HEAVY METAL Magazine

[GRWelsh]

I've been reading this magazine off and on for a long time, and I recently bought some of the more current issues. I'm glad to see it is still going strong. When the HEAVY METAL movie (1981) came out I was too young to see it yet intrigued by it because I always loved heavy metal music, animation, science fiction and swords & sorcery... It seemed like a movie made for me yet forbidden to me. I had to rely on hearing it about it from other people. The TAARNA sequence especially intrigued me with a warrior woman facing off against a mutant with a buzz saw for a hand. The magazine also was too 'adult' for me to have access to, but I remember leafing through issues of EPIC ILLUSTRATED which was Marvel's knock-off version and less edgy. Eventually I got to see the HEAVY METAL movie -- and it is still one of my all time favorites -- and was able to collect some issues of the magazine. For me, the appeal wan't so much the nudity or X-rated nature of 'adult' fantasy but rather when artists and writers have no limits, what will they do with that? Also, there is a cultural hurdle in reading comics by predominantly European creators since they have their own approach to fantasy, sometimes bizarre but always refreshingly different.

[Erik Larson]

It makes me wonder if the Green Pearl in the Lyonesse Trilogy was in any way influenced by the Loc-Nar. (The book came out in '85 so... who knows?)

[GRWelsh]

I've wondered that also, due to the timing... The film HEAVY METAL came out in 1981, and THE GREEN PEARL came out in 1985. Did Jack Vance see the film, or read the magazine? He would have been in his mid to late sixties at that point. He didn't seem like the kind of guy who interacted much with pop culture in his later years. He did not attend many science fiction conventions and rarely gave interviews... He very much seemed to be a master of fantasy doing his own thing independent of everything else, sailing around to the tune of his own kazoo... The Loc-Nar in the HEAVY METAL movie is very different from the Locnar in Richard Corben's "DEN" series in HEAVY METAL magazine (1977) or Corben's NEVERWHERE movie (1969) where it first showed up as a generic neutral magic item, later used by Den to bring peace and prospertity to his adopted world as told in DENZ (1996). For the HEAVY METAL movie it was given intellect and agency and a voice, in order to be an over-arching antagonist linking all of the stories together, claiming to be "the sum of all evils." The green pearl in Vance's book is much more subtle and distinctive, since it is the result of a green fume that arises from a cremated corpse and blows out to sea to mix with the spume of the waves to become a green pearl that is swallowed by a fish... More of a long term scheme by a particular villain to get revenge.