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Apr 7, 2017

The 40 Years of Comics Project Friday Magazine 8: Heavy Metal v.3 #2, June 1979

https://www.comics.org/issue/64550/

Taking my first tentative steps into my Heavy Metal collection. I've a good friend back in Ontario, and Heavy Metal were the comics he grew up reading. It explains a good deal about him, I have to say. I'm just sometimes amazed that I managed to get as far into the hobby as I have without having a bit more exposure to this magazine.

The story that stood out in this week's magazine was the full-length story that's featured, "Captain Future," the tale of an ordinary person who is thrust into a role of greatness. The nice little switch on the theme in this story is that his coming is foretold by a strange probe returning from the future, so everyone around him assumes he's the person foretold, and therefore creates him. It's one of those ontological paradoxes which drive many people nuts, but which I think are one of the more realistic aspects of what time travel would be like. Of course stuff like this would happen.

The rest of the issue was okay, I guess. I'm still trying to wrap my head around what the aesthetic and the demographic are that the magazine aims for. One thing is for sure, though: this is very, very different from the mostly North American comics output that I've been reading for the majority of the Project. This might seem an obvious thing to point out, but in reading comics from other cultures, especially when those comics are in translation, it's important to remember that they developed very differently from the comics that I've grown up reading. And I have other thoughts about the fact that a comic written in another language has the words translated into English, but the pictorial form isn't translated into "North American" graphic language. Is this a problem, or does it give us a more "authentic" experience of the comic's original publication?

Onward!

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