Philippe Druillet

Some classic Heavy Metal-era comics.

These are short, simple, and largely incoherent stories from the drug-addled early 70s. Each is a dozen pages or less, appearing as (or intended for) installments in a monthly magazine. Consequently, the stories move pretty fast, with no time for backstory or in-depth explanation. This gives the comics a making-it-up-as-we-go-along feel, though there are often hints that there is more to the story than available space allowed.

Druillet's art, which tends to add superfluous lines to provide the illusion of intricacy or detail, works pretty well here. This is because the subjects are, for the most part, ornately-costumed characters or hallucinatory mind-states. Druillet is clearly one of those artists who has gobbled up every available resource depicting religious or tribal artifacts, but has never cracked a technical manual, architectural blueprints, or an engineering text. This sort of thing is usually defended as "the technology is so alien that it would look nothing like what we have now", but really it's ignorance - and it makes even more insulting the use of historical Asian designs as "alien".

Anyways, as it goes with Druillet, despite all the obvious flaws these are pretty fun little comics.… (altro)

In a nutshell: Mad Max meets the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. I expected this to basically be a Blue Oyster Cult song in comic book form, and it certainly was that - minus a bit of cleverness perhaps.

OK, so some bikers who get burned by the sun are being exterminated by the cops and the "palefaces". They decide to rise up and seize the production facility the produces the drugs they need to stay alive.

It's barely coherent as a premise, and this is not helped by the dialog, which is in the form "HA HA HA! BLOOD! CRAP! NIGHT!". Maybe it's a translation issue, or maybe this was kinda just shat out in a bender of grief (included are extra helpings of explanation that this was produced right after the death of Druillet's wife, probably to make up for the merits lacking in the work itself).

The art is deceptively complex: it appears simple and drug-addled, but on closer inspection there is a lot of complex detail, but on further inspection this detail is just extra lines. Filler, added perhaps as a texture, providing no form, no information, no *detail*. It's like Druillet saw the hints of intricacy that Moebius tosses into his work, and is aping that style without understanding it.

Kinda fun, in a trashy 80s Italian dystopian sci-fi film sorta way, but I wouldn't call it *good*.… (altro)