Sunday, March 11, 2012

Moebius (1938-2012)

French comic artist Jean Giraud, also known as Moebius, died yesterday at 73.  I give this guy credit for getting in early on the whole one-word name thing that made you instantly cool and pretentious.  I've only read one comic with his artwork, but it was a good one, a collaboration with Stan Lee on Silver Surfer: Parable, a two-issue limited series released in 1988.  It's arguably the best Silver Surfer story out there, not only because of Lee's faithful portrayal of the character, but the stunningly unique artwork provided by Moebius.  His Surfer was slighter and more nimble than previous incarnations, but complemented Lee's noble and graceful hero as no one had before. To the best of my knowledge, that was the first and only time he worked on a traditional superhero book. Too bad.  Most of his work is on science fiction and fantasy comics. From what I can tell, it's pretty cool, if not a little weird.  But hey, he's French.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

No doubt the news story felt 'round the world.

Moebius seems to me to be one of those weird enigmas from the comic world whom everyone talks about and is familiar with, but few actually have read/own any of his work. I'm sure part of that comes from the fact that he's not American, but still. Even people who are only somewhat comic fans are familiar with his nom de funny papers.

I have a few comics where there are either long sections with no dialog or no dialog at all. It takes a very good artist to convey the story without using any narration.



ted