other contributors, participating in the special issue and exhibit represents a chance to pay back a debt to Heavy Metal, the magazine that inspired them, freed them, and provided an outlet for their work.

"Heavy Metal is where I got some of my first work published," Pratt notes, pointing out that even today the superhero-loving major comic-book publishers are unwilling to invest in serious sequential art. And while HM helped facilitate the rise of independent comic-book houses, creating outlets for full-length artistic works, the magazine, with its anthology format, remains one of the few vehicles for shorter works such as Entropy, Pratt's contribution to the anniversary issue.

A textless piece in black and white, Entropy is as near an approximation of poetry as sequential art is likely to achieve. Its 12 panels, stretched over four pages, present a human figure, the embodiment of entropy, alone except for a black cat in a birch forest in winter, at rest in a landscape of his own making. Entropy endeavors not to tell a story but to invoke a feeling and engender reflection, an effort that recalls not just Moebius's work but the spirit of traditional visual art.

Pratt, who was 17 when Heavy Metal had its debut, says he had never thought of sequential art as a lesser form, but was somewhat surprised to discover he wasn't alone on that front. "Here was Moebius doing these weird things that weren't so different from Creepy [one of the few American magazines to buck the Comic Code's ban on horror themes] in a way, but were not so linear," Pratt says. "It kind of confirmed what I already knew about comic art."

Part 3