Motivation is hard to come by these days. More change is coming to my life, I'm biding time again. It'll be good, but the pain and suffering, the greed and stupidity, the ignorance and hate, roiling the world around me, even more than usual, is dismaying and infuriating, at a time I would rather be basking in my good fortune.
And I am fortunate. In physical and material comfort and relative security, I have what I need and more. The constraints of living in pandemic times impact me relatively little. I can still get Heavy Metal Magazine, though I haven't been to a bookstore in months. (I go to mycomicshop.com)
So why the sad face? Mostly the dismay and fury. But I am also realizing that my HM fanboyhood is stale. My blog is riddled with gaps and links to nowhere. I've procured and read #298 and #299, and #300 is out now, but I haven't even started my #298 review. My curiosity has waned. The mag is less exciting to me. Less arresting or compelling art, less intrigue or mystery or awe in the stories, more action comic pacing and wordy exposition. I'm not excited one bit by all the HM media empire machinations. In fact it's distasteful to me. It makes sense that they are leaning on Taarna for a brand property,
since it's one of the few things HM actually owns, but it's amusing that
Taarna's only a thing because they couldn't make the original movie
character Arzak. Action figures, swag, pinball machines (really? are fantasy painted conversion vans coming back too?), spinoff comics and novels (doesn't anyone remember the Heavy Metal Pulp novels?) don't do it for me. The current incarnation of the website is a slurry of incongruous bits of nostalgia and inane catergories like The Forge and Carousel. And it hates my aging computer.
It's not all hopeless to me, like the links to the Arzak Rhapsody short videos are nice, and I still find some things to like in the mag, but I think after 40 years the HM world is finally passing me by, not that I was ever actually keeping up. But, rummaging around in the pile of crap that surrounds me, for something to look forward to, I figure I'll keep buying the paper mag as long as it exists, and hope for the occasional morsels of fun, and it won't be too long before I decide to get to work on some reviews, and touching up my little blog.
Until next time, stay safe out there.
2 comments:
I remember the Heavy Metal Pulp (at least the one that had an excerpt in the Mag). I was just thinking about that a few weeks ago. I wish I bought it.
My father used to have a nice collection of Pulp fictions. Some of them were really old. (Pages yellow, like they smoked a pack of cigarettes more intensely, than the PI's inside their pages). I used to read them more than the required literature at the school. (Mostly Doc Savage, Edgar Wallace, and Lun King Of Midnight stories captured my budding imagination). Amazingly, I found the latter in English on Amazon Kindle. Worth checking it out.
Thinking of writing one myself. (Hey, got to keep my self busy while waiting for Fred's next HM Mag. review). :-)
Stay safe.
Hi IF,
I have one of the Heavy Metal Pulp books, "Money Shot" found in a used bookstore. It's not great, but I've thought of finding the other two online, just for fun. But I'm not going to try to keep up with the blizzard of external content they seem to be dreaming up at HM Central.
And of course they announce the mag is going monthly right after my forlorn rant. Along with a cover price jump of 40% (maybe the biggest ever?) and the increasing pile of stuff they're putting out, it's a pretty ballsy move. We'll see how it plays out I guess. I'll try to keep up with the monthly issues, if I can find them, but I wonder how they can pull this off, and whose money they are burning through.
Stay safe,
fred
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