The 40 Years of Comics Project Friday Magazine 14: Heavy Metal v.9 #6, September 1985

What I'm going to have to do with these Heavy Metal magazines is read the earlier ones, such as this one, in some kind of order. Before taking on the format that the magazine has now, it was a far more serially-driven publication. Thus one of today's stories is "Tex Arcana" part 23. While the individual pieces of each story do tell some kind of semi-complete narrative, without the context of the surrounding parts of the narrative, it's hard to say whether the story was good or bad.

I'm also going to state outright, as I don't think I have before, that I'll only be reading the comics pieces in Heavy Metal. While the text articles are interesting, I'm not sure I need to be reading reviews of 30-year old video games and films, at least not for this particular project. It also allows me to actually get a magazine read in the time I set aside for it each week.

Some bizarre bits and pieces in today's issue, many of which I didn't really understand (that whole context thing), and others that were obtuse, but intentionally so. The thing that always strikes me about Heavy Metal is the variety of art styles. There's no such thing, as far as I can tell, as a "house style" for HM, in the same way that we might think about such a style for Marvel or DC at particular times in their histories. While the artists within the magazine all come from particular traditions of comics, those traditions don't seem to dictate a particular illustrative style, but rather a series of technical guides within which an artist can experiment. Just like a sonnet, the comic is a very structured creative mode (page, panel, speech bubble, etc.), and the key to innovation is to push at the boundaries of those structures. The Heavy Metal artists are very, very good at this.

Onward.

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

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!

The 40 Years of Comics Project Friday Magazine 7: The Best of Heavy Metal #2, 1986

The other day I was trying to think of what magazines I should read in the coming weeks for this part of the project. I went over in my head all of the magazines in my boxes, thought about reading some Doctor Who Monthly, or Epic Illustrated, and then I realized, because sometimes my brain doesn't work all that well, that I have just shy of 200 issues of Heavy Metal, and that I should probably start making some headway through those.

So that's what I'm doing.

Today's magazine really does do best what early Heavy Metal is all about. It's loaded with European storytellers, there's heaping quantities of science fiction and fantasy, all spiced with ample amounts of nudity and violence. This is what Heavy Metal, at least at the time, was known for. Now, the stories are pretty amazing, as are the artists contained herein. I remember Heavy Metal being almost, for a prepubescent comics fan, as tantalizing as the more explicit adult magazines with which it shared space at the local convenience store. I'm glad to have had a chance to read it as a grown up (however much of one of those I am), and to have discovered the amazing work that was being reprinted in these early editions. There's a reason the magazine has been around since the late 70s: it gives us amazing pieces of comics that aren't going to find a better popular outlet in North America. So, that said, I'm going to delve into the Heavy Metal portion of the collection for the next little while, and get a feel for the comics art of Europe. Exciting!

Onward.