The 40 Years of Comics Project Friday Magazine 30: Heavy Metal v.33 #8, Fall 2009

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Going to try to get back to my weekly magazine. Otherwise it'll be the 90 Years of Comics Project, and I'd like to think that I'll finish this strange and interesting journey one day.

I'm trying to figure out ways to get the rest of my comic collection into the house and out of the garage, and the magazines, Heavy Metal and otherwise, are amongst those items in the garage. The other night I brought a couple of boxes in, and this magazine had been put into one of the boxes while I was packing. It's been a while since I read an issue, so I thought I'd check it out.

Pat Mills loves to right ultra-violence. I know that that's a given for anyone who's read 2000A.D., but I'm not super-familiar with that magazine, or Mills' work in general, so it was a bit of a revelation for me. I enjoyed Claudia Vampire Knight: Violent Women, despite not having any background for the series. After a moment's confusion, the context of the piece helped me understand the setting. It was pretty cool, very violent, and quite funny, actually. The other long-from piece in this issue was Call of the Locnar, a call-back to some of the oldest HM stories, and featured some flashes of setting that I remember from watching Heavy Metal the movie in my pre-teen years. I wonder how it would hold up these days.

More, hopefully, to follow.

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 12: Heavy Metal v.26 #5, November 2002

After a brief break, the Friday Magazine returns.

I quite like this era of Heavy Metal in which we get a "complete" graphic novel in each issue. I put complete in quotation marks because, though length-wise it might qualify as a graphic novel, I feel like it's really the middle of a story. Perhaps it would be better to say a complete graphic album, rather than graphic novel.

This month's GN, "Yiu - My Promise to You," was stylish and dark, and presented a fascinating future based around a consolidation of power of six of the major religions (it doesn't ever quite say which). Part of the story is about a hitwoman who is trying to pay for a surgery for her brother, and part is about the birth of the Antichrist. I'm not entirely certain how the two mesh, and there's not really a lot of back story. This is why I think it's only a part of a series, rather than what we would traditionally think of as a graphic novel. To me, at any rate, a graphic novel tells a complete story. It might be part of a larger sequence, but within that sequence it itself is a complete narrative. I don't get that feeling from this graphic novel. But if we think of it as a graphic album, part of a numbered series, then we can read the piece in the context for which it's intended, as part of a story. Translation's a funny business, even when it's translation of formats.

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.

The 40 Years of Comics Project Friday Magazine 5: Heavy Metal v.31 #4, September 2007

Much like Creepy, Heavy Metal lurks on the periphery of my comics reading consciousness, though perhaps a little more prevalently. In this I mean I'm far more familiar with the magazine and its content than I was with Creepy, though I could probably count on...well, perhaps both hands and feet the number of issues I've read. The film from the early 80s was one of my formative pieces of movie watching, and perhaps one of the first things I ever watched that was explicitly sexual. I still have fond memories, though it's been ages since I've seen it and I'm not sure if it holds up.

Today's magazine was pretty good. I chose it at random from a huge collection of the magazine that I was fortunate enough to pick up a few years back. This collection ranges all the way back to the second issue printed of the magazine, back in 1977, and finishes up around 2008. It's by no means complete, but it offers a lovely selection of the kinds of European comics that were finding their way into North America over the last 3 decades. I have to say, despite having admitted to having read little of the magazine previously, that this issue was pretty standard Heavy Metal fare. The feature story, "The Golden Age," was okay, though I found the artwork a little muddy for my tastes. There were panels in there within which I simply could not identify what was going on. "Fragments from the Encyclopedia Of Dolphins" was a bit more "Euro," written and drawn by Prado, and offered some commentary on the perils of intolerance that is more relevant that is comfortable in our current, perilous times.

The story that stood out the most to me was "He Only Rides By Night," a Western-Horror story taking up a scant few pages in the magazine. It had a lovely atmosphere to it, and told a tale much in the tradition of Gaiman's Sandman stories in which Morpheus was simply a background character, as much setting as the environments themselves. I'm going to keep an eye our for more from Adrian Sibar and Josef Rother.

What's exciting about delving into this collection, and the Creepy magazines that were also a part of that purchase, is finding a corner of the comics universe that I've never really explored before. I had worried that trying to maintain a weekly magazine, as well as the graphic novel, as well as the daily comic, as well as other features, as well as, you know, stuff I actually have to do for work, would be too much. But discovery is reward in and of itself sometimes.

Onward!

The 40 Years of Comics Project - The Weekly Graphic Novel: Week 1 - Morbus Gravis I, 1993

The long-promised weekly graphic novel finally makes its first appearance. It's taken a while, I admit, to figure out my time and inclination, but as I come up on 6 months of blogging my collection, I'm feeling more and more committed to the project, and so I'm going to start delving into all its nooks and crannies.

Serpieri is 100% my favourite artist that I have discovered in my reading of Heavy Metal Magazine. He draws women remarkably well (and men too, but Druuna is obviously his muse). In contrast to many comics artists, especially North American superhero artists, Serpieri seems to have a notion of the way that proportion plays a role in the human body. Yes, Druuna is quite buxom, but the size of her breasts is not disproportionate to the rest of her body. She is a large, solid woman. And this makes sense, given the milieu within which she has her adventures. This is a world of survival and chaos, and while intellect has to play a role in one's continued existence in such a world, so too does body. Druuna is built to survive her environment. And look good while doing it.

I did have a few concerns as I read this book, though. The story revolves around a decadent city in which the citizens are succumbing to a disease that turns them into vicious mutants. As far as I can tell, from this opening volume, the mutation seems to give every penises as well. This ranges from the almost human-looking altruistic mutants that try to help Druuna, and the bestial, canine-like tentacle beasts that attack the "normal" citizens. Coupled with this are the two fairly explicit scenes of rape that occur in the story. Druuna is forced into fellating a mugger, though she then leads this criminal and his cohort to her apartment where they are torn apart by her mutating lover. And later a woman is attacked by one of the most bestial of the mutants, and is raped and then eaten. (Please note, these scenes are not fully illustrated the way I've just described them. There's a lot of implied horror in this book.) I was uncomfortable with this aspect of the story, until just after the second incident. The very next panel depicts a number of "normal" citizens entranced by the spectacle of the woman being raped and eaten, treating it as entertainment, and claiming that the woman is enjoying it. It's at this point that one begins to wonder whether there is really much difference between the mutants and the normals. They all seem to be monstrous. Would it be reading too much into Serpieri's weird horror tale to claim it is a critique of the rape culture within which we currently exist? At certain moments during the story, Druuna uses her sexual whiles to further her goals. She also demonstrates a desire to have sex, to enjoy sex. But she demonstrates these characteristics in a world in which a virulent disease is turning normal citizens into tentacled, raping monsters. Serpieri's narrative is pointing to the fact that this disease, which is identified by its physical attributes, is very much the same as a virulent attitude that infects the minds of the non-mutated citizens. And that somehow, in the midst of this toxic environment, there is a woman who utilizes and celebrates her sexual nature in defiance of the culture within which she lives.

But maybe I'm wrong. I don't know much about Serpieri, nor have I read much about the Druuna stories. I'm going to keep this in mind as I read more of them though. The depictions of rape in the Druuna stories have always bothered me, but having read this initial tale, I begin to see them in a different light. What got to me was that Druuna is always depicted beautifully and erotically, even when these terrible things are happening to her. But perhaps that's a part of it too. We should react the way I have when we see something so horrible happening to someone, and if we can see that that someone looks the same in the bad situation as well as in a good situation, then we begin to see the person as a person, not an object. Druuna is beautiful when she makes love, and, sadly, is beautiful when she is attacked. Let me also note that she's a fully realized character as well. I've focussed mainly on the visual element of the character, but she's also a feisty, resourceful, brave adventurer in this strange world. We connect with her, her being the focal character, and this makes the attacks on her all the more difficult to take. In his depictions of her, Serpieri takes care to craft both her body and her mind in ways that will foster a reader connection. And having done so, we are deeply disturbed at the moments where this character is abused.

Morbus Gravis I is the only collection of the Druuna stories I own. I have some more in Heavy Metal, but that means that next week's graphic novel will not be a continuation of this line of thought or this series. Just FYI.