The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1854: Moebius Comics #1, May 1996

For information on stopping the spread of COVID-19, and on what to do if you are quarantined, have a look at the World Health Organization site.

You may have noticed I'm not reading Jon Sable anymore, despite my liking of the series. I just needed to do some different things, which I'm kind of blaming on the quarantine, and kind of blaming on my ADHD.

Moebius plays a background role in my comics education, much the same way that Heavy Metal (his primary vehicle in North America) does. I, of course, have always been aware of Giraud's work, but my preference for the mainstream, and for superheroes, has always kept me from getting into his stuff. Which, I suppose, is why I started this project to begin with. That said, science fiction comics have never really been a thing I enjoyed. Or rather, have never been a thing I enjoyed as much as some other things. It's weird, because as a genre I quite like science fiction - I just often find that there's not quite as much of a spiritual dimension to such stories, or not in the way that I like to see/read a spiritual dimension, anyway. For me I think that's why superhero stuff works so nicely - it meshes the magical and the scientific into a pretty good amalgam, which is also how I try to order my brain.

Today's comic is a bit of a mishmash. In order to spread the one complete story out over a few issues, we get a scant amount of the primary tale, "The Man from [the] Ciguri." Everything else is stuff from Moebius' sketch book, or from abandoned projects, which is interesting for the collector of Giraud's work, but not necessarily for the casual reader. I do like the "Arzach Jams," in which another artist takes some of the sketchbook work and fleshes it out into a proper story. William Stout's work in today's issue pays homage to Moebius without totally ripping him off. It's quite a lovely piece.

Isolation life is weird. My schedule is becoming non-existent, as there's nothing pulling on my time. I'm still writing for CBR in order to make a bit of money, and I'm still taking care of the house, but there's no sense of urgency to any of these things. Right now, though it's not an ideal circumstance, I seem to have time. Now I just have to get off my ass and fill it with all the things I want to do when I don't have any.

More to follow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 795: True North II, 1991

The first of the inevitable slew of comics I've picked up at the con this weekend. This issue features 53 different creators (so I will not be tagging them all) doing 2-4 page stories about censorship. It's perhaps a little-known fact that the Canadian border is (or was) quite restrictive on what kinds of comics could be shipped to comic stores in Canada. This comic comes about as a direct result of the Toronto police actually raiding stores in the city, and, I think, Aircel Publishing's warehouse, on charges of distributing pornography to minors and obscenity. Back when I had my comic store, Diamond Comics simply refused to ship anything even remotely "mature" across the border because there was no way they could guarantee that the comics would ever reach the stores they were meant for.

The editorial on the back page articulates the argument against this kind of censorship quite well. Derek McCulloch notes that "[m]any of the comic books I find myself...called upon to defend are ones I find personally repugnant...No matter what I may think of this title or that, though, there is presumably someone out there who...read them and enjoy [sic] them; it would be a gross kind of hubris for me to think my opinion of the material superseded anyone else's." This is absolutely the crux. While we have governments in place to maintain a particular level of civilized discourse and conduct, such strictures have a way of becoming restrictures, when one person, or a small group of people come to believe that the way they think of things is obviously the best way.

Oh. Right. We live in Trump's world now. You know these things already.

Some of the comics in today's selection were really cool, some not quite to my taste. But that's the point of art, right? We all have our own tastes, and we should all be able, as long as we're not hurting anyone, to indulge them.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 372: A1 #3, 1990

Our last little look, for now, at the short comics writing of Grant Morrison ends with quite a long book. A1 features some really, truly wonderful, weird, and generally excellent stories. It's a who's who of luminaries in the comics industry of the early 90s, with Morrison's presence being accentuated by Alan Moore, Brian Bolland (who writes and draws a story, in poetry, as well as providing that amazing cover), Philip Bond, Steve Parkhouse, Glenn Fabry, John Bolton, and Moebius. The stories are all weird (except Bond's, which is just kind of lovely), so Morrison's "The House of Heart's Desire" is in good company. I always get this story mixed up with his prose piece "The Room Where Love Lived," but that's only because they're works I'm less familiar with.

What more can I say? The real importance of this story comes in one panel, midway through the piece. The protagonist, with a door strapped to his back, has just come through a stinking forest, and is making his way toward a city of ghosts. The sign that points the way has a single word upon it: Barbelith. I'll point out that this comic is from about four years before Morrison's The Invisibles saw the light of day, and made the word Barbelith so very important for those of us who delved into the Supercontext.

Back to random craziness from the collection tomorrow. See you then!