Thursday, July 10, 2014

Heavy Metal magazine July 1984

'Heavy Metal' magazine July 1984



July, 1984, and as I am driving from upstate New York down to Baton Rouge, Louisiana to go to graduate school at LSU. On the car radio, the single 'Boys Do Fall in Love' from Robin Gibb's new album 'Secret Agent', is in rotation.  


'Boys' wound up being a modest hit that Summer, but it remains a great song, and epitomizes the synth-heavy, eletronic drum sound of mid-80s pop. 

After the BeeGee's 1981 album 'Living Eyes' tanked, signalling the end of the disco era with crushing finality, it was Robin Gibb, as a solo artist (with some help from brother Maurice), who let the world know there was more to the band than the one-two disco beats and over-exposed Barry-Gibb-falsetto that had come to be associated with the band's music. 

So 'Boys Do Fall in Love' is on the radio, and the latest issue of 'Heavy Metal' magazine is on the magazine racks, featuring a front cover by Dave Dorman, and a back cover by  Ron Lightburn.

The Dossier section is one of the more ludicrous to appear in the magazine, focusing on - likely enough - Heavy Metal music, and showcasing an up-and-coming singer named.....Thor. 

Other bands in the spotlight include 'Manowar' and 'Slayer'. It's hard to tell if the HM staff ('Rok' critic Lou Stathis, along with Tim Sommer, Josh Ribakove, and  Jess Schalles) who wrote the Dossier intended that their coverage be facetious, or if they were playing it straight, but only those who grew up in the 80s can truly treasure the wonderful awfulness of these bands and their clothing/ costumes.





Other sections of the Dossier review sf books, and there is an interview with aging comedian Jerry Lewis (!) about his genuinely awful movie, 'Slapstick of Another Kind.'







The graphic content of the July issue sees a new series from Jeronaton, titled 'The Great Passage'; ongoing episodes of Thorne's 'Lann', Druillet's 'Salammbo II', 'The Hunting Party' by Cristin and Bilal; 'The Railways' by Renard and Schuiten; and 'TexArcana' by FIndley.

Among the better of the singleton strips is Alfonso Azpiri's 'Daymares / Nightdreams'. I've posted it below.









2 comments:

MPorcius said...

The old SF reviews are fun to read. I liked David Gerrold's A Matter for Men, it is a well-written Heinlein pastiche.

Arkadi said...

This Azpiri story...? I had never seen an English version, and now I'm reading this I notice that, for whatever reason, the translator made a lot of unnecessary changes in the last pages -and the story is all the worse for it! Originally, the dialogue is between the dreaming creature and the AI controlling his environment, and it's hinted that the creature is actually God and he must keep dreaming to make reality happen, even if his dreams are nightmares. The "translated" dialogue in those pages doesn't even make sense...