Jean "Moebius" Giraud & Arzach

Many years ago, my good friend Wong bought me this book for my birthday… It was my first introduction to the amazing work of the French illustrator Jean Giraud, better known to the world as Moebius.

Moebius is possibly the most influential and almost certainly the most well known of all the many French comic and graphic novel artists from the last 50 years or so. Born in 1938, his career began in earnest with the serialisation of the Western anti-hero Blueberry throughout the 1960′s and 70′s, but it was with the publication of the four stories of his most famous work, Arzach (or variously Harzak, Arzak, and finally Harzack in the final installment) that his reputation for highly individual and creative work was sealed.

First published in a 1975 edition of Moebius’s own quarterly magazine Métal Hurlant (rebranded as Heavy Metal when it was later published in America), Arzach featured a lone warrior riding on the back of a huge pterodactyl through increasingly bizarre and hallucinogenic landscapes, full of monsters, tentacles and naked people.

It had a huge effect on the comics industry of the time with its wordless stories, brilliant use of colour and the sheer amount and quality of work on each page. Indeed I have read that it’s effect was comparable to that of Frank Millar’s Dark Knight reboot of Batman and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen, some 11 years later in 1986.

So sit back and enjoy the work (in a deliberately random order) of one of the greatest comic artists of all time…

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