A long time ago, I came back from a month as an exchange student on the French Riviera bearing gifts. Sure, I was loaded down with postcards of topless women. And one lucky son of a gun received a French translation of the FASA BattleTech Black Widows supplement. But the stuff that really blew our minds was the comics like Heavy Metal and the French comics known as bande Dessinée.
Yeah, they often rather risque. Heck, they were frequently well outside the bounds of good taste. All the same, they were utterly compelling. Their ethos could not be further from the tiresome doldroms of collector’s items editions and variant foil covers which dominated the shelves of my homeland at the time.
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Call me crazy, but it never occurred to me that we had had such a thing on tap for years on end, well before my trip. Thanks to today’s find at the comic shop I finally know the truth. We had bande dessinée at home within the pages of Heavy Metal magazine for ages, and I never even knew it!
The December 1977 issue is loaded with treasures. There is a brief installment of “Den” which would later be adapted into the Heavy Metal movie and voiced by no less than John Candy. There is a succulent morsel of Moebius, just enough to make you want to seek out more! There is a positively baffling piece called The Mauve Sideshow by a certain Nicole Claveloux– sort of an R. Crumb meets Salvadore Dali type thing. Everything in this magazine is exotic. Everything’s weird. Everything’s foreign!
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You could even clip out a coupon to give someone a subscription to “the illustrated fantasy magazine from France” for Christmas. You could also order beautiful vinyl binders to keep your issues of Heavy Metal in. And if that wasn’t enough, you could clip out yet more coupons to Arzach, “all four of the brilliant, full-color adventures of Moebius’s pterodactyl-riding hero, acclaimed as works of genius when they appeared in the first issues of Heavy Metal magazine.”
The main event here is all nine installments of “Druzz” by Druillet. Why has this name not graced my ears until this day?! Because he was only nearly as good as Moebius? Because we are only allowed one French artist to penetrate our consciousness here in the States, and all the rest need to be relegated to the unknown and the obscure? Bah!
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Editor Marchant was on the money when he declared of Druillet that has some imagination. His sprawling picaresque never wavers, falters, nor ceases to astonish. The only thing we have here in the States remotely approaching this is Jack Vance’s The Eyes of the Overworld. It has everything: bizarre creatures, bloodthirsty raiders, conniving wizards, godlike entities, epic battles.
Part of me wishes this sort of thing could be cleaned up from its excesses a bit, but then it wouldn’t be what it is anymore. At some point you just have to let the French be French.
Que sera, sera!
Jeffro Johnson is the third most important person in D&D history. He is the author of both Appendix N: The Literary History of Dungeons & Dragons and How to Win at D&D. You can follow his latest exploits via Twitter or on his blog.
What do you think about vintage Heavy Metal? Leave a comment and let us know.
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