I was kinda inspired by a post I made yesterday to start this one - a chronological read-through of the great Heavy Metal Magazine. The first few years of this series was one of the best comics runs ever, IMO.

But first, here's a couple of Cartoonist Kayfabe videos to prime the pump. Since Jim and Ed covered the first two, I'll start with #3. Since this is an adults-only comic series, I'll spoil the NSFW images. You are on your own for the CKF videos, though.

I think I bought a couple Heavy Metal issues. I rarely bought any comic-based magazine, though.
I have more Marvel Epic.

I missed the first few issues, but Bernie Wrightson's cover to issue 5 caught my attention and I bought it fairly regularly for the next fifteen years or so. Took off twenty years but then started buying again when Grant Morrison started writing for the mag (and supposedly editing it, but I am not sure he actually did that.) Jumped off again a few years back. So many great artists got major exposure or the opportunity to do wider varieties of material than they had the could do through the Big Two with HM. Moebius, Corben, Paul Kirchner, Wrightson, Chaykin.. so much good stuff.

My first issue:


One of my personal favorites who never caught on in North America is Nicole Claveloux. I believe she only had a few appearances during the first year or two of the mag. Very dreamy strips and she had a beautiful ink line. A few years ago the New York Review of Books published a collection of her stories, most drawn from those early Heavy Metal appearances.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1681376687/?tag=imwan-20



Some pages of her work.

Was not and am not interested in "adult" comics, but I knew "Heavy Metal" by reputation. They had some highly-touted artists (And samples of the work I've seen are often very impressive).

That notorious image of the robot bludgeoning the other robot appeared in a late-1970s book on robots that I found in a bargain bin at a local store. It was a fantastically-illustrated look at all aspects of robots--real robots and bionics, robots in fiction, humanity's relationship to machines and technology, and more. The pictures included the first glimpse I ever had of some famous sci-fi writers and movie serials. And that violent robot-murdering-another cover of "Metal Hurlant." Only some years later did I learn that "Heavy Metal" came out of that. That "Metal Hurlant" image was so creepy to me that I tried to avoid that page when paging through the book.

Years ago when I was a teenager a friend of my father's gave me like the first four years of issues complete. Some cool, crazy, and wild stuff in there!

Here's the trailer for the first Heavy Metal movie - a cult classic if there ever was one. If I had seen this before the Blues Brothers, I wonder what my musical tastes would be like?

And a clip from the movie, the segment based on Bernie Wrightson's Captain Stern.

About all I know about the movie (Besides being puzzled at the TV ads for it when it came out) was that John Halas' studio did one of the segments. He'd been in animation for well over 40 years at that point.

I quite enjoyed the movie in the early 80s when it came out, then watched it several times after that.
Started watching it again more recently. Did nothing for me. Turned it off.

The South Park spoof is great.

That books sounds familiar...was it The Robot Book by Robert Malone, I wonder?

I was buying Heavy Metal on and off for years, along with Epic Illustrated and various things like Creepy and Eerie.

I also liked the animated movie although I don't think I've seen it in twenty years or more.

I use to love the magazine when I was in secondary school. And the movie when I was a kid!

My brother and I loved the movie and album. I heard that the old time animators went crazy when they could finally do adult themes that there were scenes too adult to use!

The Heavy Metal Movie is one of the few Blurays I own.

That art is so cool. I need to get a collection of Claveloux's stuff. Great Wrightson cover, too.

Y'know, the more I get back into drawing, the more my heroes are changing. Wrightson is WAY up there for me - easy top five.

Work is pretty crazy so I can't really write the summary I'd like, but since it's been so long, here's some sample art from issue 3. This issue isn't as strong as the first two, but it is still pretty badass. And what a great Moebius cover! This is coverdated June 1977 - so very different from all the other comics on the stands and in the Sunday papers.

I think that's why I loved Heavy Metal Magazine so much. It was so different, it had tons of variety of styles, it was aggressive and riske, and it was different than everything else on the market. This was rock n' roll in comics form.

He really was great. I love leafing through my collection of his work.



That was the thing- this stuff was so very different from what we'd been exposed to. Really expanded what I thought comics could do when all I'd been exposed to was what was available on the spinner rack.

This would've been the first issue I read. An uncle had left it laying around my Grandmother's place and eleven-year-old me found it. I was already obsessed with comics, so I devoured it. This was right in the middle of the Bible belt, so when the grown-ups found out what I was reading, everyone freaked out but my parents. Mom told everyone that if I could understand it, I could read it and that was that. I don't think she liked what I was reading, but she always stood up for reading in general. But part of it might have been her wanting to shock her Mom, because I didn't get another issue until I started buying it in college.



So here I am reading obsessed with things like All-Star Squadron and Untold Legend of the Batman and suddenly I'm hit with Corben, Bilal, Chaykin, Steranko, Platt, and all those other amazing artists.

This is the first issue I bought in college - this one hooked me. I've bought it off and on until a couple of years ago. I really should get it again, too.

Who else is moving up -- and who is moving down the list?

Ditko got dropped. I still love him, but he's not top five anymore.

With the caveate that this is a Trevor's Favorites List and not a Who's Best or Who's Most Historically Significant List, this is my current top five in alphabetical order:

Guy Davis



Will Eisner



Joe Kubert



Alex Toth



Bernie Wrightson



I'd say these are the titans that are the biggest influence on how I'm trying (and failing miserably lol) to draw.

Some of those guys are pretty different, do it’d be hard to merge them into. Style. Toth and Wrightson are nearly opposites.