Week 9: A Wide World of Comics

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A couple years ago, a friend of my mother gifted me a stack of his old comic books, upon hearing that I was studying Illustration at the Ringling art college.  They were all pretty cool, he even had the original V for Vendetta issues.  Among them too were two issues of a special 2 part edition of the Silver Surfer.  The art in these happened to be done by Moebius.

This week we discussed the work of European artists, who have been a great influence into the realms of science fiction and fantasy worldwide, in comics, but even also in movie productions.  One of the most influential was an artist named Jean Giraud from France.  He took the pseudonym Moebius and created many works of science fiction and fantasy with a very distinct abstract, almost surreal style.  He was part of a tradition called bandes desinées which translates into drawn strips from French and was the name given to the comics produced for French and Belgian audiences.  His body of work was huge in comics, like his Blueberry western series, Arzach, and The Incal.  Not only that, but he did great storyboard and concept work for the creation of movies such as the original Tron, Alien, and The Fifth Element.

The art in this two part Silver Surfer issues is amazing.  Through the story the Surfer battles Galactus, who had recently decided to arrive on Earth and proclaim himself God.  As a consequence, all part of Galactus’s genius, the people started to deify him, and whoever disobeyed was killed.  This created a lot of turmoil, and the people began to divide themselves and fight.  This prompted Silver Surfer to confront Galactus and what ensued was a battle of epic proportions…(and proportionally Silver Surfer looked like a shiny worm next to Galactus)  But it didn’t matter though, his speed was too much for Galactus who later on decided to just leave seeing that the Surfer was willing to fight him to the death to save humanity.  Moebius’s illustrations are awesome.  I love his work, because it is the type of work I eventually want to do.  Anytime an artist makes me feel like I’m watching a movie from looking at the panels he or she composed is inspiring to me.  His line work and use of colors is great, but his composition of scenes is even cooler to me. It’s people like him that give me hope for a successful future in the illustration field.
Moebius inspired sketch I did from the 1988 two issue limited seris "The Silver Surfer"...