'Heavy Metal' magazine: May 1979

This month’s cover is ‘The Wizard of Anharitte’ by Peter Andrew Jones, and the back cover is ‘Centaur’s Idol’ by Clyde Caldwell.

I’ve scanned two shorter entries (that hopefully won’t imperil my Blog’s ‘PG’ rating with Google):

One entry is ‘Night Angel’, by Paul Abrams, definitely a trippy ‘stoner’ tale with some moody, effective artwork.

The other entry is one of Philippe Druillet’s occasional non- Lone Sloan pieces to show up in Metal Hurlant, ‘Dancin’ Ball’. (I’m not sure how well the thin-line, rather spidery pen-and-ink artwork will appear onscreen even with a 200 dpi scan, but I want the pages to load in a reasonable length of time). ‘Ball’ is a very cool take on futuristic bikers and wanton violence with a cynical twist of an ending.

'Heavy Metal' magazine April 1979

This April 1979 issue of ‘Heavy Metal’ is noteworthy for featuring a preview of the Fox SF-horror blockbuster ‘Alien’. The film, which had a budget of close to $ 10 million ( a lot of money back in 1979) was due in theatres in early Summer. 20^th Century Fox was obviously hoping to cash in on the momentum generated by ‘Star Wars’, ‘Superman’, and other SF films of the past two years that had yielded unprecedented box-office receipts.

Being chosen to publicize the film was a real coup for Heavy Metal, which had been in print for two years, but was still struggling to gain advertising and some perception of legitimacy among the ‘mainstream’ print media. That Fox executives had decided to give a somewhat obscure ‘stoner’ magazine the licensing rights for their marquee film for the year had to be encouraging to the magazine’s owners, The National Lampoon. Indeed, by selecting Heavy Metal to showcase their film among what would come to be labeled the ‘fanboy’ crowd, Fox was engaging in a marketing practice that was still comparatively innovative at the time. Nowadays, nobody blinks when directors and cast associated with a high-budget SF or fantasy blockbuster appear at various Comic-Con shows to preview clips and take questions from the audience. But the idea of dispatching Ridley Scott or Sigourney Weaver to speak at a geek gathering would have gotten a Fox marketing exec fired back in ‘79.

Along with some pages from the Alien preview, I’m posting ‘Pyloon’, a tongue-in-cheek homage to SF illustration, with art by Ray Rue and a script by Leo Giroux, Jr. I’m sure readers will find at least one archetypal image that they recognize as cribbed from the visual library of pop culture and SF. The art is very good, particularly when one realizes that computer-generated color separations were still years away.

Also posted is a advertisement for a board game, ‘John Carter of Mars’ , by SPI, one of the leading publishers (along with Avalon Hill) of war games, and other hex-based board games, during the 70s. This is what you got when you went ‘gaming’ way back then. ‘Space Invaders’ had still not appeared in my hometown in upstate New York in April of ’79, and the idea of playing games on ‘micro-computers’ was something electrical engineers thought about in their spare time, when they were hypothesizing about home entertainment in the 21^st century.

Rounding out our look at the April ’79 issue are the front cover by Clyde Caldwell (‘The Brain Cloudy Blues’), and the back cover by Larry Elmore (‘Gidget Meets the Squirrel Dogs from Outer Space’).

'Heavy Metal' magazine: February 1979
Here's the front and back covers (by Derek Rigg and Bob Wakelin, respectively) and a three-page b & w story, '1996', by Chantal Montellier.
 

'Heavy Metal' magazine: January 1979
 

Nowadays, ‘Heavy Metal’ magazine is very different from what it was thirty years ago. It’s aimed more at fanboys raised on ‘Lady Death’ or ‘Shi’ comics, manga, anime, and other onanistic geek- culture entries.

But back in the late 70s and early 80s, Heavy Metal was one of the few outlets for comics and graphic art that was too ‘adult’ for mainstream publication in the comics issued by DC and Marvel. Most of the contents of each issue were translations of material appearing in the French magazine ‘Metal Hurlant’. Occasionally some homegrown American comics would appear in its pages.

Heavy Metal rarely got much in the way of advertising; some record labels, or perhaps a rolling paper manufacturer, might buy a page or two; as a result, the magazine was essentially subsidized by the successful sales of its parent, The National Lampoon.

Heavy Metal was aimed at a core audience of stoners; back in the late 70s a ‘nickel’ bag of pot cost only 10 bucks, and it was expected that after getting high, you’d open up a copy of Heavy Metal and peruse it while listening to some music of the same genre.

Although at a cover price of $1.50 it was comparatively expensive, I started picking up the magazine in late ’78 and followed it on a monthly basis until mid-1980. Some of the material was very good; a lot of it was mediocre. 

For example, much was made of the appearance of serialized comics by Moebius (the pseudonym of French artist Jean Giraud), but the ballyhooed ‘The Airtight Garage of Jerry Cornelius’ was plainly a toss-off by Giraud, who at that time was busy moving into concept art and design for motion pictures (‘Alien’) and obviously tired with the low recompense –to-effort economics of comic drawing and writing.

Over time I became disenchanted with the inclusion of too much serialized material in the pages of Heavy Metal and I ceased buying it. But I did hang on to those 1979 issues, (although I didn’t slip them into plastic sheet protectors and store them in a cool, dry place).

While the 70s Heavy Metal had its share of cheesy T & A woven into many stories, it was also willing to print more downbeat, horror-themed tales than would appear in the contemporary edition of the magazine. Thanks to the magazine’s high production values, this stuff remains attention-worthy even in the age of computerized art layout and coloring.

Along with the front and back covers (done by Jo Ellen Trilling and Kevin Johnson, respectively) of the January 1979 issue, I’ve excerpted one such grim SF tale, a three-page installment of ‘1996’, a series by French artist Chantal Montellier.