Vampirella #99, 1981

Opium, 1983-90

Red Tide

Legendary comics creator Jim Steranko is 76 today. Though his revolutionary work for Marvel Comics was before my time I did in my teens acquire a copy of his pioneering graphic novel Chandler: Red Tide and probably only read it two or three hundred times. A brilliant homage to classic film noir and hard-boiled detective fiction, it started me on a lifelong fascination with the genre.

Moebius

I was saddened to hear of the death yesterday of Jean ‘Moebius’ Giraud, one of the greatest exponents of the graphic narrative form vulgarly known as the comic book. With his virtuoso technique and extraordinary visual imagination Giraud was a powerful, underground force from the late seventies onward and his work for cinema, and his influence on that medium in particular have made his vision part of the common aesthetic currency of our times.

Federico Fellini said of Giraud: “I consider him more important than Doré. He’s a unique talent endowed with an extraordinary visionary imagination that’s constantly renewed and never vulgar. Moebius disturbs and consoles. He has the ability to transport us into unknown worlds where we encounter unsettling characters. My admiration for him is total. I consider him a great artist, as great as Picasso and Matisse.”

No small selection of Giraud’s work could do justice to the dizzying variety of his huge oeuvre, so I have posted the first of his works that I saw, as a young boy, when it appeared in the June 1977 issue of Heavy Metal.

Jean Henri Gaston Giraud (8 May 1938 – 10 March 2012)

Happy Birthday Frankie

Daniel Clowes

Eightball covers gallery at zines

A heaping helping of modern misery: The complete Mister Wonderful at the New York Times