These splash pages continue to be the best thing about this strip. It doesn’t have a lot else to recommend it so far, but I’m probably not the ideal reader.
(Heavy Metal issue #52, July 1981 - Page 27 Tex Arcana by Findley)
In the same way that Heavy Metal put a lot of push behind Alien, Heavy Metal got behind Outland in a major way. There was a full page ad on the inside front cover and a full page ad for the novel and photobook adaptations. And then there was Steranko.
Pieces from Steranko’s adaptation were repurposed in the middle of this issue to serve as character and situation primers for people who weren’t sure if they wanted to see the movie or not. The two page spread at the top is cropped at the bottom and dropped down to make a gutter at the top that could be used for character bios. As teasers go, it’s really good - it made me want to watch the movie.
The next issue is the proper start of the Steranko adaptation - this collection of pages is just another portion of the Outland marketing outreach. It was a really smart cross-promotion and Heavy Metal was good at this kind of thing - which helped when the movie came out later in 1981.
(Heavy Metal issue #51, June 1981 - Pages 48&49 Outland by Steranko, 55 Outland adaptations ad & Inside Front Cover Outland ad)
Lou Stathis returns with capsule reviews of newbies Echo and the Bunnymen, Devo, The Teardrop Explodes and U2 (with a casual mention of the Psychedelic Furs at the beginning). Above that is a profile of Elvis Costello. And turned sideways is a review of the second issue of Raw, which includes the first chapter of Spiegelman’s new feature Maus.
(Heavy Metal issue #51, June 1981 - Page 90 Ri-‘vyu-ed)
The first part of the Corben interview showed up in this issue. The expression on the face in the bottom right corner of the second page is reasonably close to what I felt like when I was reading it. He doesn’t come out and say it, but he’s just shy of being a full-blown Ayn Rand libertarian.
The interviewer is provocative in ways that he didn’t really need to be, but Corben never really says anything specifically damning. He mostly just comes across as cranky that he’s getting stupid questions that don’t seem relevant.
There are two more parts and a coda to this interview. Stay tuned!
(Heavy Metal issue #51, June 1981 - Page 6 Corben Interview & 22 Bloodstar by Howard and Corben)
Ronald Reagan draped in the American flag as if he were a Roman Emperor is a fantastic visual metaphor. I’ve read that Kierkegaard was living in DC when he wrote this, so it’s sort of like a ground-level view of what the city felt like.
The Capitol Land sign on the next page is great, because the city has always felt like it was overrun by tourists. The only difference here is that Marriott is in charge now. Government contractors took care of everything.
(Heavy Metal issue #51, June 1981 - Pages 92&93 Rock Opera by Kierkegaard)
The Bus continues to be a really entertaining look at the commute. It’s very basic and completely silent, but the punchlines always make sense and completely subvert expectations.
Finding a comic that very well could have been a syndicated Sunday cartoon in a counter-cultural anthology magazine aimed at people who were as far from that experience as it was possible to be at the time is very strange. Even weirder is the fact that I can find the collected edition of these cartoons in Amazon France for a reasonable price, but if I want to buy in English, I have to fork over twice that price for a low end copy.
(Heavy Metal issue #51, June 1981 - Pages 4&96 The Bus by Kirchner)
This page is consigned to convey a certain amount of information in a concise manner - not take up too much time and space with all of this, which really shows how important it really is to the author.
Press clippings are always a good way to push exposition and points of view to build context. I like the way that they’re stacked on top of a black and white photograph (the rest of the story is in color, so the change is very noticeable on a casual read).
What I find very interesting is how the translation was handled - taping captions over the original words instead of trying to fully replace them is not a design choice that I’ve sen very much of. It’s both jarring and amusing, like seeing behind the curtain during a stage production.
(Heavy Metal issue #51, June 1981 - Page 35 The Immortal’s Fete by Bilal)
This is very clever story has several interesting features. The story itself runs on the conceit that his hair has become some kind of vegetation - it grows flowers, changes color in the fall and eventually grows little tubers that he can eat. At the time, Caza was probably considered to be a hippy and length of hair was a big deal. It’s a neat turn on a fairly topical subject that also spoke directly to the casual Heavy Metal reader.
Caza also busts out some great design tricks. The fixed-perspective-show-change-by-what’s-different approach is obvious, but really well done. He also throws in a topical reference to the mainstream design aesthetic in the first panel, where his hair is the shortest and conforms most to the people who live and breath in that context.
My favorite part is at the bottom of the page, with the effect he got on the man in the white suit. Only certain parts of the clothing is filled in - the rest is just a mass of color. It’s the kind of thing that Hugo Pratt would do with thick black brushstrokes, but here it’s the absence of everything - pure negative space.
(Heavy Metal issue #51, June 1981 - Page 75 The March Hair by Caza)
Of course Heavy Metal readers would be interested in the new Cheech and Chong movie.
(Heavy Metal issue #51, June 1981 - Page 5 Cheech and Chong’s Nice Dreams ad)
There are five Valentinas on this page and it is the smallest one that’s talking. This is one of those “you can only do this in comics” moments - not just the image regression (which is a neat trick), but the use of it on top of a close up of her face to immediately convey the metaphorical nature of the page (and maybe the story as a whole).
(Heavy Metal issue #51, June 1981 - Page 56 Valentina by Crepax)
