Dry Ice Factory

Yeah, where to start? I suppose it starts with X-Men: First Class and memories it raised of my days as an avid comics reader in the '70s and '80s. Although maybe it actually started with the recent death of Jeffrey Catherine Jones, which got me thinking about the comic book and paperback cover artists that I grew up with, and how many of my favorites owed a debt to the Pre-Raphaelites and to Art Nouveau. That's when I started poking around the web looking at websites for Jones, Barry Windsor-Smith, and Michael Kaluta (all three founders of the Studio, along with Bernie Wrightson). But the X-Men movie stirred all that up again, and for some reason yesterday it got me thinking about -- and googling -- Jean "Moebius" Giraud, whom I first encountered in the pages of Heavy Metal in 1977, when I lied about my age and subscribed to it. (You were supposed to be 18.) Little did I know that I would one day hang out with the editor of Heavy Metal, Ted White, who recently wrote about getting stoned with Jeff Jones and the gang at parties at the Studio.

It turns out that despite his worldwide fame as a designer for Alien (1979), Tron (1982) and The Fifth Element (1997), there isn't much of Moebius' work in print in the US at the moment. I had already gotten that impression from googling around, but it was confirmed when I stopped by the U District Zanadu and talked to a very knowledgeable young guy. There's a collection of Moebius' collaboration with Alejandro Jodorowsky, The Incal, coming out this month, but there are no current collections of Arzach or The Airtight Garage of Jerry Cornelius or The Long Tomorrow. It was actually a lot of fun to talk to the guy at Zanadu. I had run across some names of current artists who have been influenced by Moebius, including Geof Darrow, Frank Quitely and James Stokoe, and this guy was able to show me their work and the work of other people too. He said I should look for artwork by a Brazilian guy named Rafael Grampa. There are clearly a lot of great young artists out there, and I went home with a few things, including a collection of Frank Quitely's work on the X-Men -- and a new deluxe collection of Kaluta's brilliant collaboration with Elaine Lee, Starstruck, which I loved so much in its earliest incarnations.



When I got home I also looked through my small collection of graphic novels and magazine-sized comic books. There's a lot there I'd forgotten! I even have a collection called Heavy Metal Presents Moebius, with an introduction by none other than Frederico Fellini. I still have the very first issue of Heavy Metal, too, with the top image above above by Moebius on the back cover. For that matter, I still have a complete run of Los Bros Hernandez's Love and Rockets from issue 1 through issue 46. I actually still have a fair number of comic books too, although I gave most of my superhero comics to my oldest nephew when he was the appropriate age. I still really love the artwork by my favorite artists from those days -- still love Kaluta's Carson of Venus stories, Craig Russell's Elric, Moebius' surreal, deadpan science fiction. I was into it enough back then that I was starting to explore the roots, and I have over-size collections of Windsor McKay's Little Nemo in Slumberland and E.C. Segar's Popeye. I gave up collecting at a point in the '80s when I was unemployed and broke, and I stopped reading then too, despite the fact that I'm surrounded by Denys' vast collection.

The past couple of nights I've been reading old X-Men stories from the original '60s series, and I've really been enjoying them, much to my surprise. I didn't think Stan Lee's writing would stand the test of time very well, but from a historical perspective it's interesting to remember how his injection of soap opera elements and mundane worries revolutionized the field and how his theme of superheros as alienated outsiders still shapes the hit movies of today. Now I've got this small pile of new stuff to look at, including a Moebius-influenced title by a young guy from Ballard and a strange title from Stokoe called Orc Stain, which looks more like S Clay Wilson than Moebius, but whatever.

Maybe I should stay away from comic shops. Nostalgia in this case could end up being expensive.