Tripwire Reviews Heavy Metal#1

Under New Management

Tripwire’s contributing writer Tim Hayes reviews Heavy Metal#1, out in shops and online this month…

Heavy Metal#1
Writers: Various
Artists: various

After false starts and management churn and grumbles about subscriber service clouded the issue, a new Heavy Metal magazine rises – again. The man in the editor-in-chief’s chair at relaunch is Frank Forte, a writer and designer with appearances on the magazine’s editorial credits going back a decade, so continuity with the past from someone familiar with the landscape will be the goal. At the same time new publisher Marshall Lees is talking about adopting a modified mission for the mag, pushing into RPG and gaming audiences, combined with “a more adult Heavy Metal than the last few years have been.” The launch issue was supported by a Kickstarter campaign with a modest goal duly overshot by a factor of 150, which might bolster editorial confidence and also account for two dozen cover variants made available through various channels. Whether all this adds up to a viable model for a quarterly $15 European flavoured art-comics anthology in this day and age will now be put to the test.

For its launch, the magazine’s comics content adds up to around 20 different strips split between new work and “previously unseen” material, the latter being fresh English translations of strips from foreign creators, essentially Heavy Metal‘s original core purpose. The magazine’s adopted figurehead puts in an appearance: Taarna, a female warrior woman created for the 1981 Heavy Metal movie but deployed ever since as house mascot, gets a couple of new strips. In one of them, written by Leah Moore & John Reppion and drawn by Anna Morozova, Taarna follows a tasteful nude bathing scene with an airborne skirmish between various winged monsters while pondering the nature of life. The other, drawn and co-written by Joseph Michael Linsner, leans more heavily into the ribald slaughtering of multiple male oafs by a barely dressed fantasy female with a big sword and a skimpy outfit. David Quinn and Tim Vigil kick off a philosophically-inclined Thoreau-quoting monster series called “Transcendestiny” that could have aligned with previous eras of Heavy Metal, or indeed Marvel’s contemporary Epic Illustrated. Jim Rugg draws a 1960s UFO strip in a crisp modern pastiche of period style, smart and slick.

The translated material features names that previous Heavy Metal readers will know well, with Enki Bilal, Paul Kirchner, John Workman, José Ortiz & Antonio Segura among them. There’s also the start of Sergio Gerasi’s 2024 reimagining of Valentina, bringing Guido Crepax’s classic sensual Milanese fashion photographer back to life for the first time in a few years. Heavy Metal presented a selection of the original Crepax stories to an Anglophone audience in the 1980s, and her return for the relaunch in a translation of Gerasi’s book has a neat symmetry, another solid link to the magazine’s past.

What the magazine’s future holds remains to be seen. Anthology comics can be a hard sell. The online era has erased most of the hard borders between English-speaking readers and the deep oceans of European comics heritage across Heavy Metal‘s core genres of sci-fi, mild psychedelia and enthusiastic smut; the shock of the new that played a part in the original publication won’t be coming back. It’s not clear if the contents will be creator-owned to the same extent as before. Arguably the last time Heavy Metal had its own distinct identity was during the period Grant Morrison had some editorial control, and Morrison’s name seems conspicuously absent from the storied roll call of past contributors namechecked in connection with the relaunch. But a digest of Heavy Metal-esque material would again be a net good for comics readers venturing outside the mainstream and the Manga-infused heartlands of the indie sector, assuming that such an audience is still there among the RPG players the mag is pushing for. The magazine actually called Heavy Metal would be as strong a place to foster it as any.