Métal Hurlant: 1974 – 1987. Révolution of the Humanoïdes. (Part 2)

 (Image:  Jean ‘Moebius’ Giraud art for ‘The Long Tomorrow” written by Dan O’Bannon.  First appearing in Métal Hurlant (1976)

Whatever ambiguity is written about Dionnet’s past, the stories of his American experience has been an undeniable and a fascinating aspect in the development of the adult French comic Métal Hurlant, drawing from the grit and rawness of New York City, where the main comic book companies DC and Marvel are located, the cleanness of American comic book hyper-reality with its superheros, paint a picture of pure escapism.  Dionnet’s European cicatrix of being born after World War Two and of course his French philosophical musings, could indicate how he and Métal Hurlant entered a more risqué perspective of comic book writing, despite being enthralled by American exceptionalism.  It is in one story of his second visit to New York City, he went and saw Martin Scorsese’s 1978 Taxi Driver, later commenting that what he viewed from watching the movie Taxi Driver in an rundown cinema on Broadway, was the same when the movie finished and he walked back out to Lower Manhattan into a broken city.  America may have been relatively untouched economically and structurally after World War Two, but in its post-Vietnam war resonation, American cities and its society were falling apart.

But if it was Dionnet who had the creative nous and plethora of ideas from his transatlantic contacts, it was the meeting between the two talented and very original comic book artists Jean “Moebius” Giraud and Philippe Druillet with financier Bernard Farkas that sealed the deal in creating their first issue of Métal Hurlant on the 19th December 1974.   Bringing Giraud and Druillet on board, particularly the astounding talents of Giraud who also penned his name as Moebius, it would give the him a platform to explore the more experimental of science fiction ideas, in his uniquely grand and mystical concepts that was evoked from his artwork.  

Giraud was born in 1938 Nogent-sur Marne, in France, his parents separated soon after and as an introverted young boy, raised by his grandparents, he grew up being heavily influenced by the plethora of American Western films being shown in a post-war France, like the rest of Europe, which was being reconstructed after the devastation of World War Two.   This escapism capsulized the hope that Americanization offered to Europe in the 1950s in the shadow of a Cold War, in which Giraud was enthralled by these Hollywood Westerns and as an aspiring young artist his ability to envelop into his own world of imagination held an uncanny fixture.  Encouraged by his family, in an effort for  Giraud to cultivate his craft, he enrolled in the early 1950s into an Parisian art school. It was in 1955 during during a semester holiday, his mother, who had remarried to a Mexican, asked Giraud to visit them in Mexico, thrilled at the opportunity to visit abroad, particularly a place that was, in a cinematographic way, visualized so much as a young boy, he ended up staying in Mexico for a whole year, never completing his final year as an art student.   This time spent in Mexico was to be a turning point, not just as a young man exploring an environment that he would later describe as a defining moment in his life.  To view, in person, the endless, yet serene deserts, the sun with its blue skies and picturesque cloud formations, the impact on Giraud was a revelation, an enlightenment.  Upon returning to Paris, he created a pseudonym under the name Moebius that would become synonymous with Giraud’s more diverse works as he began to experiment with the subversive and psychedelic.   In Giraud’s own words, he sought to channel his thoughts with “bizarre science fiction,”  the “avant garde”, “surrealism” and “sexuality”.

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A.Glass 2021