Metal Hurlant 1975 to 1983 Part Three: Heavy Metal magazine Sci-Fi Fantasy Artists Enki Bilal, Vaughn Bode, Nicole Claveloux, Jean Claude Gal and Francois Schuiten.
Metal Hurlant Book on Sale Here.
Nicole Claveloux was one of the female sci-fi fantasy artists in the early days of Metal Hurlant magazine. You may recognize her style, it’s unique. See the original video here. The coloring is so good and she did a lot of art for both Metal Hurlant and Heavy Metal in the 1970’s.
Then we have America’s own Vaughn Bode with the science fiction fantasy comic strip Cobalt 60, rendered in glorious black and white from Metal Hurlant number 4, 1975.
Eternity Road by Metal Hurlant Artist Enki Bilal
Enki Bilal drew Crux universalis aka Eternity Road. Bilal reminds me a lot of Moebius. These artists were all together when they put the illustrated science fiction and fantasy magazine out and I think that some influences crossed over to other artists. One of the things you can see in Crux Universalis is the black and white cross hatching that reminds me of Moebius.
Schuiten’s Carapaces for Metal Hurant
Carapaces by Francois Schuiten. A Carapace is a shell as in an insect exoskeleton. By Francois Schuiten that first appeared in Metal Hurlant in issue number 13, 1977. This is a basic story with very little dialogue so you don’t need to know French to understand it. It begins in black and white with a scene of insects mating then suddenly this metal foot smashes them and of course it’s our female and male “Androids” walking around through the burned remains of civilization.
They’re walking around having fun and the male decideds to remove the metal shell from his finger. He takes more metal off revealing flesh beneath the carapace. The art suddenly becomes colored, prior to that it was black and white with gray tone. Now the color starts coming in. He takes the eye Shields out and we see his eyes. They remove all their of their metal shells rendering them naked and they start making love. Then the insects attack and slowly devour them and we see two insects humping on the remains of the humanoids. The end.
Rock and Roll Suicide
Marc Caro’s art and story for “Rock and Roll Suicide” is very interesting. As I explained in the previous article, Jean Jeunet and Marc Caro collaborated on films. You can check out Marc Caro’s superb “Dante 01” now playing on TUBI.
Jean Claude Gal Conquers Metal Hurlant
The Conquering Armies is next with incredible art by Jean Claude Gal and excellent writing by Jean-Pierre Dionnet who was one of the founders of Metal Hurlant. The printing of this story in Metal Hurlant is superior to the reprint in Heavy Metal magazine because Metal Hurlant used a kind of matte paper stock with high end printing while Heavy Metal used a glossy paper stock and the contrast is kicked up substantially losing a lot of fine detail in he amazing work by Jean Claude Gal.