How Art Spiegelman Designs Comic Books: A Breakdown of His Masterpiece, Maus

Maus, car­toon­ist Art Spiegel­man’s ground­break­ing, Pulitzer Prize-win­ning account of his com­pli­cat­ed rela­tion­ship with his Holo­caust sur­vivor father, is a sto­ry that lingers.

Spiegel­man famous­ly chose to depict the Jews as mice and the Nazis as cats. Non-Jew­ish civil­ians of his father’s native Poland were ren­dered as pigs. He flirt­ed with the idea of depict­ing his French-born wife, the New Yorker’s art edi­tor, Françoise Mouly, as a frog or a poo­dle, until she con­vinced him that her con­ver­sion to Judaism mer­it­ed mouse­hood, too.

The char­ac­ters’ anthro­po­mor­phism is not the only visu­al inno­va­tion, as the Nerd­writer, Evan Puschak, points out above.

Draw­ing on inter­views in Meta­Maus: A Look Inside a Mod­ern Clas­sic, taped con­ver­sa­tions with Neil Gaiman, and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Washington’s Mar­cia Alvar, and oth­er sources, the Nerd­writer pans an eight-pan­el page from the first chap­ter for max­i­mum mean­ing.

On first glance, noth­ing much appears to be hap­pen­ing on that page—hoping to con­vince his elder­ly father to sub­mit to inter­views for the book that would even­tu­al­ly become Maus, Spiegel­man trails him to his child­hood bed­room, which the old­er man has equipped with an exer­cise bike that he ped­als in dress shoes and black socks.

But, as Spiegel­man him­self once point­ed out:

Those pan­els are each units of time. You see them simul­ta­ne­ous­ly, so you have var­i­ous moments in time simul­ta­ne­ous­ly made present. 

Read­ers must force them­selves to pro­ceed slow­ly in order to ful­ly appre­ci­ate the coex­is­tence of all those moments.

Left to our own devices, we might pick up on the senior Spiegelman’s con­cen­tra­tion camp tat­too, or the intro­duc­tion of Art’s late moth­er via the framed pho­to he shows him­self pick­ing up.

But Puschak takes us on an even deep­er dive, not­ing the sig­nif­i­cance of Art’s place­ment in the long mid-page pan­el. Watch out for the 4:30 mark, anoth­er visu­al stun­ner is teased out in a man­ner rem­i­nis­cent of the rev­e­la­tion of a mes­sage writ­ten in invis­i­ble ink.

So Maus con­ferred com­mer­cial suc­cess upon its cre­ator, while hang­ing onto some of the bold visu­al exper­i­ments from ear­li­er in his career, when he and Mouly helped dri­ve the under­ground comix scene—the past and present entwined yet again.

And this is just one page. Should you ven­ture forth in search of fur­ther visu­al cues lat­er in the text, please use the com­ments sec­tion to share your dis­cov­er­ies.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

R. Crumb Shows Us How He Illus­trat­ed Gen­e­sis: A Faith­ful, Idio­syn­crat­ic Illus­tra­tion of All 50 Chap­ters

23 Car­toon­ists Unite to Demand Action to Reduce Gun Vio­lence: Watch the Result

Lyn­da Bar­ry on How the Smart­phone Is Endan­ger­ing Three Ingre­di­ents of Cre­ativ­i­ty: Lone­li­ness, Uncer­tain­ty & Bore­dom

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

The Philosophy of Rick and Morty: What Everyone’s New Favorite Cartoon Has in Common with Albert Camus

“Nobody exists on pur­pose, nobody belongs any­where, every­body’s gonna die.” So, in one episode of Rick and Morty, says the four­teen-year-old Morty Smith, one of the show’s tit­u­lar co-pro­tag­o­nists. With the oth­er, a mad sci­en­tist by the name of Rick Sanchez, who also hap­pens to be Morty’s grand­fa­ther, he con­sti­tutes the ani­mat­ed team that has enter­tained thou­sands and thou­sands of view­ers — and made insa­tiable fans of seem­ing­ly all of them — over the past four years. To those few who haven’t yet seen the show, it may just look like a sil­ly car­toon, but the true fans under­stand that under­neath all of the mem­o­rable gags and quotable lines lies an unusu­al philo­soph­i­cal depth.

“The human desire to ful­fill some spe­cial exis­ten­tial pur­pose has exist­ed through­out his­to­ry,” says video essay­ist Will Schoder in his analy­sis of the phi­los­o­phy of Rick and Morty. But the tit­u­lar duo’s adven­tures through all pos­si­ble real­i­ties of the “mul­ti­verse” ensure that they expe­ri­ence first­hand the utter mean­ing­less­ness of each indi­vid­ual real­i­ty.

When Morty breaks that bleak-sound­ing news to his sis­ter Sum­mer with the now oft-quot­ed line above, he actu­al­ly deliv­ers a “com­fort­ing mes­sage”: once you con­front the ran­dom­ness of the uni­verse, as Rick and Morty con­stant­ly do, “the only option is to find impor­tance in the stuff right in front of you,” and their adven­tures show that “friends, fam­i­ly, and doing what we enjoy are far more impor­tant than any unsolv­able ques­tions about exis­tence.”

Schoder, also the author of a video essay on Rick and Morty co-cre­ator Dan Har­mon’s mytho­log­i­cal sto­ry­telling tech­nique as well as one we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured about David Fos­ter Wal­lace’s cri­tique of post­mod­ernism, makes the clear philo­soph­i­cal con­nec­tion to Albert Camus. The philoso­pher and author of The Stranger wrote and thought a great deal about the “con­tra­dic­tion between humans’ desire to find mean­ing in life and the mean­ing­less­ness of the uni­verse,” and the absur­di­ty that results, a notion the car­toon has dra­ma­tized over and over again, with an ever-height­en­ing absur­di­ty. We must, like Sisy­phus eter­nal­ly push­ing his rock uphill, rec­og­nize the true nature of our sit­u­a­tion yet defi­ant­ly con­tin­ue “to explore and search for mean­ing.” Morty, as any fan well knows, offers Sum­mer anoth­er solu­tion to her despair: “Come watch TV.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Albert Camus: The Mad­ness of Sin­cer­i­ty — 1997 Doc­u­men­tary Revis­its the Philosopher’s Life & Work

David Fos­ter Wal­lace on What’s Wrong with Post­mod­ernism: A Video Essay

The Phi­los­o­phy of The Matrix: From Pla­to and Descartes, to East­ern Phi­los­o­phy

The Phi­los­o­phy of Bill Mur­ray: The Intel­lec­tu­al Foun­da­tions of His Comedic Per­sona

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Alan Watts Explains the Meaning of the Tao, with the Help of the Greatest Nancy Panel Ever Drawn

A Nan­cy pan­el is an irre­ducible con­cept, an atom, and the com­ic strip is a mol­e­cule. — comics the­o­rist Scott McCloud

A lit­tle over ten years ago, car­toon­ist Jim Woodring iso­lat­ed a sin­gle image from Ernie Bushmiller’s long-run­ning and deeply polar­iz­ing Nan­cy com­ic strip, cel­e­brat­ing it on his blog, the Woodring Mon­i­tor, as “the great­est Nan­cy pan­el ever drawn.”

What makes this pan­el the great­est? Woodring declined to elab­o­rate, though his read­ers eager­ly shared the­o­ries—and some befuddlement—in the com­ments sec­tion:

Slug­go has reached the per­fect state of no-effort, the satori-like denial of the “small mind” and all of the suf­fer­ing that comes with it.

… it’s the com­ic equiv­a­lent of a koan—something designed to tie our ratio­nal mind in knots so that we can glimpse enlight­en­ment.

Slug­go smiles because he knows a secret. He says no because he rejects con­sen­sus real­i­ty. He floats along because he doesn’t fight life—he sees the main­te­nance of the har­mo­ny and is one with that har­mo­ny. He knows all paths lead away from home. Instead he goes with­in and knows free­dom.

“I am con­tent. I need noth­ing, I will do noth­ing, I am fine as I am.”

Anoth­er fan, Glyph Jock­ey’s Lex 10, took it one step fur­ther, remov­ing the speech bub­ble before tak­ing Slug­go on an ani­mat­ed trip through the cos­mos, nar­rat­ed by philoso­pher Alan Watts:

In the state of being in accor­dance with the Tao, there is a cer­tain feel­ing of weight­less­ness, par­al­lel to the weight­less­ness that peo­ple feel when they get into out­er space or when they go deep into the ocean.

Gab­by Pahinui’s “Pu’uanahulu” and Ramayana imagery bestow added hyp­not­ic appeal.

Revis­it this strange lit­tle ani­mat­ed gem the next time your head­’s about to explode from stress. Don’t ques­tion or get too hung up on mean­ings, just go with the flow, like Slug­go and Watts.

Could oth­er Nan­cy pan­els serve as vehi­cles for Taoist enlight­en­ment? May­haps:

Bushmiller’s strong point was nev­er the con­tent of his com­ic strip’s jokey plots—a friend once described him as ‘a moron on an acid trip.’ In fact, the gags were even sim­pler than was nec­es­sary for a ‘chil­dren’s’ strip. That’s because they were just a vehi­cle for the con­trolled and bril­liant manip­u­la­tion of rep­e­ti­tion and vari­ety that gave the strip its unique visu­al rhythm and com­po­si­tion. Bush­miller chore­o­graphed his famil­iar for­mal ele­ments inside the tight­est frame of any major strip, and that helped make it the most beau­ti­ful, as a whole, of any in the papers.” — Tom Smuck­er, The Vil­lage Voice, 1982

Recent­ly, Bushmiller’s Nan­cy has been enjoy­ing a renais­sance. The strip that many casu­al read­ers of the fun­ny pages dis­missed as bor­ing or dumb is revered by many cel­e­brat­ed car­toon­ists, includ­ing Bill Grif­fith, Daniel Clowes, and Art Spiegel­man.

This month sees the pub­li­ca­tion of Paul Karasik and Mark New­gar­den’s How to Read Nan­cy, a book length analy­sis of one sin­gle strip, which also func­tions as a how-to and his­to­ry of the com­ic medi­um. This hot­ly antic­i­pat­ed vol­ume has in turn giv­en rise to a live­ly online How To Read Nan­cy Read­ing Group, a hotbed of fan art, altered pan­els, and Nan­cy strips from around the world.

Invite your pals over to play com­ic the­o­rist Scott McCloud’s Dadaist game Five Card Nan­cy or take the online ver­sion for a solo spin.

And for those who require con­text, here is the orig­i­nal strip from which the float­ing Slug­go pan­el is drawn.

Appar­ent­ly the key to the Tao is a plas­tic ham­mock…

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Wis­dom of Alan Watts in Four Thought-Pro­vok­ing Ani­ma­tions

Three Charles Bukows­ki Books Illus­trat­ed by Robert Crumb: Under­ground Com­ic Art Meets Out­sider Lit­er­a­ture

Fol­low Car­toon­ist Lyn­da Barry’s 2017 “Mak­ing Comics” Class Online, Pre­sent­ed at UW-Wis­con­sin

Down­load Over 22,000 Gold­en & Sil­ver Age Com­ic Books from the Com­ic Book Plus Archive

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Download Theft! A History of Music, a New Free Graphic Novel Exploring 2,000 Years of Musical Borrowing

From the team behind the 2006 fair use com­ic Bound by Law comes a new fair use com­ic, Theft! A His­to­ry of MusicCre­at­ed by James Boyle and Jen­nifer Jenk­ins, two law school profs from Duke Uni­ver­si­ty, Theft! A His­to­ry of Music is “a graph­ic nov­el lay­ing out a 2000-year long his­to­ry of musi­cal bor­row­ing from Pla­to to rap.” The book’s blurb adds:

This com­ic lays out 2000 years of musi­cal his­to­ry. … Again and again there have been attempts to police music; to restrict bor­row­ing and cul­tur­al cross-fer­til­iza­tion. But music builds on itself. To those who think that mash-ups and sam­pling start­ed with YouTube or the DJ’s turnta­bles, it might be shock­ing to find that musi­cians have been bor­row­ing – exten­sive­ly bor­row­ing – from each oth­er since music began. Then why try to stop that process? The rea­sons var­ied. Phi­los­o­phy, reli­gion, pol­i­tics, race – again and again, race – and law. And because music affects us so deeply, those strug­gles were pas­sion­ate ones. They still are.

The his­to­ry in this book runs from Pla­to to Blurred Lines and beyond. You will read about the Holy Roman Empire’s attempts to stan­dard­ize reli­gious music using the first great musi­cal tech­nol­o­gy (nota­tion) and the inevitable back­fire of that attempt. You will read about trou­ba­dours and church com­posers, swap­ping tunes (and remark­ably pro­fane lyrics), chang­ing both reli­gion and music in the process. You will see dia­tribes against jazz for cor­rupt­ing musi­cal cul­ture, against rock and roll for breach­ing the col­or-line. You will learn about the law­suits that, sur­pris­ing­ly, shaped rap. You will read the sto­ry of some of music’s icon­o­clasts – from Han­del and Beethoven to Robert John­son, Chuck Berry, Lit­tle Richard, Ray Charles, the British Inva­sion and Pub­lic Ene­my.

To under­stand this his­to­ry ful­ly, one has to roam wider still – into musi­cal tech­nolo­gies from nota­tion to the sam­ple deck, aes­thet­ics, the incen­tive sys­tems that got musi­cians paid, and law’s 250 year strug­gle to assim­i­late music, with­out destroy­ing it in the process. Would jazz, soul or rock and roll be legal if they were rein­vent­ed today? We are not sure. Which as you will read, is pro­found­ly wor­ry­ing because today, more than ever, we need the arts.

All of this makes up our sto­ry. It is assured­ly not the only his­to­ry of music. But it is def­i­nite­ly a part – and a fas­ci­nat­ing part – of that his­to­ry…

Released under a Cre­ative Com­mons license, the book is free to down­load online. Or you can buy a nice paper­back ver­sion on Ama­zon.

The video above offers anoth­er intro­duc­tion to the graph­ic nov­el. And you can read an inter­view with the authors over on the Cre­ative Com­mons web­site.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bound by Law?: Free Com­ic Book Explains How Copy­right Com­pli­cates Art

Down­load 15,000+ Free Gold­en Age Comics from the Dig­i­tal Com­ic Muse­um

Down­load Over 22,000 Gold­en & Sil­ver Age Com­ic Books from the Com­ic Book Plus Archive

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Follow Cartoonist Lynda Barry’s 2017 “Making Comics” Class Online, Presented at UW-Wisconsin

Pro­fes­sor Skeletor—aka car­toon­ist and edu­ca­tor Lyn­da Bar­ry—is at it again. Mak­ing Comics (& oth­er Graph­ic For­ma­tions), her fall offer­ing at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wisconsin’s Insti­tute for Dis­cov­ery is just get­ting under­way.

Those of us who can’t study in per­son with an edu­ca­tor whose depart­ment chair called her “the best class­room teacher” that he’s ever seen can hap­pi­ly fol­low along online.

As always, her hand­writ­ten home­work assign­ments will be post­ed to her Near­sight­ed Mon­key tum­blr account, along with in-class reflec­tions and inspi­ra­tional bits and bobs pulled off the Inter­net.

The first task, famil­iar to read­ers of her Syl­labus work­book, is to begin a dai­ly diary prac­tice, fill­ing in a tem­plate frame of Barry’s own devis­ing.

Begin by putting your phone on air­plane mode. “The phone gives us a lot but it takes away three key ele­ments of dis­cov­ery: lone­li­ness, uncer­tain­ty and bore­dom,” she stat­ed last year, on a vis­it to NASA’s God­dard Space Flight Cen­ter. “Those have always been where cre­ative ideas come from.”

Amen.

Any one of the exer­cis­es will renew your pow­ers of obser­va­tion and sense of con­nec­tion with the world around you. Don’t be sur­prised if you find your­self get­ting up ear­ly or skip­ping some must-see TV in order to ful­ly com­ply with Pro­fes­sor Skeletor’s feel-good assign­ments. There are no wrong answers, pro­vid­ed you go at the assign­ments with ener­gy and a will­ing­ness to play. As Bar­ry said in an inter­view:

Because we tend to give up on the arts so ear­ly in life, I became real­ly inter­est­ed in what would hap­pen if we rein­tro­duce the arts with­out the thought of ‘you’re going to do this to become a great writer or painter,’ but rather that it might help peo­ple with the oth­er work in their field.

For added val­ue, com­plete your first dai­ly diary frame to an audio record­ing of Barry’s timed instruc­tion here. (Ignore the back­ground noise of your teacher’s life—her sneez­ing cat, her hap­py pet birds—or bet­ter yet, let her household’s zesty ener­gy seep into your work.)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lyn­da Barry’s Illus­trat­ed Syl­labus & Home­work Assign­ments from Her New UW-Madi­son Course, “Mak­ing Comics”

Lyn­da Barry’s Won­der­ful­ly Illus­trat­ed Syl­labus & Home­work Assign­ments from Her UW-Madi­son Class, “The Unthink­able Mind”

Join Car­toon­ist Lyn­da Bar­ry for a Uni­ver­si­ty-Lev­el Course on Doo­dling and Neu­ro­science

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Gonzo Illustrator Ralph Steadman Draws the American Presidents, from Nixon to Trump

In a 2012 inter­view with Nation­al Pub­lic Radio, car­toon­ist Ralph Stead­man, best known for his col­lab­o­ra­tions with Gonzo jour­nal­ist Hunter S. Thomp­son, lament­ed the qual­i­ty of the can­di­dates in that year’s Pres­i­den­tial race:

The prob­lem is there are no Nixons around at the moment. That’s what we need — we need a real good Nixon to give some­thing for oth­er peo­ple to get their teeth into, to real­ly … loathe him, to become them­selves more effec­tive as oppo­si­tion lead­ers.

Alas, his prayers have been answered.

Stead­man, who has brought his inky sen­si­bil­i­ties to bear on such works as Ani­mal Farm and Alice in Won­der­land, has a new Amer­i­can pres­i­dent to add to the col­lec­tion he dis­cussed sev­er­al years ago, in the video above.

Steadman’s pen was the sword that ren­dered Ger­ald Ford as a scare­crow, Ronald Rea­gan as a vam­pire, and George W. Bush as a mon­key in a cage of his own mak­ing.

Barack Oba­ma, one of the can­di­dates in that com­par­a­tive­ly bland 2012 elec­tion, is depict­ed as a tena­cious, slen­der vine, strain­ing ever upward.

Jim­my Carter, some­what less benign­ly, is a pup­py eager­ly fetch­ing a stick with which to par­don Nixon, the Welsh cartoonist’s dark muse, first encoun­tered when he accom­pa­nied Thomp­son on the road trip that yield­ed Fear and Loathing: On the Cam­paign Trail ’72.

And now…

Don­ald Trump has giv­en Stead­man rea­son to come out fight­ing. With luck, he’ll stay out as long as his ser­vices are required. The above por­trait, titled “Porky Pie,” was sent, unso­licit­ed, to Ger­ry Brakus, an edi­tor of the New States­man, who pub­lished it on Decem­ber 17, 2015.

At the time, Stead­man had no rea­son to believe the man he’d anthro­po­mor­phized as a human pig hybrid, squeezed into bloody flag-print under­pants, would become the 45th pres­i­dent:

Trump is unthink­able. A thug and a moles­ter. Who wants him?

The por­trait’s hideous­ness speaks vol­umes, but it’s also worth look­ing beyond the obvi­ous-seem­ing inspi­ra­tion for the title to a ref­er­ence few Amer­i­cans would get. “Pork pie”—or porky—is Cock­ney rhyming slang for “a lie.”

See a gallery of Steadman’s por­traits of Amer­i­can pres­i­dents on his web­site.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ralph Steadman’s Sur­re­al­ist Illus­tra­tions of George Orwell’s Ani­mal Farm (1995)

How Hunter S. Thomp­son — and Psilo­cy­bin — Influ­enced the Art of Ralph Stead­man, Cre­at­ing the “Gonzo” Style

Break­ing Bad Illus­trat­ed by Gonzo Artist Ralph Stead­man

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

Three Charles Bukowski Books Illustrated by Robert Crumb: Underground Comic Art Meets Outsider Literature

Think of the artists you know who, espe­cial­ly in the 1960s and 70s, por­trayed an often sor­did real­i­ty in detail, just as they saw it, gar­ner­ing acclaim from enthu­si­asts, who per­ceived a high artistry in their seem­ing­ly rough-hewn work, and cries from count­less detrac­tors who object­ed to what they saw as the artists’ lazy cru­di­ty. In the realm of poet­ry and prose, Charles Bukows­ki should come to mind soon­er or lat­er; in that of com­ic art, who fits the bill bet­ter than Robert Crumb? It makes only good sense that the work of both men should inter­sect, and they did in the 1980s when Crumb illus­trat­ed two short books by Bukows­ki, Bring Me Your Love and There’s No Busi­ness.

“Crumb’s sig­na­ture under­ground comix aes­thet­ic and Bukowski’s com­men­tary on con­tem­po­rary cul­ture and the human con­di­tion by way of his famil­iar tropes — sex, alco­hol, the drudgery of work — coa­lesce into the kind of fit that makes you won­der why it hadn’t hap­pened soon­er,” writes Brain Pick­ings’ Maria Popo­va.

“In 1998, a final posthu­mous col­lab­o­ra­tion was released under the title The Cap­tain Is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Tak­en Over the Ship — an illus­trat­ed selec­tion from Buk’s pre­vi­ous­ly unpub­lished diaries, cap­tur­ing a year in his life short­ly before his death in 1994.” As one stu­dent of the graph­ic nov­el sum­ma­rizes Bring Me Your Love, “the main char­ac­ter is a man whose per­son­al­i­ty resem­bles the main char­ac­ter of most Bukows­ki sto­ries. He goes through life rather aim­less­ly, killing time by drink­ing and hav­ing sex. His wife is in a men­tal hos­pi­tal.”

“Crumb’s illus­tra­tions give the already grit­ty sto­ry­lines a visu­al con­text — such as a man who looks much like Buk wrestling on the floor with his ‘wife’ after a dis­pute involv­ing answer­ing the phone or var­i­ous bar­room skir­mish­es depict­ing a Bukows­ki-look­ing char­ac­ter run­ning amok,” says Dan­ger­ous Minds. “He was a very dif­fi­cult guy to hang out with in per­son, but on paper he was great,” Crumb once said of Bukows­ki, and his illus­tra­tions also reveal that he under­stands Bukowski’s own aware­ness of the dif­fer­ence between his page self and his real one. “Old writer puts on sweater, sits down, leers into com­put­er screen, and writes about life,” Bukows­ki writes, in their third and final col­lab­o­ra­tion, above a Crumb illus­tra­tion of just such a scene. “How holy can we get?”

See more Crumb illus­tra­tions of Bukows­ki at Brain Pick­ings.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Four Charles Bukows­ki Poems Ani­mat­ed

Watch “Beer,” a Mind-Warp­ing Ani­ma­tion of Charles Bukowski’s 1971 Poem Hon­or­ing His Favorite Drink

R. Crumb Shows Us How He Illus­trat­ed Gen­e­sis: A Faith­ful, Idio­syn­crat­ic Illus­tra­tion of All 50 Chap­ters

Robert Crumb Illus­trates Philip K. Dick’s Infa­mous, Hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry Meet­ing with God (1974)

Car­toon­ist R. Crumb Assess­es 21 Cul­tur­al Fig­ures, from Dylan & Hitch­cock, to Kaf­ka & The Bea­t­les

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Métal hurlant: The Hugely Influential French Comic Magazine That Put Moebius on the Map & Changed Sci-Fi Forever

Would you believe that one par­tic­u­lar pub­li­ca­tion inspired a range of vision­ary cre­ators includ­ing Rid­ley Scott, George Lucas, Luc Besson, William Gib­son, and Hayao Miyaza­ki? More­over, would you believe that it was French, from the 1970s, and a com­ic book? Not that that term “com­ic book” does jus­tice to Métal hurlant, which dur­ing its ini­tial run from 1974 to 1987 not only rede­fined the pos­si­bil­i­ties of the medi­um and great­ly widened the imag­i­na­tive pos­si­bil­i­ties of sci­ence fic­tion sto­ry­telling, but brought to promi­nence a num­ber of whol­ly uncon­ven­tion­al and high­ly influ­en­tial artists, chief among them Jean Giraud, best known as Moe­bius.

Métal hurlant, accord­ing to Tom Lennon in his his­to­ry of the mag­a­zine, launched “as the flag­ship title of Les Humanoïdes Asso­ciés, a French pub­lish­ing ven­ture set up by Euro com­ic vet­er­ans Moe­bius, Druil­let and Jean-Pierre Dion­net, togeth­er with their finance direc­tor Bernard Farkas. Influ­enced by both the Amer­i­can under­ground comix scene of the 1960s and the polit­i­cal and cul­tur­al upheavals of that decade, their goal was bold and grandiose: they were going to kick ass, take names, and make peo­ple take comics seri­ous­ly.”

This demand­ed “artis­tic inno­va­tion at every lev­el,” from high-qual­i­ty, large-for­mat paper stock to risk-tak­ing sto­ry­telling “shot through with a rich vein of humour and deliv­ered with a nar­ra­tive sophis­ti­ca­tion pre­vi­ous­ly unseen in the medi­um.”

Giraud took to the pos­si­bil­i­ties of the new pub­li­ca­tion with a spe­cial avid­ness. Under the pen name “Gir,” writes Lennon, he “was best known as the co-cre­ator of the pop­u­lar West­ern series, Blue­ber­ry. By the mid-1970s, Giraud was feel­ing increas­ing­ly con­strained by the con­ven­tions of the west­ern genre, so decid­ed to revive a long-dor­mant pseu­do­nym to embark on more exper­i­men­tal work. As ‘Moe­bius’, Giraud not only worked in a dif­fer­ent genre to ‘Gir’ – a deeply per­son­al, high­ly idio­syn­crat­ic form of sci­ence fic­tion and fan­ta­sy – but his art looked like it was drawn by a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent per­son,” and “unlike any­thing that had been seen in comics — or, for that mat­ter, in any oth­er medi­um.”

Métal hurlant saw the debuts of two of Moe­bius’ best-known char­ac­ters: the pith-hel­met­ed and mus­ta­chioed pro­tec­tor of minia­ture uni­vers­es Major Gru­bert and the silent, ptero­dactyl-rid­ing explor­er Arzach, who bears a cer­tain resem­blance to the pro­tag­o­nist of Miyaza­k­i’s 1984 film Nau­si­caä of the Val­ley of the Wind. Read through the back issues of the mag­a­zine — or its 40-years-run­ning Amer­i­can ver­sion, Heavy Met­al — and you’ll also glimpse, in the work of Moe­bius and oth­ers, ele­ments that would lat­er find their way into the worlds of Neu­ro­mancerMad MaxAlienBlade Run­nerStar Wars, and much more besides.

“A while ago, SF was filled with mon­strous rock­et ships and plan­ets,” said Moe­bius in 1980. “It was a naive and mate­ri­al­is­tic vision, which con­fused exter­nal space with inter­nal space, which saw the future as an extrap­o­la­tion of the present. It was a vic­tim of an illu­sion of a tech­no­log­i­cal sort, of a pro­gres­sion with­out stop­ping towards a con­sum­ma­tion of ener­gy.” He and Métal hurlant did more than their part to trans­form and enrich that vision, but plen­ty of old per­cep­tions still remain for their count­less artis­tic descen­dants to warp beyond recog­ni­tion.

via Tom Lennon/Dazed Dig­i­tal

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mœbius & Jodorowsky’s Sci-Fi Mas­ter­piece, The Incal, Brought to Life in a Tan­ta­liz­ing Ani­ma­tion

Moe­bius’ Sto­ry­boards & Con­cept Art for Jodorowsky’s Dune

The Inscrutable Imag­i­na­tion of the Late Com­ic Artist Mœbius

Watch Moe­bius and Miyaza­ki, Two of the Most Imag­i­na­tive Artists, in Con­ver­sa­tion (2004)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

« Go BackMore in this category... »
Quantcast