While there are many out there who love comics just for the story and have no desire to hoard boxes upon boxes of bagged and boarded floppies, I am not one of them. I have a thing for collecting. (It used to be cards, now it’s comics.) Even so, I made the decision to go all digital about six months ago. The simple fact is that I was slowly being buried alive by my collection. As it stands, I have somewhere between five and six thousand comics, and that is, regrettably, too many. So the question becomes, what to do with all of those books? Continue reading
Category Archives: Andrew Hales
Geeks You Should Know: Jean Giraud
Any comic books fans in internet land should make it a point to know the work of Jean Giraud, better known by his pseudonym “Moebius.” By far, Moebius is one of the all time greatest French comic artists. His work on the western book Blueberry brought him to the attention of film maker Alejandro Jodorowsky who quickly employed him to work on storyboards for his ill-fated Dune project. After working with Jodorowsky on Dune, Giraud went on to found the comic magazine Metal Hurlant which translates to “Heavy Metal.”
By 1980, Moebius was reunited with Jodorowsky and the two created The Incal. Giraud eventually made a small jump to mainstream American comics in 1989 when he did a two part Silver Surfer mini-series with Stan Lee called Silver Surfer: Prelude, which won an Eisner award, and he continued to make comics until his death in 2012.
When I say that Moebius is one of the all time greats, that is no understatement. Though very different in style from most of them, he is absolutely the equal of any great American comic artist, including the king himself, Jack Kirby. I would go so far as to say that he is not only a great comic artist, but just a great artist, regardless of the medium. There is an amazing detail and quality to his work that is incredibly distinctive.
Not only has Giraud’s personal work been influential, it’s possible that Metal Hurlant has been even more influential. The publication and it’s American cousin Heavy Metal have introduced many European artists to audiences as well as influenced up and coming artists to different styles and story telling ideas. In addition to his work in comics, Moebius’ work in film has been pretty amazing too. He provided quite a bit of design work for Alien and The Fifth Element. Without his work, neither of these movies would have the amazing visual appeal that they are known for; and while his work on Dune may not have seen the screen in its original form, the book that he and Jodorowsky put together made its way around the Hollywood studios and many of the scenes can be found in the biggest films of the last few decades. It is truly unfortunate that the comic community has lost someone as immensely talented as Giraud, but so long as people keep looking to his work for inspiration, Moebius will be a Geek You Should Know.
Filed under Andrew Hales, Comics, Geeks You Should Know
CBLDF Response: Pride of Baghdad
The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (CBLDF) is fighting the good fight against comic book censorship, a problem that has plagued the industry for decades. In order to better educate myself, and by extension Therefore I Geek’s readership, I am starting a periodic series in which I will read all of the books in the CBLDF’s list of banned book case studies and discuss them. These blog articles will take the opportunity to evaluate the material on its own merits, as well as in the larger context of censorship and why these books were banned. To kick off this new series, I’ll be discussing Brian K. Vaughan’ Pride of Baghdad.
In March of 2003, a US led coalition began airstrikes in preparation for the invasion of Iraq. As a result of the airstrikes, four lions from the Baghdad zoo escaped from their enclosure and began wandering the streets. Pride of Baghdad tells the story of these lions, using their journey as an allegory for discussing the invasion itself and exploring the some of the philosophy that surrounded it. At the time the book was published in 2006, the war’s outcome was far from clear, as a civil war was just beginning and the book makes no attempt to predict the future beyond the obvious idea that no matter what the outcome, things will never been the same in Iraq. Continue reading
Filed under Andrew Hales, CBLDF Response, Comics
Therefore I Geek 