Maybe this will help?
That's a comic strip by Ben Katchor that appeared in the December 1978 issue of HM. Though Katchor was just starting out as a cartoonist, his slightly blurred, cracked-realist point of view was already very much in evidence, as was the single-page-devastator approach of his best known work, the monthly Julius Knipl strip which appears in Metropolis magazine to this day. Julius Knipl is significant as a lit-comic that can actually stand next to literature without embarrassing itself, to be sure -- but it also represents about the furthest into the American arts 'n' humanities mainstream as comics have gotten, a regular feature in a prestigious magazine like it ain't no thang.
But what's so interesting about this Katchor Heavy Metal strip is the way it points to his respectable future (which in a few years would include publication in alt-comics' point of departure, Raw) while still engaging with the garish, space-frozen Heavy Metal ethos. This isn't the black-and-white meandering of Julius Knipl: Katchor's watercolors blaze off the page with as much brightness and conviction as anything by Philippe Druillet. You can lose the hoary scifi aspect of the comic in the strangeness of New York and Katchor's Joycean wordplay, but it's there, in a first panel that gives the term "dimension-hopping" the best visualization I've ever seen in comics. It's a testament to the strength of Katchor's style, of course, that it comes through so immediately even in this weirdo mashup of Little Nemo, Edward Gorey, and the X-Men issue of Marvels. But it's also a testament to what Heavy Metal was that it could pull off slapping a strip by one of comics-for-grownups' future leading lights on the same exact sheet of paper as this:
Y'know?
6 comments:
Katchor did another HM piece in the May '79 issue, 'A Proposed Architect", which is also pitch perfect in drawing & tone. Katchor's way of desynchronizing art & concept without losing the reader was, and is unique.
I think for artists of my age, the old HM was an enormous influence, there's never been like anything quite like it since in North America.
Americans like Katchor, Matt Howarth, Howard Chaykin et al. went head to head with the French and it was pretty hot stuff for us younger artists. The mix of commercial & underground styles was key to HM's (artistic) success, you had Gray Morrow in the same issue as Katchor and the contrast was very instructive.
A rich vein for some of the comix theoreticians which seem to be sprouting up these days: the influence of HM on today's middle-aged inksters.
Yeah, for sure -- that comic's influence just runs so deep, and it's not going away any time soon. Your point about the Americans and French going head-to-head in that book is also a good one: except for Corben all the Americans who made significant contributions to early HM were basically young turks trying to outdo the older generation. The contrast between that strain of American genre cartooning and the previous one ('70s Marvel, basically) is pretty interesting, but yeah: looking at say Howard Chaykin's HM stuff as a direct challenge to the Druillets and Enki Bilals is fascinating. And I mean... Raw was also a response to Heavy Metal, they translated Tardi and everything. Once Moebius and Macedo and Schuiten & co. had hit it was kinda incumbent upon EVERYBODY in American comics, regardless of genre, to respond. That's certainly how we got Frank Miller's Ronin, for example. Heavy Metal just seeps and seeps into the art form, and even a cursory look at the current Cool Comics shows that it ain't stopping yet.
Aw man, I'm so into this post right now since I just bought eight old HM issues for $1 a piece and have been really thinking about that period as well. It makes me sort of nostalgic to think of what could have been. It's not like people didn't try to push good stuff but the public either wasn't ready or the distribution system had already been beaten down to the last few news stands and the new DM shops who were more often superhero nerds who were sick of missing out on an issue of Iron Fist (hey, I was one of them).
If you go back you see Comix Book, 1984, Epic Illustrated, etc. DC put out those GNs of adapted sci fi stories and everybody remembers the Marvel GN line that half the time was just using Marvel characters in slightly more "adult" ways (i.e. Death of Captain Marvel).
What if you could go to a magazine rack and find a comic mag for every demographic? What if the GN boom would haven't have faded once people tried Maus, Dark Knight and Watchmen and couldn't find anything else after? *sigh*
Oh well, it's still awesome to go back and enjoy what did happen. HM had lots of great indy artists- especially doing one pagers. That's where I discovered Rick Geary (and still actually prefer his older, fantastical work over the true crime stuff).
The Katchor strip is so interesting. It's funny to see how similar his work is now- even the faces in the next to last panel look exactly like how he draws today. It reads to me like someone walking through NYC during Christmas season (the song is a spoonerism version of Joy to the World) tripping/massively stoned but it would be interesting if anyone's got anything on some of the symbols- like say the first panel figures in the forest of trees with Greek(?) symbols.
Oh, the forgotten DC graphic novels... Alex Nino on Space Clusters burned the eyes out of my skull. And that's not even mentioning Berni Wrightson on the Hulk/Thing graphic novel for Marvel!
You know, more and more I'm becoming convinced that if you curate your reading right and squint a little you can totally live in a world where the Heavy Metal promise got lived up to. Stuff like American Flagg, Ronin, and Marshall Rogers' Captain Quick in the '80s, and then all the Milligan/McCarthy and weird '90s Vertigo stuff I was talking about, not to mention books like Real Deal! Nowadays we've got the big three from Image, plus stuff like Dash Shaw and Tom Kaczynski's Mome strips, Michael DeForge's Lose, and I mean even stuff like X'ed Out and Powr Mastrs has whiffs of that HM vibe. It's influence, it's expansionism, it's fearlessness. We still got those in spades.
I'm not so certain that Hm had much influence in North America. It certainly did allow certain artists to reach national venue from which they did loosen up the American style a bit but not shake it to its core.
The essential HM French style of drawing every single panel and drawing it like you meant it is not the mainstream NorthAm style. For every Charles Burns & B. Katchor and Hans Rickheit you have a lot of artists who are focussing on a speddy brush or pen style.
The essential philosophy of HM's visual style is still being absorbed here.
Well, sure, but you know... HM contained "good comics". I'd say that pretty much all the "good comics" from America (that I can think of) have totally absorbed that style, even the superheroes. Like, Kirby would draw a throwaway panel every couple pages in pretty much everything he did. Frank Quitely, JH Williams? Not so much. I think you can see that commitment to excellence in a lot of the high-quality American material that's come out since HM hit.
Of course, since the mainstream is focused on speed and product accumulation rather than anything to do with art, its artists will always produce stuff that sticks to those values. But the current superhero product, I think, has basically nothing to do with HM or those who took its influence. It was never going to transform all American comics, just like there are plenty of lowest-common-denominator French comics out there. But I'd say there's a significantly higher level of craft going into the best post-HM American stuff, and that's where the influence really counts.
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