I'm trying to wait patiently for Heavy Metal Magazine to reappear. The new Whatnot Publishing issue Vol 2 # 1, starting with 5 different cover variations (sigh) continues to slip on its published release date, too much like issue #320 did, until that no longer existed (double sigh).
HM's public internet presence has shriveled to nothing since the announcement of the new CEO in January. And groping blindly through the interwebs doesn't find me anything about when the new Volume 2 will exist. I'd think if something was happening with the mag they'd say something about it. The best luck I have for info is watching comic sites (like mycomicshop.com and midtowncomics.com) to see if anything changes about new magazines coming. And it's depressing that all I see are release dates slipping from February to March to ... ?
Then this happened.
Really? From the smouldering wreckage that was once Heavy Metal Magazine, the first sign of life is, HM branded weed?
They're getting a lot of play on the weed media, for example here.
Heavy Metal's history is littered with ideas big and small that didn't quite work out. Going from monthly to quarterly publication after 1985 claiming readers wanted complete stories rather than serials (yeah right). Kevin Eastman was pretty good at big ideas, a Fistful of Blood movie and a new HM movie that sort of became "Love, Death + Robots" were two notable entries on the list (to be fair, Mr Eastman did actually do things, such as the Heavy Metal 2000 movie, and Eyebrow Tuna, and much else, but most of all just keeping the mag going for decades past its expiration date). More recently there was Heavy Metal branded coffee, with Dark Matter and GeekGrind,
that may have actually existed, but I never saw them. I even went to
the Dark Matter store when I was in the neighborhood around the time,
didn't see it. And of course there were the breathless announcements at the 2022 NYC Comicon about a new Taarna movie and other stuff by the old Big Shots, before they sucked the mag down the whirlpool with themselves.
And then there was the weed "edutainment" magazine that Jett Lucas was supposed to be part of, while he was listed on the HM masthead as Creative Executive or something, in late 2017. It'd be funny if this is actually related to the current branding effort (5+ years later).
Nothing against weed and Heavy Metal, nor against HM trying to make a buck, but I gotta admit I'd much rather know if and when there may actually be a rebirth of Heavy Metal Magazine, than some other niche branded product I'll never see. And I wish I had more confidence it would actually happen.
Sigh.
