A Wide World of Comics

So for this week, I decided to read Moebius' work (Mostly for Heavy Metal magazine). The artist known as Moebius is actually Jean Giraud from France. It's hard to describe his art style, it's a mixture between simple and complex.

The line work is very complex with simple watercolor-like coloring.  Most comic book artists that I've seen in the past several weeks go simple in design for small panels and very detailed in larger panels, but with Moebius, his artwork is always very detailed which shows that he's a very skilled artist. 

I think the biggest thing I've taken away from Moebius and his work is his storytelling.  I've noticed a bit of a pattern in his comics.  It seems he's a huge fan of science fiction, but there are rarely any happy endings.  It usually starts with a small back story of the main character and their purpose, then introduces alien-like creatures that feel like they belong in the story.  Each comic he shows feels like it's part of a bigger story (that belongs in a graphic novel), you feel like part of the story.  But the thing with Moebius' story, is that it usually ends horribly for the main character.  For example, in "The Twinkle in Fildegar's Eye", Fildegar play's the main character that follows a crystal to travel across the galaxy.  He lands on a planet and meets inhabitants, but gets pulled by a sense of wonder, where he comes across a talking mushroom-like creature.  He ends up eating a part of the talking mushroom and the crystal leaves and then turns into a super nova.  It leaves a sense of wonder and deeper meaning. 

I've been a huge fan of Heavy Metal magazine since I was in high school, and usually the art in there is very "underground" (drug use, nudity, sex, etc...), but Moebius doesn't really fit in that category, although there was breasts in one of his comics that I read, I wouldn't categorize him as an underground artist because of the deep story telling and not needing to put drugs and sex into his comics to grab the attention of the audience, his story telling and art does that already.