#293 preview

In the first new "news" entry on the HM website in over a year, there's a preview of #293:


http://www.heavymetal.com/previews/heavy-metal-magazine-issue-293/


It announces this issue is now for sale, but I haven't seen it in a store yet.  We're just getting the first issue of the year at the end of April, jeez.


But it's a pretty nice preview, touching on many stories I'm looking forward to, especially The Door and Murky World.  There are cover images too.  I expect to get the cover "A" at the store:

Though I was struck by the image for the cover "C", "REMANENT HEAD 2" by Wanjin Gim:

It's pretty fantastic and strikingly similar to the Spring 1987 cover by Jim Warren:

(this image is from Lostboy's Heavy Metal Magazine Fan Page, and my Covers post from a while back)


I just hope I come across this new issue soon.

Paul Kirchner

Paul Kirchner did The Bus in Heavy Metal Magazine, from the second issue until 1985, the end of the monthly era.  I really liked it, it did a lot of storytelling in less than half a page, and thought it was a big part of what made HM what it was to me.  He did several other stories in that time that I liked, like The Temple of Karvul in February 1979 and Critical Mass of Cool in November 1984.  Maybe I didn't think his art was the most spectacular in the mag, but it was very good in stories that made you think.


There was a return of The Bus in HM #276, and I had hoped for more, but I haven't come across it.  He does sell books including a couple The Bus compilations.


The Bristol Board recently had some Dope Rider stories listed, which is what got me thinking about this.  Dope Rider was in High Times way back when, and it appears Mr Kirchner is producing new stories.  It wasn't in HM, but it's pretty cool regardless.  Check it out.

Meanwhile over at Heavy Metal

Announced on HM's fbook via a BleedingCool article, a Tim Seeley is joining the mag as Managing Editor.


https://www.bleedingcool.com/2019/03/21/tim-seeley-managing-editor-heavy-metal-magazine/


(man that webpage really hates my computer, takes forever to load with all the crap and ads)


Rantz Hoseley has "left the company" it says.  Nothing on what he's doing or even a thank you.


Tim Seeley is apparently a well-known comics guy, and the article has Mr Eastman and others saying how great Tim is.  No word from or about Mr Morrison.  Comments on the article and the fbook post are all over the place, most like Mr Seeley and think Mr Morrison will hang on, though some seem even more clueless than me.


For me, it just came to me how HM has been trying to merge with comics, which I've been in denial of for a while.  I still thought of Heavy Metal as "The Adult Illustrated Fantasy Magazine" and comics were more lightweight and transient, but with the popular culture impact of comics these days, I can realize why HM might want to seem a part of that.


I'm also a bit annoyed about such an announcement by a fbook link to another article, rather than directly from HM, but I guess that's just how they do things, when they don't have much of a PR stance, as seen by the haphazard nature of the HM internet presence.  (it's been over a year since the main website has had anything new.)


So best of luck to Mr Seeley, and I hope he does at least as good of an interview as Mr Hoseley.

Heavy Metal Cover Price History

R. M. Rhodes has a great little article on his heavymetalmagazine.wordpress.com about the history of Heavy Metal Magazine cover prices, which includes history of the tagline, which was "The Adult Illustrated Fantasy Magazine" for a good while, with some discussion of the issue format going from monthly to quarterly to bimonthly to whatever it is now, including just numbering issues rather than noting the month or period and year.  For fun I lifted the chart from the article:

The article nicely gathers these bits of info and helped my understanding of these trivial but interesting details of the history of Heavy Metal Magazine.  I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Kranburn comics

Ben Michael Byrne revived Kranburn last year, after dropping it in favor of other stuff, and there was a link to "Printed Kranburn" that never materialized.  I had seen some references to new issues coming but I never found where to buy them, since he seems to be most active on Fbook, but I ain't on that so I don't get very far, until Mr Byrne recently put up a link on his Twtr, to his updated Ownaindi listing.  Ownaindi is a site for Australian comics, where he was selling his NSEW (also pretty cool) before, and though it could be problematic, it worked for me to get them.  He's gone and printed all the old Kranburns, and the new ones, and the NSEW, as well as something called Ektype (I have no idea what this is, but I want it anyway).  I went and ordered everything I didn't already have.  So this is great news for people like me, who really liked Kranburn and Mr Byrne's work, and are fortunate enough to afford to buy printed comics shipped halfway around the world.

Heavy Metal # 292

Just got this issue in a bookstore on the last day of 2018.  That made five issues in the year, based on when I actually bought them.  Same for the year before.  Falling short of the stated six issues per year, and the internet presence hanging by a thread, concerns me about the health of the operation.


But the mag itself is still pretty good.  I got the Cover A, "Elefanka" by Ron English.

Pretty cool, I like it so I'll give it an 8, and especially the background elephant images reminded me of the Roger Dean Osibisa album cover art.

Yeah, not quite the same, but still kinda neat.  The mag is labeled the "Psychedelic Special", and there is some attempted mind-bending going on, so the Special name has some actual meaning this time.


The Contents page illustration is by Adrian Cox, "Spectral Witness with Gathering Storm", which looks like just that, and Mr Cox has a Gallery entry in this issue.


The staff listing has some changes, no more Jett Lucas (and no sign of that weed "edutainment" magazine he was said to be working on almost two years ago), and there's a Paul Reder noted as COO/CFO, with Brian Witten going to Creative Advisor.  Jeff Krelitz is still listed as President.  I certainly don't know what's really going on, but I'll guess that an executive-level reorganization indicates a change in operational structure, which I will hope is to stabilize the organization to ensure its continued existence.


Mr Morrison is still around too, and his editorial for this issue is written as a story of illicit drug trials that produced "HM292" and its psychoactive effects on those subjected to it.  Rather clever and it fits the theme.  I'll give Mr Morrison credit for continuing to produce these editorials in such an entertainingly loquacious fashion.


"She Comes at Midnight" by Rob Sheridan - 8 - Musings of desire for late night tv images.  Evocative and cool to look at.  This very much makes me think of the time long ago, before cable, where a subscription for early pay-tv for sports and adult content, involved using a set-top box to unscramble the subscription channel signal.  And it was rumored that if you didn't have a subscription box, but fiddled with the antenna enough, you could just make out a boob or something.  Never worked for me, but this makes me think Mr Sheridan may have been a young teen boy in the mid 70s too.


"The Smile of the Absent Cat" Chapter Three by Grant Morrison and Gerhard - 6 - Noted as "the never condition".  A cat lunatic asylum resident, tormented by the Great War, trying to get his life back in order, is approached by another resident, and pulled into some devious plan.  Some nice storytelling going on, but even with the three chapters being mostly separate stories, the year and a half since the last chapter made it hard for me to get excited about it.  I wonder when the next chapter might appear, or even if there's a whole story to even get through.


Gallery with Miles Johnston - 7 - with an interview by (surprise!) Rantz Hoseley.  The artist tells us a great deal about himself with Mr Hoseley's help, and I thought what I learned helped my appreciation of his work.  There's a lot to like, though I have to get over being picky about proportion in what looks like it should be photorealistic.  Because it's not, it's supposed to evoke things like infinite regression and emptiness inside, not look exactly like them, because it won't. 


"The Door" Chapter 4 by Michael Moreci, Esau Escorza, & Adam Wollet - 7 - The story continues for our young protagonist and her misadventures in worlds she does not know.  Reappearing in a city scene familiar from the beginning, but where the residents have pig heads, she and her companion "Monster" are rescued from the crowd by a pig with manners, introducing himself with a "these swine know little when it comes to civil society" as Francois Bacon.  Monsieur Bacon not only deduces that her paper crown indicates the Garbage King sent her for a reason, but expounds on the nature of the worlds they are in, helping us understand what's going on.  Similar to the Matrix, they are in a series of software constructs of realities, the product of humanity retreating into their inner digital worlds, and her ability to step between them makes her unique, but also able to escape.  He directs her down a darkened staircase, and this chapter ends with "to be concluded."  The art continues to be enjoyably lovely, and the story exposition takes some shots at some of humanity's more selfish aspects, including the current aberrant administration and abdication of individuals' parts in society.  I'm looking forward to how this concludes.


"The Oneiroverse" by R.G. Llarena, Garrie Gastonny, Omar Estévez, Jame - 8 - An aspiring writer pays for a dream journey into the Oneiroverse to search for the IDEA to write his first book.  It starts with a joke (I've not read Hitchhiker's Guide, but even I know "why forty-two") and sends him to dozens of worlds with fairy princesses, mystical warriors, and bitchin' babe bands.  He returns dissatisfied, still not realizing where the IDEA needs to come from.  Nicely done art and I again enjoyed Mr Llarena's storytelling abilities, and I was impressed by how well the translation worked.


"The Rise and Fall of Empires" by Grant Morrison and Rian Hughes - 5 - A somewhat interesting execution of representing change with an area graph.  Here it's apparently it's about distribution and reach of presumably societal factions shown with different colors and geometric patterns.  It's pretty abstract and without context on the factions, so it doesn't really tell me a lot.


Gallery with Ron English - 8 - Titled The Art of POPaganda, with a short text introduction of Mr English (Not by Mr Hoseley!?) and a series of images that rather assertively demand your scrutiny.  Some really wacky stuff going on there, not to say I don't enjoy it.  Mr English did the first cover of the Morrison Era:

and the skully Mr Smiley is seen again here, as well as other recognizable and perhaps not-so familiar characters.  I enjoyed looking at the images and imagining what it would look like generating this stuff, and considering the filthy mess of society I inferred from the compositions.  And good thing I liked it, since there's more of Mr English later this issue.


"Influencer" by Michael Kupperman - 7 - In three pages and nine panels, a story of ergot-induced madness, prophecy, and immortality.  The art is perhaps not refined, but so effectively plays its part in the storytelling, which I found fantastic, literally, including the unbelievability of the ending.  And of course, it's on topic with the Psychedelic theme.


Another ad for the Dark Matter Heavy Metal coffee, which seems to exist only in the pages of the magazine.  I've never seen it actually for sale.


"Hydroglyphs to Mania" by Miranda Smart - 7.5 - Heavens, a trip through the caverns of your brain doesn't have to be so scary, but it can be.  A wordless depiction of a peer-pressured hallucinogen ingestion, looking every bit like it's describing a personal experience.  And the story's success in telling me with the art alone is what impresses me.  A similar trippy art style was more common in the mag's early days.


Gallery with Amélie Barnathan - 6 - Mr Hoseley makes up for lost time with a long-ish interview.  Ms Barnathan shows a number of works with some thought-provoking images, and talks about her training, and a new Tarot she worked on, apparently Instant Archetypes, "an analog toolkit" for our digital age.  I guess Tarot is a thing.


"Citied" by Rantz Hoseley & Andrew Brandou - 7 - Cute little art student critters dress up for the funnest Halloween party ever.  Chemical assistance was applied.  It was worth the challenge to discern the text and details in the colorful jumbled miasma of the art.


"The Color of Air" Part Nine:  The Conclusion by Enki Bilal, translation by Jessica Berger - 8 - Still beautiful, even moreso with more color at this ending and epilogue of the old story, pointing to the beginning of the next.  The Planet finishes its Bloody Coup and the inhabitants are re-invigorated and re-associated.  Like life I suppose, it's only supposed to make as much sense as you can make of it.  Thanks for everything Mr Bilal.


"Beatle" by Diego Agrimbau & Gabriel Ippóliti - 6 - Ringo impersonators are turning up dead in the city.  A Beatles-loving cop goes undercover at a well-known impersonator agency, and uncovers the Beatles' final secret. 


"Combrats" by Ron English - 9 - Mr English brings us to the Combrat Zone, where "feral clown kid soldiers" patrol the no man's land between Delusionville and hell.  An inhabitant of Delusionville, a Rabbbit, wants to visit hell, but is detained by Combrats.  It's just as wacky as it sounds, and it looks even more.  The Combrats are like clown faced dolls with tie-dyed clown suit uniforms and helmets, and guns, and the rabbbits have three ears and three eyes (as also seen in some of the previous Gallery).  There's a lot of 3D modeled background with fantastic imagery, some so clearly rendered as to make me wish he had constructed it all with modeling clay and popsicle sticks, some of hideously mutated creatures so Bosch-ian that I thought of the Bruce Bickford animation in Baby Snakes.  Much of it had me thinking of the beloved (by me) Rock Opera by Rod Kierkegaard Jr from Heavy Metal in the later 80s.  So much to see, so much weird as hell and so much creepy as shit.  There's even some "regular" comic drawing and a "painted" image or two.  The story gets right into the nature of belief and reality (Delusionville and hell) and God and Satan, and I enjoyed some of the banter, though I admit I didn't follow it all the way it was going, and there were parts in quotes I didn't know, so I missed out on some of it.  But I got much of it, and I caught a joke or two in there, and the whole story was bunches of Heavy Metal magazine fun, so thanks for that.


Gallery with Adrian Cox - 7 - With more great interview work by Rantz Hoseley, and Jeff Krelitz is credited as being in the interview, at a gallery opening of Mr Cox's work at the Corey Helford Gallery in LA, but I guess he didn't make the edit (though he got in a couple photos).  The work shows fantastical images of humanoids made of flowers, or iridescent energy, or ... something, and apparently it tells a story.  The text was informative, and I was able to get a feeling of the story from the descriptions and images here.  Cool.


"Cultscape" by Hector Lima, Patricio Delpeche, Martin Túníca - 6 - A couple makes their escape from a White Light cult based on a space station.  It makes the most of the facets of insight and brilliance that shine through a rather opaque story and its serviceable art, as it tries to convey the mind control pressure inherent in a cult environment.


"Murky World" Part 5 by Richard Corben - 7.5 - A small chapter in the story, Tugat and Moja are to die in the arena, but the ferocious killer beast won't cooperate.  Simply lovely to see, enticing and mind-boggling, and I'm having too much fun to be bored by the story's meandering.  What can possibly happen next?

John Findley's Tex Arcana

John Findley's Tex Arcana has not indicated an update for over three years.  I thought to email to the link a few days ago, to ask about it.  I'd done it before.  The email generates an auto-reply, advising that there's a registration process to allow the message to get past spam blockage.  I've been actually lucky enough to get a response a few times over the years, and he was quite gracious about it (actually corresponding with actual HM creators is an actual thrill for me), but the last time was over three years ago.


While I wait, I thought to look on the internet, and was disappointed to learn that the Tex Arcana comic was no longer available on the site, but for one short story, and it's been like that for almost 2 years!  I felt really bad, not really checking for so long that the great story I've been pointing to wasn't there anymore.  The Book looks like it's still available, which is good, and I recommend to anyone reading this you should go buy it.  I did earlier and I'm glad I did.


So I certainly hope things are going well for Mr Findley, and that this might just mean he wants to encourage people to buy his book (do it) or something else constructive.  In any case I remain grateful for what he did and what he shared freely, and for the kindness he showed me in previous correspondence, and I wish only the best of what his life has to offer for him.


But I remembered double checking on a link on an earlier post before, and it worked.  And it does.  For some reason, the work on the fourth as-yet-unpublished book, is still out there.  Starting here, after the end of the still-up story, are over eighty pages of some really cool expansion of the Tex Arcana saga.  If you're still reading this, you should go take a look at it, while it's still there.  As we see, nothing lasts forever.

some history

an article by R. M. Rhodes, who does the HM page-a-day tumblr, about the Eastman era. 


https://comicsdc.blogspot.com/2018/04/and-then-heavy-metal-was-bought-by.html?m=1


I read it before, and I should have posted it then, but HM fbook linked to it, so I get another chance.  It has interesting perspectives, some of which I share, but it's informative to anyone who wants to know more about why Heavy Metal Magazine still exists.


Thanks for sharing

Heavy Metal Documentary

Just announced on Variety via a post on HM Fbook, a Heavy Metal Magazine documentary is planned.  It may be interesting, and I'll look forward to hearing more.  But the article erroneously says HM led to the phrase Heavy Metal being used for Metal music.  And it mentions the 1981 movie, and the abortive effort for another movie in 2008, but ignores the Heavy Metal 2000 F.A.K.K. 2 movie. 


I kind of understand why no one wants to remember the second Heavy Metal movie, it was plenty bad.  But it had its moments, and Mr Eastman did manage to actually produce it.  I hope the documentary does happen, and they give Mr Eastman his due for keeping the mag alive, and making it his own for so many years, including the story of the 2nd HM movie. 


Honestly my favorite part of HM2000 was having Billy Idol in a lead voice role, because of this from Dossier in the mag in December 1982:

Which is something I've wanted an excuse to post for a while.  The recent meme joke on the HM Fbook recently almost did it, but my bringing up the HM2000 movie here gave me my opening.  I've thought it was funny that Mr Idol was in the HM2000 movie, remembering this snarky takedown, and how much I agreed with the sentiment at the time.  With his sneery poser-punk act all over the MTV cable-waves taunting me, I spent a whole year actively changing the station or shutting off the radio whenever he came on.  Now, as I approach senior-hood, I am much less offended than amused, I probably wouldn't want to punch his face anymore, and I understand Mr Idol is an ok guy with a sense of humor about it all.


So best of luck with the documentary guys.  I hope it actually gets done and it doesn't suck.

Outland by Jim Steranko

A very nice article about Jim Steranko's Outland, from Heavy Metal Magazine in '81 and '82, Inventing Sci-Fi Noir, is featured on We Are the Mutants.  I liked the direct HM reference, and I enjoyed the informative background of the context of the times, and how Mr Steranko took the gig. 


I'll note that the presentation by Mr Steranko of this adaptation as mostly double-page splashes, as the article notes, would be next to impossible these days, since the mag has been edge-glued ("perfect" binding) for years, rather than stapled ("saddle stitched") as it was in its first years.  My opinion is that the ability to really use double-page presentation, was one of the strengths of Heavy Metal Magazine's first era.  That and the monthly publication, and the large amount of work that made it able to present.


I also liked the rather bold choice of the article, to include an image from the story from the mag, which anticipates and depicts not only future widescreen tv but also widespread pornography.  Such transgressive content surely excited very young adult me, and this image of the future was also anticipated by a similar scene in the October 1980 "Special Rock Issue", in "Rock City" by Moebius.  Seeing these images then, and knowing that they now reflect our amazing sci-fi reality, is another example of how I'm actually living in the future.