Sex, Violence, Druuna

Posted on June 15, 2016 by RM Rhodes

Trigger Warning: This article talks about sexual assault and rape, at length. In an attempt to reduce inadvertent exposure to the material discussed, I will provide links to specific sequences.
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In 1986, Heavy Metal changed their format from monthly to quarterly. As part of this format change, they began to print full stories instead of serializing them. Mostly, these stories were originally printed in Europe – where the Francophone market published 48 page collected editions called albums.

The third full album printed in the new quarterly format was Morbus Gravis (Severe Disease) by Paolo Eleuteri Serpieri, in the Summer 1986 issue. This feature introduced Druuna, a sexually charged woman navigating her way through a nightmarish dystopic society with nothing but her wits and her sexual availability to keep her alive. Over the course of the story, she is forced to expose herself, prostitutes herself for medicine, and is forced to perform fellatio at knifepoint. In retrospect, this was tame.

In spite of (or, perhaps, because of) this appalling level of sexual violence, Serpieri (and Druuna, especially) became massively popular among the Heavy Metal readership. So much so that a parody strip was published asking the question “Where is Druuna now?” (Answer: married, with two kids.)

The appeal was not and is not difficult to understand. Serpieri is a master craftsman. From the various sketchbooks that have been published, it is obvious that he enjoys drawing women. Naked women. Sexy women. And because he enjoys drawing them, he has gotten really good at it.

Any casual connoisseur of pornography can tell you that the act of sexual intercourse is not inherently anything – visually sexy, meaningful, or even necessarily pleasurable. It’s the elements that make up the context of the act that add significance. Even something as simple as bad lighting or poor framing can push a visual depiction towards embarrassing or arousing.

Making something look sexy is not an easy feat. Serpieri knows this and the amount of effort he puts into his work is obvious. He is an incredibly talented illustrator who also happens to have a very good grasp of sequential narrative. That he likes to use those talents to draw people having sex would seem like a net positive – until you realize that a lot of the sexual activity is non-consensual. But he has somehow managed to draw the assault as sexy, which makes the realization very uncomfortable when it hits.

Serpieri works best as a pin-up illustrator, creating one off images that are designed to titillate and arouse the viewer. These are, to a one, perfectly suited to do just that. There is no problematic text to distract from the purity of the visual depiction. Which feels like an argument for the platonic ideal of looking at women without talking to them, so as not to spoil the illusion, but there you go.

To be sure, there is a straw-man argument to be made (half-hearted at best – like you’d find from a certain kind of Twitter account holder, one who doesn’t like to be challenged on his enjoyment of problematic entertainment) that the story is set in a dystopic future where survival of the fittest is the rule and depicting sexual violence is both natural and understandable. After all, that’s what happens when society collapses and there is no means of enforcing mores like consent. Sure, but it is really necessary to depict it so much? And if society has to collapse for these kinds of things to be normalized, why does rape still occur in this day and age?

Serpieri himself claims that Druuna’s approach to sexual pleasures is actually a challenge to Judeo-Christian mores on sexuality. Which would be laudable if there wasn’t quite so much rape. And it’s not like Serpieri is unable to depict healthy, consensual sexual situations. He is. He just choses not to, for reasons.

To be clear – Heavy Metal had a long history of problematic stories. Sexual assault and rape are not the sole province of Serpieri. And he was not the first artist to produce beautifully rendered, overly sexualized science fiction that didn’t make much sense (I’m looking in your direction, Fernando Fernandez). However, to the extent that Druuna became emblematic of Heavy Metal as a publication, she also became emblematic of the sexual assault problems at the heart of the most problematic stories published by that magazine.
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In the Spring 1988 issue, Heavy Metal published a follow up Druuna story. In this story, Druuna is only raped once – by someone she knows and was actively fooling around with before he brutally and suddenly crossed the line into non-consent (page 42). About the best I can say is that it’s a very realistic example of a date-rape scenario. The sequence to that point is incredibly erotic, but subsequent rereads retroactively taint any potential for arousal.

The real sexual violence in the story is reserved for Hale – a woman that Druuna meets in the wilderness. Shortly after they meet, Hale’s father is killed by a group of soldiers. One of those soldiers immediately rapes Hale and takes her as his possession. The most disturbing part of this is the panel where we see Druuna and one of the soldiers standing by passively while we can read the off-panel dialog of Hale screaming “no” and being ignored (page 23). The page turn shows the actual rape in progress. As a piece of sequential storytelling, it’s very well executed. Both the reaction shot and the actual rape are excellent example of show, don’t tell. But that’s about all it has going for it. That and the heartbreaking shot of Hale wrapped around herself post-trauma.

Druuna’s advice to Hale is to just let it happen (!) because whatever the soldiers can do to them can’t be worse than the monstrous mutants who wander the wastelands could do instead. Survival is the key, and the best advice is to endure. Which is an interesting thing for a young, impressionable young man – a demographic that was reading Heavy Metal at the time – to read. Especially so close to such a graphic sexual assault.

Hale is raped a second time, and the act is used to drive the plot. While the soldier is distracted, a mutant comes out of nowhere and drags him away (page 29). Hale is laughing hysterically at her salvation and near-death experience and the death of the soldier is given a little too much dramatic emphasis, considering that he was mid-rape when he was whisked away. Again, Serpieri is a good enough sequential storyteller that we get to see this occur, from the rape onwards.

Completing Hale’s arc, we are shown a single image of her working as a prostitute in a military barracks and we hear nothing more about her for the entire series.

In the Summer 1988 issue of Heavy Metal, an editorial addressed current events. It seems that copies of the previous issue had been seized at the Canadian border for being in violation of code 9956 – a writ denying the importation of material dealing with sex with violence, bondage, etc. The editorial admits there was “sex with violence” in Druuna.

But there is a side of the strip that seems to have been ignored. Beyond the breasts, beyond the sex, there is an extraordinary power within the story – the horror of a world gone mad. We were not condoning the violence, simply presenting a frightening oftentimes exaggerated look into a future even more violent than the times we live in now.

That very issue, they featured a slew of stories from the Spanish version of the Illustrated Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Because they’d been censored, you see. This was a free speech issue.

Heavy Metal has always been a commercially-minded magazine. That approach has worked out very well for them and gave the publication a kind of self-aggrandizing swagger. You knew they were going to be over-the-top and merchandise everything, so nothing came as a surprise after the first five or six years.

Heavy Metal in the late 80s was filled with material by Daniel Torres and Peter Kuper – to the point where they felt like house artists. However, no character captured the public attention like Druuna. The two first books were republished as stand-alone hardback editions, as well as a slew of sketchbooks and other art books. Serpieri reprints became big business for Heavy Metal. So much so that these are all still in print, decades later.

An interesting side effect from the free-speech editorial board was that Heavy Metal began to censor some scenes of sex and violence. The series The Waters of DeadMoon received the most obvious changes, but Serpieri’s later works were given special attention. A few panels were altered, but mostly word balloons were placed at strategic spots to cover penetration, like a modern day da Volterra. In later years, this got to be almost farcical and a bored archivist could spend hours spotting the unnecessary bowdlerizations. In one later story, an entire six page sex scene disappeared, leaving readers confused.

Ironically, there was a note in May of 1992 (the first issue that Kevin Eastman’s name shows up in the masthead as publisher) that read

We have gotten a lot of flack about censorship in the Raoul Fleetfoot story (January 1992). Those little black bars covering up “casual indiscretions” were part of the story and not our way of screwing around with the First Amendment.

Given previous behavior, it would not have been that unlikely a conclusion to arrive at. I certainly came to the same conclusion when I read the story in question.
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In the November 1992 issue, the third Druuna story, Creatura, was published. Infamously, this story contains a four page sequence (pages 45-48) where Druuna is drugged and gang-raped. On the last page of the sequence, she wakes up and the following internal dialog shows up in a thought balloon.

Forgive me, we might have been able to live together. Your little devils gave me so much pleasure, you know? I don’t know how much those drugs were responsible… But I can reassure you it was a wonderful experience.

Which is, in my opinion, the crux of the problem with these stories. If there were no word balloons, it would be entirely possible to read at least one of the pages of the sequence as just a very well-drawn group sex scene, with attendant pornographic associations. It is drawn sexy. That’s how Serpieri draws these things – he’s very good at what he does and his artistic choices are on the page. With the context added in, the juxtaposition of sexy and horrific makes the mind recoil in realization.

However, the apology that the victim utters (even if it’s only in her mind) seems to absolve the instigator of the assault (a woman) retroactively on the theory that it was fun, once Druuna got into it. I cannot think of a more dangerous sentiment to present to the kinds of people that would find those pages more sexually arousing than horrific; keep in mind that I count myself as one of those individuals.

The first Druuna story was published in 1986, the year I entered high school. Heavy Metal was not news to me – on the contrary, my father had the complete run as I was growing up, so there was not a time when I did not know that Heavy Metal existed. But the perfect bound quarterly issues starting in 1986 did not fit into the official commemorative binders that held the first nine years of the publication. The new issues sat alone and were easier to consume as they came in.
The second story was published when I was still in high school and Creatura came out when I was living at home, having dropped out of college. In those pre-internet days, anything pornographic was a precious item and this one was mailed directly to my house. I’ll spare you the gory details, but I honestly wonder how much those three stories impacted my sexual development.

If you can read Marain, figuring out my FetLife profile shouldn’t be that difficult. I’m not going to make it easy for you, but I will say that enthusiastic consent is a massive turn-on for me. And even the slightest hint of reluctance makes me very uncomfortable. I guess that means I got the right message? It’s difficult to say for sure if I am representative of the average reader reaction or an outlier.

I will say this, though – I tend to be attracted to women with bodies that are similar to Druuna’s and that’s probably not a coincidence.
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Five additional Druuna stories were published between 1993 and 2003 (fun fact: more Druuna stories were published under Kevin Eastman as publisher than not), but I’m not going to recap them all in nauseating detail. They all are all set in more or less the same technorganic futuristic hellscape, a place full of horny soldiers, brutal authoritarianism, sadistic sexual predators, disease, ravenous mutants, and bewildering recurring characters.

There is a lot of philosophy and soul-searching. Consensual sex is found throughout the series, but usually only in the context of idyllic dream sequences that serve to demonstrate what the world could be like. On the other hand, the constant threat of violence and sexual assault seem to serve as a cautionary element, describing how the world is messed up.

Which works, on an allegorical level. But the stories themselves tend to duck and weave considerably around the outright identification of self-identification as allegories. In fact, Serpieri’s hyper-realistic artwork tends to work against reading these stories as allegorical. These are specific events, happening to specific people.

If Druuna is, indeed, some kind of ur-woman, what do her repeated sexual assaults mean, exactly? Are they meant to imply something about the universal condition of women? That’s pretty bleak, no matter how you turn the interpretation. However, if there is no meaning to these assaults, then the allegory argument falls apart on first principles.

It is entirely possible that I think too much about these things.

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One final story: When I was in a mall outside of Antwerp earlier this year, I was flipping through Anima, the first new Serpieri book in thirteen years, at FNAC. My girlfriend looked over my shoulder and noted that the book was not just “a little rapey” (as I had described his work in Heavy Metal) but depicted actual rape, complete with knives to throats during intercourse. Considering that the book is largely silent, this is both a testament to his sequential art capabilities and his pre-occupation with sexual assault.

Paolo, you’ve still got it!

Heavy Metal Magazine is Not Punk

Posted on July 14, 2015 by RM Rhodes

By now, everyone knows that Grant Morrison is taking on the role of Editor in Chief for Heavy Metal magazine. As someone who is three years into a complete reread of the entire run of the publication, this is of great interest to me.

My first reaction to this announcement was “again?” I’ve seen this kind of stunt casting for Editors before. When I read Grant Morrison’s comment that “[w]e’re trying to bring back some of that 70s punk energy of Heavy Metal,” I had to wonder if he actually, y’know, read the magazine during the 70s and 80s. Of all the labels that could possibly be laid at the feet of Heavy Metal during that period, punk is the only one I wouldn’t use.

First of all, the magazine was originally published by National Lampoon, a not-inconsiderably-sized company that released movies (Animal House, Vacation) and sold an awful lot of branded merchandise during the 70s and 80s. The pages of early Heavy Metal were packed full of advertisements for National Lampoon stuff. None of that really came across as punk to me at all. As Heavy Metal went on, they became much more obviously commercial, with their own brand of merchandise that was advertised in every issue.

An ad for Animal House from an early issue of Heavy Metal.

Second, a lot of the early material is very psychedelic and appealed mostly to the aging hippy demographic, which was, if I remember Sid and Nancy correctly, directly antithetical to the ethos of punk. Furthermore, Ted White was a big prog-rock fan and the material that was produced under his guidance leaned very heavily in that direction. If you were an Ultravox fan, Heavy Metal in the early 80s was absolutely the magazine for you.

An ad for a Ted Nugent album, from March of 1979. Tres punk.

Third, the revolution that really drove Heavy Metal was very distinctly French and had a lot more to do with the format of how French comics were serialized than with any kind of musical aesthetic, something that is largely transparent to Anglophones. Instead of serializing stories 22 pages at a time on a monthly basis, French BD magazines serialize their stories half a page at a time in weekly anthologies and have done since the 50s. It was a technique made popular with Tintin magazine, and perfected by Spirou. By the end of the 60s, Pilote (under the editorial guidance of Rene Goscinny, not coincidentally, the writer of Asterix) was the big boy on the block, largely due to this production methodology.

The collected editions of popular stories and characters would stack half-pages together to create magazine-sized albums. Take a look at any French (or European) BD collection produced before 1970 – Asterix, Valerian, Corto Maltese, Blueberry, Philemon, Spirou – and you will notice a white gutter running horizontally through the middle of almost every page in the book. This is a direct artifact of the serialization methodology, regardless of whether the story was actually serialized or not. There were occasional splash pages in these books, but that’s more of an exception than a rule.

A page from Blueberry – note the A and B in the bottom right corners of the half pages.

But when you look at the material that Moebius and Druillet were producing in Metal Hurlant, you can really see a massive revolution in format. The pages are not formatted to be chopped in half for serialization – the page layouts are a direct challenge to the old commercial methodology. In addition, the fact that three or four pages were printed at once to present a complete story in a single issue was a major shift.

For contrast, a page from Arzach, also by Moebius

It’s probably not a coincidence that Les Humanoïdes Associés came mostly from the Pilote stable of artists. They pushed against the solid editorial format of the establishment and, when that didn’t get them where they wanted to go, they went out and formed their own magazine – something that just about everyone in the Francophone market did at one point or another. There were many, many anthology magazines on the stands at the time and still are.

The Metal Hurlant revolution can be better understood to an Anglophone comics audience as analogous to the Image revolution – a bunch of artists got together and did their own thing because they wanted more creative control. It’s a shame that this part of the history isn’t better understood, because it would have been more appropriate to compare the Image revolution to the Metal Hurlant revolution because of the order they occurred in. C’est la vie.

After Metal Hurlant proved to be a successful commercial powerhouse, the BD market shifted. Not everything had to be in half-page increments anymore and there were far more experiments in format. By the early 80s, things like Les Cites Obscures by Schuiten and Peeters started showing up in complete albums without serialization and multipage stories by Caza were appearing in Pilote.
When Heavy Metal appeared on American newsstands in 1977, there were already a number of other anthology titles floating around. Not quite part of the underground movement, these were referred to as the “ground level anthologies” (because they were a step above the underground and a step below the mass market) and, to Anglophone eyes, Heavy Metal fit right in.

The granddaddy of these was (in my opinion) witzend, which started in 1966 and was published irregularly through the mid 80s. Star*Reach and Hot Stuf’ were around in the early 70s and provided venues for artists like Howie Chaykin and Rich Corben, who went on to make great material for Heavy Metal.

Interestingly, 2000AD also started in 1977.
By the early 80s, the ground level anthologies business was very popular. Every little (and some not-so-little) publishing house was putting out their own anthology – Eclipse, Epic Illustrated, Warrior, Raw, Weirdo, 1984 (later 1994) all came and went during the heyday of Heavy Metal. There was even a short run of a Scottish anthology in 1980 called Near Myths that featured a strip called Gideon Stargrave by a young up-and-comer named Grant Morrison.

It’s entirely possible that the young Morrison saw Heavy Metal in punk terms because that was what he was immersed in when he was 20, when he was working on an anthology created in clear imitation of Heavy Metal. But that doesn’t mean that Heavy Metal had any kind of real “punk energy” during that period. Maybe we are predisposed to define all future revolutions (including the ones we create) in terms of the first revolution that we live through.

A really revolutionary act would be for Morrison to go back and read those issues with fresh eyes and see what made Heavy Metal distinct (the European material, which none of the other ground level anthologies had in such a high volume). In the Entertainment Weekly article, he is quoted as saying “One of the things I like to do in my job is revamp properties and really get into the aesthetic of something, dig into the roots of what makes it work, then tinker with the engine and play around with it. So for me, it’s an aesthetic thing first and foremost.”

He also plans to write and create original material for the magazine, which doesn’t fill me with a lot of hope that he will, in fact, recapture that original aesthetic – mostly because the most honest way to do that would be to hire revolutionary European creators and give them room to really challenge the status quo. But I don’t see him trawling Angouleme for new creators anytime soon.

One thing is certain: given my commitment to read the entire run of Heavy Metal, I’ll get to his issues eventually. I’m currently on the 1989 issues, so that will be three to four years from now, based on my current reading speed. At this point, though, I really don’t feel a sense of urgency to jump ahead and read them as they are released, based on his remarks.

That Time When Heavy Metal Went Quarterly

Posted on February 25, 2015 by RM Rhodes

When subscribers received their copy of the December 1985 Heavy Metal in the mail, they were greeted with a letter from publisher Leonard Mogel, printed on the paper mailing wrapper, informing them that with the next issue, Heavy Metal would be moving from a monthly publication schedule to a quarterly schedule. The reason provided was simple: readers were unhappy with the fact that the stories in the monthly version of Heavy Metal continued from one month to another. Quarterly publication allowed the magazine to increase the page count from 96 to 116 pages, add perfect binding and to publish complete stories in each issue. Oh, and the cover price went from $2.50 to $3.95 (the equivalent of jumping from $5.40 to $8.53, adjusting for inflation).

Having read every issue of Heavy Metal through 1986, I’m not entirely convinced that “the audience wants complete stories” was the whole reason for the shift in publication frequency. Looking at the individual magazines that were published in the years before the shift, it’s easy to spot how a combination of cost-cutting measures and behind-the-scenes change in staff might have also contributed. Having said that, “readers want complete stories” was convenient and easy to explain and a lot more audience-friendly than “we’ve had some staff issues.”

And boy, did they have staff issues in 1984 and 1985. But in order to explain the full impact of those staff issues, we have to go all the way back to the January 1978 issue of Heavy Metal, when John Workman became the magazine’s second Art Director. In that January issue, Workman was co-credited as Art Director with Harry Blumfield, who had been working in the position since the first issue. In February, Blumfield was gone and Workman was in.

Workman’s influence was not obvious at first, but over the course of the next two years, he built up the quality of the production. When editors Sean Kelly and Valerie Marchant were replaced by Ted White in 1980, Workman survived the transition. He also survived when Ted White left at the end of 1980 and was arguably one of the mainstays holding the staff together during the transition. Throughout this period, Workman’s name lingered near the middle of the credits on the masthead, never getting higher than fourth. This is significant, because I believe where the individual ranked on the masthead was indicative of where they fit into the staff hierarchy; whether or not this is true, it seems clear that members of the staff at the time believed it to be true.

In fact, Leonard Mogel’s name appears at the top of the masthead throughout most of 1981, reflecting a more active involvement in the day-to-day activities at the time. Julie Simmons-Lynch is credited as the editor, but it was obvious that she didn’t have the same kind of hands-on relationship with the production as Kelly/Marchant or White. They needed someone to pitch in and take care of operations.

Accordingly, in the March 1981 issue, a new name appeared on the masthead – Brad Balfour, Contributing Editor. His editorial efforts were largely forgettable, but Balfour was a terrible interviewer and badly botched an interview with Richard Corben which ran in June, July and August of that year. This series precipitated an angry full-page letter from Corben, who demanded that the letter be printed in full, with no edits. This letter appeared in the September 1981 issue, the same issue that was dedicated to the Heavy Metal movie that was released on August 7^th of that year. It was not the best use of editorial synergy and was largely reflective of the state of the magazine in 1981.

In addition to the movie, which brought in hordes of new readers, the other major event of 1981 was the release of an entire special issue, dedicated entirely to Moebius. This Moebius special featured (among other things) an introduction by Federico Fellini and the first few chapters of The Incal, a serial written by Alejandro Jodorowsky and drawn by Moebius. Workman and his team did a lot of the heavy lifting for this issue and Workman was given top billing in the masthead. Perhaps coincidentally, Mogel’s name was no longer on the masthead for the December 1981 issue of Heavy Metal and Workman’s name was second, right underneath Simmons-Lynch and above Contributing Editor Balfour. Workman’s name remained in this position on the masthead until he left in 1984.

Workman’s contribution to the magazine was everywhere and, thus, only truly obvious after he left. He contributed a lot to the look and feel of the individual issues, producing spot-art and the occasional one-page story when it was necessary to fill a gap. Although he was never credited as an editor, he was the Art Director in a publication dedicated to art and the magazine was better off having an Art Director in such a prominent role in the leadership.

The February 1982 masthead had some major changes. In addition to Brad Balfour becoming an Associate Editor, there were some new names, most notably Lou Stathis as Contributing Editor and Steven Maloff as Editorial Assistant. Since October 1981, Stathis had been working on Dossier – the spiritual heir to the columns that White had added when he was the editor in 1980. In this incarnation, Dossier was focused largely on music, with healthy digressions on movies, books and video games. There were far more writers than White had in 1980 and the topics bounced all over the place.

February 1982 masthead

Balfour was the first real editor of Dossier, but Stathis took over when he was promoted to Associate Editor in May 1982. As for Balfour, he was credited with “Special Projects” and disappeared from the masthead entirely in October 1982. Maloff was promoted to Contributing Editor in July 1982 and not a lot else changed in Heavy Metal leadership for the next two years.

Dossier November 1983

I would argue that this incarnation of Heavy Metal, with Workman, Stathis and Maloff, was one of the best periods of Heavy Metal, full stop. When Stathis wasn’t busy picking fights on the letters page (sample response: “Yeah, but I’ll bet your dick has to hunt and peck when it types.”), he was turning Dossier into a powerhouse review section that also ran interviews with all kinds of creative types, from Jerry Lewis to Jack Davis and everyone in between.

For his part, Workman was busy turning Heavy Metal’s visual content into something legendary. In addition to long-running series like Rock Opera by Ron Kierkegaard, The Bus by Paul Kirchner, Tex Arcana by John Findley, and I’m Age by Jeffery Jones, Workman also put together a series called June 2050. This featured one-page vaguely science fictional stories by various comics luminaries including Dick Giordano, Chris Browne, Drew Friedman, Rick Veitch, Bill Dubay, Len Wein, Todd Klein, Rick Geary, Howard Cruse and Pepe Moreno.

It’s not clear where Steven Maloff’s influence can be seen during this period.

In 1982, Heavy Metal released a second special issue, their first Best Of. In 1983, they decided that they had enough material to produce a 13^th issue, which was branded Even Heavier Metal. Both of these were masterminded by Workman and it’s interesting to note that neither Stathis or Maloff were credited in Even Heavier Metal (I don’t have Best Of #1) – presumably because there was only comics and art-related material on offer. This changed in 1984, when Son of Heavy Metal was released. Here, Maloff was credited as Associate Editor, the only masthead that shows him with this particular title (he was promoted to Managing Editor in July 1984).

1984 was not a particularly good year for Heavy Metal, production-wise. In January, Bird Dust, a story by Caza was reprinted (a first, for a magazine with so much content that it felt compelled to print 13^th issues three years running) – it had originally been printed in the November 1977 issue, two issues before Workman began. In April, the cover price went up to $2.50, the first price hike since February of 1980. The next month, in June, 16 of the 96 pages of the magazine changed from the usual glossy paper to newsprint; this was ameliorated somewhat by printing Dossier and Tex Arcana, a black and white feature, on the lower-quality paper. Coming so close upon the heels of the cover price hike, the lowered paper quality hints strongly at money problems.

And then John Workman left the magazine. The October 1984 issue was clearly laid out by Workman, although his name does not appear in the masthead and neither does his staff. It’s not entirely clear if the departure was planned or unplanned, but there is a clue in the masthead. Steven Maloff, who had been credited as Managing Editor since July 1984, was temporarily demoted back to Contributing Editor in this masthead, which is almost hidden on the credits page. It’s very subtle, but it’s absolutely a message of some kind in Maloff’s direction.

October 1984 editorial

November 1984 editorial

Indeed, the very next month, Maloff’s name was now above Stathis in the masthead, where Workman’s name resided since 1981. There was clearly some kind of power struggle and Workman lost. The magazine was not better off without Workman – the production quality of the magazine dropped significantly in that single month and never really recovered. It was Balfour all over again, only this time they didn’t have a movie bringing in new readers or John Workman providing support.

There is no better indication of how bad things got, production-wise, than the 13^th issue from 1985 – Bride of Heavy Metal. Workman was long gone by the time this came out and the little details that Workman put into the special issues he produced are not here. And instead of providing distinct credits, the whole issue was “Compiled by the Staff of Heavy Metal magazine,” which is as vague as it gets.

As bad as 1984 was, 1985 was worse. My copy of the February 1985 issue has a major printing error – the registration lines from the red ink don’t quite line up in one of the signatures, an issue that hadn’t been seen in years. In April, Maloff took over editing Dossier from Stathis. In May, the paper quality dropped again, including four bright white pages that were a step up from newsprint, but a step down from the normal glossy paper and tended to let the art from the other side of the page bleed through. In June, the whole magazine had switched to this new paper stock, replacing both the newsprint and the glossy paper. And, in July, Stathis was completely off the masthead. Maloff was now in charge of the magazine, for better or for worse.

One of the lesser ideas that Maloff introduced in July 1985 was a full page of trivia questions called Trivial Metal. In that issue, the answers were not provided and it was run as a contest – readers were encouraged to send in answers with a chance of winning a sweet satin-like jacket with the Heavy Metal logo printed on the back. The contest aspect of Trivial Metal didn’t last long and, by the next issue, the answers were printed upside down on the same page as the questions. This continued for another issue and, in October, the feature was not there. In November, neither was Maloff.

Trivia June 1985

His position was not filled, exactly. Michela Nonis had been promoted to Production Manager in April 1985 and, absent Maloff, became the default bigwig. It’s difficult to tell if going quarterly was her idea or not, but it was certainly a decision rapidly made. The September 1985 issue has a subscription ad that features a good deal for a three year subscription, which pretty clearly indicates that the staff thought they were going to be publishing a monthly magazine for the foreseeable future. There were no subscription ads in October and, in November, the last installment of Dossier published seven interviews – clearing out the backlog of interviews that they had stocked up over time.

The subscription ads and editorials in the December 1985 issue leaned very heavily on the idea that readers had been clamoring for complete stories in every issue for years and the change in format was completely not a last-minute decision by a staff that had run out of ideas for ways to cut costs. This was clearly propaganda, but propaganda that was easier to promulgate than explaining how they’d lost their star Art Director in a power struggle over whose name got to be on the masthead of the 13^th issue a year earlier.

December 1985 editorial

December 1985 subscription

October 1984 subscription

I’m convinced that the loss of John Workman led directly to the transition of Heavy Metal from a monthly magazine to a quarterly magazine. True, each of the new issues contained only complete stories, but that was not necessarily a good thing. In January 1983, at the height of the Workman/Stathis years, the magazine boasted fifteen features, not including Dossier. Five of them were short – half-page or single-page comics, but the range and quality of the material was extensive. The first issue of the new format boasted seven full-length features. One featured short, episodic stories and the other offered novellas that were promised to be stand-alone (ie, no sequels).

In addition, there was a certain frisson that came from reading several serialized comics right on top of one another, anthologies being sort of the entertainment equivalent of eating a multi-layer cake or club sandwich. There were a lot of weird, conflicting flavors, true, but the experience was richer for it. Reading two (or more) serials at the same time over the course of several periodical installments creates an associative memory between the two (or more) stories, an effect that can only be achieved through sequential episodic serialization. Complete, non-sequential stories offer a pale echo of the same experience, but cannot (by definition) offer the experience of following a serial across multiple installments.

Publishing quarterly didn’t last. After three years, Heavy Metal changed their publication schedule again in 1989, moving to bimonthly and eventually being sold to Kevin Eastman in 1992. In nearly nine years as a monthly magazine, over a third of all Heavy Metal issues to date were published between 1977 and 1985. It was a strong brand that spawned a movie, innumerable branded clothing options and a number of imitators (the so-called ground level anthologies, most notably Epic Illustrated, which coincidentally folded in 1986). It was a mainstay on the magazine rack, month in and month out. Dropping the frequency of publication really limited its visibility in a big way.

In my opinion, the biggest loss was Dossier, which didn’t fit the new format. The Dossier section turned readers on to any number of great bands, songs, albums, movies, authors and other entertainment options they might not have otherwise been exposed to. Dossier had the potential to become a monthly guide to cool, weird stuff for a certain kind of reader with access to a decent record store. Lou Stathis was a contrary proto-goth with a severe aversion to dickheads, but he had great taste in music.

In 1986, as the publication frequency changed, there was an attempt to spin Dossier off into a weekly newsletter called Heavy Metal Report. I can find no information about this spinoff online (and my father, who I inherited my collection from, was clearly not interested because he had no copies). The loss of this review section remade Heavy Metal into more of a pure comics magazine, significantly disconnected from contemporary pop culture.

At SPX, Joe McCulloch reminded me that the stories published in the quarterly years were actually pretty good. A Corto Maltese story by Hugo Pratt, the introduction of Druuna by Eleuteri Serpieri, an old Moebius story and a new Enki Bilal story were all printed in the first year. In fact, one of the few things that survived both the departure of John Workman and the switch from monthly to quarterly was the overall quality of the comics stories. Not every story was a winner, but when they were good, they were very, very good. Moving forward, there were just fewer of them, complete in every issue.

The Year of Ted White

Posted on February 19, 2013 by RM Rhodes

August 1980 – Page 96 Chain Mail

If you ever get the opportunity to look at a copy of the August 1980 issue of Heavy Metal, flip to the letters column on page 96. On the bottom left corner of the page, you will find a letter that I feel perfectly captures the mood of the average Heavy Metal reader during that year. It reads as follows:

Dear Ted,

The day is fast approaching when “reading Heavy Metal stoned is like being stoned… almost” (as one reader put it) is no longer true. Who can get into reading book reviews, movie reviews, and other such stuff when one is stoned? You sit there and stare at a paragraph for ten minutes before you realize you’re not even reading it, much less absorbing the content. I’d much rather sit staring at full-page artwork for ten minutes and really get into that.

I especially miss Druillet’s very worthwhile contributions[1]. So fire up another bowl and get HM back up to the top – where it once was.

T.H.C.

Decatur, Ind.

August 1980 – Page 53 Salammbo by Druillet

If online message boards, forums and/or Usenet had been widely available in the late 70s, the one(s) dedicated to discussing the content of Heavy Metal magazine would have exploded in controversy in 1980. This is obvious from the content of the letter columns during this year. The usual approach was to print a page of positive responses with an equal number of negative responses, followed up in later months by reactions to the responses. The printed responses were obviously just a drop in the mail bucket – I can only imagine what would have happened if it had played out in real time.

So what happened in 1980 to cause so much wailing and gnashing of teeth? Short answer: they got a new editor. Not quite two years after the inception of the magazine, the first editorial team of Sean Kelly and Valerie Marchant was replaced by Ted White, who had spent ten years editing Amazing Stories and Fantastic. At the time, it was felt that his success on those publications made him a good choice to take Heavy Metal in a new direction. It’s also interesting to note that the entirety of his comics-related work to that point was a Captain America novel he wrote in 1968.

The biggest (and most controversial) change that White brought to the pages of Heavy Metal were four columnists, each writing about a different topic – Lou Stathis, Jay Kinney, Bhob Stewart and Steve Brown. Original fiction pieces were dropped entirely and the volume of art pages was reduced to make room for column inches. To the editorial staff’s credit, they did play with the layout considerably, often presenting pages that were half text and half comic. Regardless, the huge blocks of text were easy to skip over and doubled the amount of time it took to read each issue.

May 1980 – Page 57 Gallery Section: New Books

Of the regular columnists, the most controversial was Lou Stathis (who was an editor at Vertigo later in life). He insisted on referring to rok musick, an affectation that looks amusing now, but was probably seen as very progressive at the time. In his first column (January 1980), he starts by claiming that the only two acts that were any good during the 70s were the Sex Pistols and Roxy Music. This probably came as somewhat of a shock to the readers of Heavy Metal, who were mostly in the Led Zeppelin camp (a band that Stathis doesn’t even deign to mention in that first column)[2].

Stathis presented interviews of bands he enjoyed and did a review of a whole slew of debut singles at one point – up-and-comers like The Cure, X, and Gang of Four. Later columns included an homage to Brian Eno and a long examination of Ultravox, which ran next to Ted White’s review of an Ultravox performance written under the pen name of Dr. Progresso – a name that White still uses for his prog rock radio show. White wrote additional articles on occasion and the contrast in approaches is very striking. Stathis wrote from the hip, in his best Lester Bangs sneer while White’s articles were about sharing the love of an artform that he deeply respected.

In hindsight, it’s easy to make the case that Stathis’s attitude and contempt for what he considered to be the mainstream of music had the potential to severely alienate a portion of the existing Heavy Metal readership. Unfortunately, audiences tend to take criticism (real or implied) of the bands they like as criticism of themselves. After all, if you tell me that the music I listen to sucks, aren’t you also insulting my taste in music? As jazzed as he was about The Residents, Stathis was just as scornful of “the tuna fish that you get on your radio” and he constantly read like he was trying to pick a fight.

Jay Kinney’s running history of underground comix was nowhere near as controversial as Lou Stathis, but some readers still managed to find time to complain about it. Kinney started with one of the main influences of Crumb and company – EC – and sketched biographies and bibliographies for most of the big names in subsequent months. He only managed to get as far as 1971 with his history before his column was cancelled along with the rest of them in December 1980. Along the way, he provided a fairly good blow-by-blow account of the various underground cartoonists migrating around the country, looking for more reasonable markets (San Francisco and New York were favorite destinations). It’s a collection of columns that would form the good backbone of a definitive history of the period – as a companion to Dez Skinn’s book, maybe.

May 1980 – Pages 84&85 First Love by Bissette and Perry/Comix by Jay Kinney

Bhob Stewart’s Flix column was dedicated to film. His first three columns featured an extended interview with Stephen King, whose novel The Shining was being made by Stanley Kubrick at the time. Later columns focused on animation festivals, weird films that would now be put into the “psychotronic” bucket and a story about the time he met a background artist from Fantasia. He also did a long write-up of the upcoming Heavy Metal film, which was deep into production at the time.

Steve Brown’s SF column aimed at bringing news of contemporary science fiction and fantasy books to the readers of Heavy Metal. He reviewed David Brin, Samuel Delaney, Ursula K. Le Guin and a slew of other authors. Despite the occasional bully pulpit rant about how the science fiction genre deserved better, it was easily the least controversial of the columns because it was ostensibly aimed at a demographic that liked science fiction. Unfortunately, it was lumped in with the rest of the columns as a waste of space because those column inches could have been used for more art.

There were guest columns as well. Maurice Horn provided a quarterly international comics column. The April issue featured a write-up of Guido Crepax’s Valentina (Crepax’s thank you letter was published in July, alongside photos of a van that was painted with the Heavy Metal logo), August was dedicated to Herge’s Tintin and Tezuka was in November. April saw a hysterically ironic Sidebar column from Norman Spinrad that panned both the first Star Trek motion picture and Disney’s The Black Hole as being more about the special effects than the story – a criticism that has been leveled at Heavy Metal on more than one occasion.

During this period, Heavy Metal also ran interviews with certain key creators – Jeronaton, Enki Bilal, Moebius, Philippe Druillet and Guido Crepax. In most cases, these were the first English-language interviews with these creators and exposed the readers of Heavy Metal to more than just their art. Jeronaton was all over the place, but the Druillet and Bilal interviews are excellent insights into the artistic and creative influences that shaped them and their productions.

Scattered among the columns were some top-notch comics work. Berni Wrightson, Spain Rodriguez, Joost Swarte, Guido Crepax, Howard Cruse and Matt Howarth showed up in Heavy Metal for the first time during this period and a lot more of Rick Veitch and Steve Bissette’s work was also evident. Several of Caza’s pieces from Pilote appeared, as did a lot of older Moebius material – including a great strip from when he was going by Gir. Ted White even did a few strips with Ernie Colon. Chaykin didn’t show up, but early Corben did – from the period before he discovered the airbrush.

May 1980 – Page 24 House Ad

Despite the fact that he oversaw one of the best issues of Heavy Metal ever produced – the Rock Issue, October 1980 – Ted White did not make it to the end of the year. The last issue he edited was November 1980, but the columns made their last appearance in the December issue, which makes me think that his departure was fairly abrupt. Controversy may be good for raising awareness of a publication, but when the self-identified long-term readers[3] start complaining about the format of a magazine that they have grown to love, it’s time to make hard decisions.

After acknowledging that “[s]ome of the ideas worked, others didn’t,” the editorial in the December 1980 issue laid out the new status quo and claimed that White “is now relinquishing his duties as editor to devote his time to two novels and his new record company.” He was scheduled to do a tribute to Will Eisner in an upcoming issue and wrote a few follow-up comics, so the split wasn’t entirely acrimonious.

Some of the changes that came out of 1980 were subtle– the overt drug references didn’t go away, but the rolling paper ads were replaced by ads for stereo equipment and science fiction book clubs. Guest editorials and commentary continued in later issues, as did interviews. White introduced a portfolio section, which showed off samples of art books by Syd Mead and HR Giger. This was later resurrected as a general presentation feature called Dossier that ran for years.

July 1980 – Page 22 Romance by Caza

If you were to cleave the history of Heavy Metal into distinct periods, the Year of Ted White makes a neat dividing line between the fast and loose production values of the early years and the more professional publication that was eventually given to Julie Simmons-Lynch. It’s a shame that it was only a year, though.

[1] Druillet had an excellent piece published in the same issue.

[2] A letter in the May letter column starts by asking the rhetorical question “What is the most useless person in the world?” and answering it with “A rock critic” then goes on to argue that New Wave music is terrible by citing the complete lack of talent exhibited by Devo, Elvis Costello and the Talking Heads.

[3] Of a magazine that’s just over three years old

Screaming At Heavy Metal

Posted on October 29, 2012 by RM Rhodes

Somewhere in the last thirty-five years, Heavy Metal has earned a reputation as a legendary magazine that printed the best in trippy[1] Eurocomics (the stoner teens of the 70s were apparently deemed too simple to understand the term BD[2]). Part of that came from canny marketing on the part of the editors; issue #2 had an ad proclaiming issue #1 was a collector’s item. A big part of the legend is that the artists they were publishing were legendary – Moebius, Druillet, Corben, Tardi, Chaland, Voss, et al. Of course, there is no easy way to contradict the legend – early Heavy Metal and Miracleman are two series with almost no available back issues in general circulation, which has had had a similar effect on the reputations of both titles.

February 1978 – page 43 Urm by Druillet

When the opportunity arose to reread my father’s collection (he was a subscriber for the first twelve years of publication), I jumped at it. I’d read the run when I was in my early teens and don’t remember a lot of it. My delight soon turned to dust – I was appalled when I waded into the first two issues because the art is beautiful, but the stories are lacking. In fact, the word “stories” is generous. In some places, there is an utter lack of concern – bordering on outright disdain – for comprehensible narrative.

June 1977 – page 50 Den by Corben

The cognitive dissonance caused by the collision of the magazine’s reputation (especially the early issues, which are generally mentioned in terms of “when it was good”), and the actual work is jarring. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise – the fact that I’d forgotten a lot of it was a clue. But I had high hopes and the determination to look at each issue on its own merits. After a year of reading, I can say this: the issues from the 70s[3] are very problematic.

The abundance of breasts in the magazine has become somewhat of a running joke over the years, but the amount of rape (and stories where attempted rape drives the action) that appears in those first three years is something else entirely. I really didn’t keep track of how often it happens, but any number more than “none” is usually a bad sign. Tragically, it’s mostly used as just another plot point, with no mention or indication of the consequences. I’m clearly a bad person because I don’t consider the inclusion of rape themes in an anthology as an absolute show-stopper and kept reading.

June 1977 – page 6 Gail by Druillet

To keep myself from screaming at some of the weaker pieces, it was important for me to keep in mind that Heavy Metal is very much a product of its time and had a very specific audience. The ideal reader would put Pink Floyd on the turntable, adjust his headphones, take a few bong hits and settle back into a beanbag chair and stare at the new issue for hours. Drug references abound. One of the early marketing taglines came from a reader’s letter “Heavy Metal is better than being stoned. Almost.” And in 1979, Job rolling papers became a regular advertiser.

September 1979 – page 3 Job rolling paper ad

For their part, the creators were mostly European men with Old World attitudes towards women – the usual reaction towards Feminism was the inclusion of full-frontal male nudity, not to cut down on improbable breast-revealing costumes for queens who all seemed to live in tropical climates. (It is very obvious that Richard Corben and Russ Meyer would have had a lot to talk about.) These were comics by stoners who liked titties for stoners who liked titties.

June 1977 – page 80 Harzak by Moebius

If that’s your thing, then this is the magazine for you. But if you are one of those heretics, like me, that wants actual stories with your sequential art, this is very hit or miss, with more many more misses than hits. One of the major issues in contemporary art comics (which arguably takes its aesthetic cues from Heavy Metal or what the creators think Heavy Metal represents, including the sex and drugs) is that the art is engaging and interesting, but has almost no narrative continuity from page to page or even panel to panel. The artists are having fun drawing interesting shit, which is fine. But a comic that is worth looking at once with little to no reread value is questionable at best. Unfortunately, that’s Heavy Metal in spades.

The stories that Moebius was cranking out in these early issues – Arzach[4] and The Airtight Garage – are beautiful works. He was very clearly exploring the limits of his artistic ability and the results speak for themselves. But they make very little sense. Arzach was the first major project that Moebius engaged in after working on Blueberry with Charlier for Pilote, and its wordless pages actually carry some narrative weight, but The Airtight Garage is like a kite without a string.

September 1979 – page 80 The Airtight Garage of Jerry Cornelius by Moebius

There are intrigues and airstrikes and assassinations and an entire sequence with an archer getting onto a submarine that look like they should be of some consequence. But the narrative stutters so much that the pieces never really come together and the revelations mean nothing. Moebius acknowledges this – one of the chapters is titled The Uptight Garbage of Moebius and a synopsis for another chapter mocks the narrative flailing. Towards the end, Moebius flat-out ignores any of the story he’s written so far and just goes for broke. The results are visually amazing, but severely flawed.

Druillet – one of the original co-Humanoids – is another case in point. His early black and white work is messy, but when he discovered color, it was like he leveled up. The color spreads from Ulm the Mad, Gail and Salammbo are amazing. He did interesting and innovative things with panel borders, incorporating photography into his art and even threw trippy optical illusion pieces into the mix. His design aesthetic owes a lot to Kirby, especially his spaceships and headgear, but it would take someone far more versed in the latter to really do a deep dive on that subject.

November 1978 – page 42 Gail by Druillet

One thing that Druillet could have completely left out of his later color work, though, is the words – they just get in the way. In some cases, they are lettered too small to be readable and in others, they just don’t make sense. Either way, they tend to slow down the story unnecessarily – especially the large captions that run to multiple paragraphs. It’s clear from his art that he wanted to produce epic works, but writing is not one of his core skill-sets.

It would be easy to lay the blame for these narrative inadequacies at the feet of poor translation, but the same issues crop up in works by English-speakers as well – Todd Klein, Steve Bissette, Rick Veitch and Charles Vess, I’m looking in your direction. And some of the best stories come from European sources – Jacques Tardi’s work Polonius stands out, as do several of Caza’s allegorical tales. And when these artists are working with honest-to-god writers – Dan O’Bannon/Moebius and Druillet/Picotto are good examples – they actually come out looking very good.

May 1977 – page 89 Arzach by Moebius

In the final examination, the art from those early years holds up really, really well. And if that’s what you’re looking for, these are great issues to track down (October of 1979 is probably the best from that period, in my opinion). But if you are one of those people who values actual story with your art, then you are going to be sorely disappointed. Obviously, the disconnect between story and art is something that the contemporary comics reader still has to grapple with and it’s fair to say that Heavy Metal is not where the trend started – it’s just the most obvious, most famous example.

Moebius and Druillet (among others) obviously put a lot of effort into their work. It seems like such a waste that they didn’t take that extra step to find a good writer to really make the work sing. And it’s not like they went out of their way to produce bad stories; they just aren’t good, which was so frustrating that it made me want to scream. As a result, they ended up producing really high-quality art comics at a time when the term didn’t exist.

When Moebius died, Neil Gaiman pointed out that The Airtight Garage was much better in French than it was in English because he had room to imagine how brilliant they were. Accordingly, my advice to young creators who are pining for these works is to go onto amazon.fr[5] and buy them in French, where they are easily available for reasonable prices. You’ll get the best part of the comics without having to put up with the sub-par quality of the writing. Plus, the French archival editions are usually very large, which lets the art breathe. In the unlikely event that these were actually published in English, the current trends tend to indicate that they’ll be shrunk down for some reason that makes no sense – which is another rant entirely.

[1] “I’d like to see an adult magazine that didn’t predominantly feature huge tits, spilled intestines or the sort of brain-damaged acid-casualty gibbering that Heavy Metal is so fond of.” Alan Moore, May 1981

[2] BD is short for Bandes dessinées, which is French for comics. BD:French::Manga:Japanese::Comics:English is the best way to think of it. People who know what to ask for will get much more out of their trips to Brussels and Paris.

[3] The issues from 1977 through 1979 serve as a good scope for this article for two reasons. First, Ted White became the editor in December of 1979, visibly changing the text/art ratio of the individual issues. Second, I’m only halfway through 1980 in my reread and can’t speak definitively about anything past that.

[4] Also spelled Harzak, Arzak, Harzac, Harzakc and Harzack

[5] It’s exactly the same site design as amazon.com, so the language barrier isn’t actually that big of an issue

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Tag Archives: Heavy Metal

Sex, Violence, Druuna

Heavy Metal Magazine is Not Punk

That Time When Heavy Metal Went Quarterly

The Year of Ted White

Screaming At Heavy Metal