Metal Hurlant Artists And the Heavy Metal Animated Movie

Metal Hurlant Artists And the Heavy Metal Animated Movie

The Heavy Metal animated sci-fi fantasy movie (1981) featured stories from Metal Hurlant artists but strangely did not have a Druillet story adaptation and they didn’t have a Moebius story adapted either. They took the essential  concept of Moebius’ Harzack, the character that flies around on his large bird and they created Taarna. The segment is approximately 15 minutes long and I think it’s the longest segment in Heavy Metal. It is also the last segment in the film. They basically took the framework of Moebius’ Harzack they made it into Taarna.

Kevin Eastman Adapts Taarna to Heavy Metal 2000

In my opinion, 1990’s Heavy Metal editor Kevin Eastman took Taarna and made it into Heavy Metal 2000 aka Fakk 2.  This is considered the loose “sequel” to the original 1981 Heavy Metal film. It’s basically the same character and I think Eastman realized how popular the original Taarna was, hence he took the framework and developed it into Heavy Metal 2000.

Richard Corben Conspicuously Absent from Metal Hurlant Book

On the back of the Metal Hurlant 1975-1984 book there is the list of artists showcased but there is one glaring omission in the case of Richard Corben.  Corben’s monumental graphic novel DEN began appearing in Metal Hurlant as of issue three and went on for many issues. It leads me to think that there was a copyright problem preventing Corben from being published in this book. This probably the same story for Corben’s OGRE and ROWLF which also appeared in Metal Hurlant and would have been worthy for inclusion in this tome.

Big Borders

Another gripe I have are the large borders or margins in the Metal Hurlant book. Unlike the original magazine that pushed the borders to the limit in order to show the art as big as possible on the page, they shrunk the images and left an incredibly safe border space.

Future Metal Hurlant Heavy Metal Videos

I’m going to make fifteen or twenty Metal Hurlant and Heavy Metal videos in the future.
NOTE: Please visit my YT channel for all the videos I have published since this article.
You will not want to miss them because I’m going to be showing you some stuff that you probably weren’t aware of.  There are Heavy Metal Spanish versions and the French predecessor PILOTE which predated Metal Hurlant. Pilote was more of a conventional Illustrated magazine. They had a lot of humor and political comic strips but what Moebius, Druillet, Dionnet and Farkas wanted to do was a magazine devoted more to Science Fiction and Fantasy. An illustrated mag that had no real rules to it and that is why they created Metal Hurlant.

Metal Hurlant’s Effect on World Culture

Metal Hurlant changed the world, there’s no doubt about that. The amount of influence that both Metal Hurlant and Heavy Metal have had is immeasurable. From Druillet’s wicked image on the car in Road Warrior to the Long Tomorrow and it’s influence on Blade Runner. Moebius was directly involved with the film ALIEN doing the spacesuit designs and so forth.
Artist Marc Caro who graced the pages of Metal Hurlant for years also made films with Jean Jeunet such as Delicatessen, City of Lost Children, ALIEN 4, and Dante 01.

I hope you enjoyed this look at the book Metal Hurlant 1975-1984. Although it is in French, I think it’s a great book for all fans of Heavy Metal and Metal Hurlant magazines and it is on sale.
Thanks for reading and watching!