thebookishowl.com

“Having written my lovely high fantasy, I sat back to await the world’s reaction.

What I had not anticipated was that readers would refuse to recognize it as a fantasy at all.”

“I sold Metropolitan to a new publisher for a pleasing increase in my advance.  I was somewhat traumatized by leaving Tor, but not when Ralph relayed their final message: “When Walter finally realizes what he’s worth, he’s welcome to come back.”

To which anyone of spirit can only reply, *****  ***”

Fantasy Book Critic

The Dead of Winter
Chris Priestley
Bloomsbury USA Childrens (215 pp, .99 hardcover, January 31, 2012)
Reviewed by Michaele Jordan

First and foremost, the reader needs to know that The Dead of Winter is a traditional ghost story. If you are looking for a modern view point or a cross-genre twist, this is not the book for you. It cleaves to Gothic imagery and draws on many classic antecedents.

It is set in the Victorian era; the year is not specified, but the setting makes it plain. Like many earlier works, it is presented as the journal of a first person narrator, told from a distant future, and opening with a solemn assertion that the contents of the book are entirely true, little as the reader may be inclined to believe them. Preface aside, Priestley draws on a Dickensian model to provide the young protagonist so necessary to a children’s book.

The story opens with Michael Vyner at his mother’s funeral. He is now an orphan, as his father has been dead for years. In fact, the father—an army man—died heroically, saving the life of his superior officer, Sir Stephen Clarendon. Sir Stephen has always been grateful, but Michael’s mother was too proud to accept much assistance, so Michael has never met the man his father died to save or even been encouraged to take pride in his father’s courageous sacrifice.

All that is about to change. Having no surviving family, Michael is made Sir Stephen’s ward, and summarily shipped off to spend Christmas with his new guardian, prior to being enrolled in a prestigious new school. His situation is not genuinely intolerable, as Sir Stephen is both wealthy and well-intentioned, but Michael is still too bereft to appreciate any kindness done him, and takes the sudden changes in his circumstances badly. It is a sullen and ill-mannered child that first comes to Hawton Mere.

Mr. Priestley comes into his own in his description of Hawton Mere. He vividly renders a flat, forbidding landscape in which miles of dank fenland suggest a hopeless future and an empty heart. Before Michael’s carriage even reaches the house, he is subjected to his first spectral apparition, a woman in white so seemingly solid that he demands the carriage be stopped and an immediate search conducted for the piteous figure. Of course, no such woman is found; nor is there anywhere in the vicinity she could possibly hide. So Michael arrives in his new home already under suspicion of being either a liar or crazy or both.

Sir Stephen may mean well, but he is decidedly peculiar, and afflicted with an incapacitating nervous disorder. His sister Charlotte is beautiful and mysterious and only slightly less peculiar than her brother. Their home is a monstrous antique pile protected by a moat; its dark and maze-like interior is equipped with numerous shadowy alcoves and a tomb-like priest hole. Within this setting—itself, worthy of The House of Usher—the echoes of earlier tragedy still linger. Lady Clarendon inexplicably fell from a balcony to her death some years before and Sir Stephen has never recovered from the loss of his dear wife. Nor has the memory of his cruel father ever faded.

Michael is plagued almost immediately by inexplicable sounds of banging, weeping and groaning. Panels that have been sealed shut for decades open suddenly to trap him. Of course, no one else can see or hear any of these things but him. And as Christmas draws closer, the apparitions around him grow progressively more dangerous.

It is all resolved in the end, of course. To find out how, you must read the book.

__________

Black Gate

Last weekend I went to Toronto to attend the Ad Astra science fiction and fantasy convention. It was the third convention I’ve been to in my life. I learned a fair bit.

To start with, I learned a bit about the thriving Toronto sf scene. Toronto’s a huge city, both geographically and in terms of population; over six million people live in the Greater Toronto Area, and over eight and a half in the ‘golden horseshoe’ region around the western shore of Lake Ontario. That’s the population base the sf community there draws from. There are writers of all levels of experience in and around the city, and a friend of mine told me there are at least three critique groups of published writers. Publishers are based in the city, notably ChiZine Publications. And, in tough days for retail booksellers, there’s still a dedicated sf bookstore, Bakka Phoenix. As well as three separate annual conventions, that I know of.

Ad Astra was first held in 1980, and focusses on written fantastika. Guests of honour this year were author Harry Turtledove, writer/actress Lesley Livingston, artist Joe Jusko, editor Shelly Shapiro, and fan organizer/scholar Peter Halasz. The 2012 convention was technically north of the city of Toronto proper, in the neighbouring municipality of Markham.

It was the con’s first year in a new hotel, and there seemed to be some glitches, notably to do with whether and when an interior stairway was publicly accessible (when it wasn’t, the line-up for the elevators swiftly became ridiculous). That said, overall I thought the physical layout of the convention was effective. Nothing was too far from anywhere else, and the rooms were mostly a good size for the events they held. The dealers’ room proper was small, meaning that several vendors, notably self-publishers and micropresses, were scattered through several nearby halls and rooms. I don’t know how they felt about it, but as an attendee I enjoyed wandering around and seeing the variety of tables.

There did seem to be problem with overall co-ordination. Photocopies of the schedules weren’t available for Friday night, no printed list that I could find was ever made public of which panelists would be on which panels, and there seemed to be scheduling conflicts among the panelists. That being said, I found the staff helpful and professional in answering my questions. One panel I attended (on ancient books) involved a power-point presentation, and at first the equipment wasn’t working; con staff turned up quickly, and soon had the machinery functional. For me, as an attendee who was not sitting on panels or involved in any behind-the-scenes matters, the organisation worked well enough to provide a fine convention experience.

It all started for me on the Friday evening with a panel about steampunk writing, featuring author-publisher Rob St. Martin and writer Ed Greenwood as panelists. As it turned out, the audience consisted of only one person beside myself, meaning it became a free-flowing conversation about steampunk, empire, and history. It was a good start, not least because the chance to participate so much in the discusssion really helped draw me into the event.

After wandering around the convention for a bit, I dropped in for the second half of a panel on What Scares Us?, featuring David Nickle and Michael Kelly. It was an interesting chat, again with only a few more audience members than panelists. From there I went to a panel on The Intersection Between the Academic and the Creative, where writers including Leah Bobet, J.M. Frey, and Gregory A. Wilson discussed the way academic experience can help to shape one’s fiction.

I called it a night at that point, as I had a long trip to make on the Toronto transit system to get back to where I was staying, but made it back early the next morning for a discussion about villains and what makes them work. Panelists included Wilson, St. Martin, Greenwood, and editor Gabrielle Harbowy. The latter two have co-edited a short story collection called When the Hero Comes Home (look for a review around these parts soon), with a companion volume, When the Villain Comes Home, scheduled to follow this year. The discussion was thoughtful and wide-ranging, going from Batman to Paradise Lost to, inevitably, Star Wars.

After that, poet and Managing Editor of ChiZine Publications Helen Marshall presented a fascinating look at medieval books — what they looked like, what they were made from, how they developed. Then it was off to a talk about Twin Peaks, which somehow turned into a discussion of TV generally; appropriately, after a quick lunch, I went to a panel about fantasy on TV. It was, all told, a diverse morning.

The next two panels I attended had especially strong turnouts. The first dealt with creating cultures in fantasy worlds, the second with creating languages. They were interesting chats, though occasionally seemed a bit at variance with their given descriptions — the talk on creating cultures turned into a discussion of how to use existing cultures, for example. At any rate, I followed them by attending a great panel on historical costuming, then went on to a presentation by Robert Godwin of digital panoramas he’d made of the moon’s surface by stitching together photographs and video footage taken by the Apollo astronauts. I ended things by going to a panel on adapting books into movies. All told, it was a varied and surprising day. Not all the panels cut as deeply as I would have liked, or dealt with the exact aspects of their subjects that I was interested in, but overall what I did learn made the day worthwhile.

I spent some time on the Saturday night at the parties. I was able to meet and speak with author Craig Davidson, whose excellent set of linked short stories Sarah Court I’d raved about for the Rover Arts web site. As it happened, later on I was able to properly introduce myself to Ed Greenwood, who graciously chatted for a good half-hour or more, an energetic wide-ranging talk about food in history, the Depression, the development of Toronto, and any number of other topics. It was a nice wrap-up to the day.

Sunday was briefer, but more intense. I showed up at 10 for a panel on ghost stories from around the world, which I had to leave halfway through in search of coffee. Luckily, I found some, provided in the room across from the con suite by the folks at AE magazine. An online Canadian SF magazine, named for seminal Canadian author A.E. Van Vogt, AE has also had the great good taste to publish “Unwinding Road,” a piece by my girlfriend, Grace Seybold, which they also reprinted (along with several other short tales) as handouts for the con.

From there I went to a panel on guerilla marketing for self-publishing, then to another steampunk panel, with St. Martin, Greenwood, Frey, and author Adrienne Kress. A lot of great issues about steampunk were raised, but by this point of the convention I was frankly exhausted. I suspect many others were as well, which may explain why the panel at one point burst into a rendition of a song from The Pirates of Penzance. Somehow, it seemed relevant at the time.

I then managed to catch half of a panel on Northern Gothic, featuring David Nickle and Peter Halasz; it was an intense investigation of the meaning of gothic, and how it works when translated to a northern sensibility — is it inherently rural, and if so how does it relate to landscape; or is an urban northern gothic imaginable? It was a fascinating talk, which led nicely into the panel I’d been looking forward to all weekend, a discussion about what were the 10 most influential books in fantasy. There were some interesting names thrown out; nobody had quite the same definition of ‘fantasy,’ or for that matter of ‘influence,’ making for a diverse group of texts. Does one choose the Epic of Gilgamesh, Homer, Ovid, Mallory … or should we look at the influence on the current marketplace, and select Brooks and Jordan?

(If you’re interested, according to my scribbled notes, over the course of the panel Peter Halasz mentioned Gilgamesh, the New Testament, the Koran, Homer, Ovid, Mallory, The Arabian Nights, Perrault’s Mother Goose, Grimms’ Fairy Tales, The Lord of the Rings, and Jorge Luis Borges. Writer Matthew Johnson put forward Macbeth, Lin Carter’s Conan of the Isles — the first franchise novel — The Left Hand of Darkness, Charles de Lint’s Jack the Giant-Killer — the first urban fantasy novel, Johnson suggested, and a direct ancestor of Buffy the Vampire Slayer — Brooks’ Sword of Shannara, Moorcock’s Elric books, and Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun. Writer/publisher Elizabeth Hirst suggested Lord of the Rings, Frankenstein, Peter Beagle’s The Last Unicorn, A Wizard of Earthsea, Paradise Lost, Dante’s Inferno, The Mists of Avalon, the Harry Potter books, Interview With the Vampire, The Colour of Magic, H. Rider Haggard’s She and related works, and Lewis’ Narnia books. Rebecca Simkin, one of the organisers of the Sunburst Award, suggested A Wrinkle in Time, The Odyssey, Neuromancer, A Wizard of Earthsea, Beowulf, Elric, and The Once and Future King. Writer Ian Keeling mentioned The Lord of the Rings, the Potter books, The Wheel of Time, Mallory, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin, A Princess of Mars, the Thomas Covenant books, and the Narnia books. Suggestions from the audience included Alice in Wonderland, Patricia McKillip’s early work — which the commenter suggested revised myths in a significant way — and the work of Pauline Baynes, who drew the map for The Lord of the Rings.)

(Meanwhile, I’d come up with a list of my own; I decided “10 most influential books in fantasy” meant the books within the fantasy genre that shaped the genre the most in terms of narrative structure — if a genre’s a set of narrative conventions, which books most defined those conventions? So I excluded children’s books, for the most part, and magic realism, and came up with the following list: Sara Coleridge’s Phantasmion, William Morris’ romances, Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros, Howard’s Hour of the Dragon, The Lord of the Rings, Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast books, Le Guin’s Earthsea, Moorcock’s Stormbringer, Martin’s A Game of Thrones, and Jaqueline Carey’s Kushiel’s Dart — but Hirst’s mention of Mists of Avalon convinced me to drop that one in favour of Bradley’s book. I wish I’d been able to find room for Dunsany, MacDonald, China Miéville, John Crowley, Hope Mirrlees … any number of other writers, really. But that’s the challenge of the exercise.)

All in all, the weekend’s panels had a good range of subject matter, and on the whole worked fairly well. It seemed to me that they were more conversational than at the other conventions I’d been to; that the audience was often able to enter into a real dialogue with the panelists. It was engaging, unpredictable, and informal in the most effective way possible.

Overall, I enjoyed Ad Astra. I don’t honestly know if I’d go back, just because the location makes it inconvenient to get to unless you’re staying at the convention hotel or somewhere else nearby. But the people were friendly, and it’s large enough that there’s always something going on that’s worth looking at, whether a panel, or an anime showing, or a group of lego enthusiasts. And, overall, although there are events to do with other media, the focus was mainly on the written word; that in itself was nice to see. As I said, I don’t have a wide experience with conventions, but Ad Astra was pleasant and involving. I was able to pick up review copies of a number of books, as well, which I’ll be discussing over the following weeks. So a positive experience, on my end; just about what I was hoping for.

Black Gate

• Greg Bear, Hull Zero Three (Gollancz)
• Drew Magary, The End Specialist (Harper Voyager)
• China Miéville, Embassytown (Macmillan)
• Jane Rogers, The Testament of Jessie Lamb (Sandstone Press)
• Charles Stross, Rule 34 (Orbit)
• Sheri S.Tepper, The Waters Rising (Gollancz)

Fantasy Book Critic

Who the heck is Lawrence Schoonover?

I had no idea. At least until I found myself in an unexpected bidding war for a beautiful collection of Bantam Giant paperbacks on eBay, including two by Mr Schoonover: The Golden Exile and The Burnished Blade (cover here).

Don’t know much more about him. I’m sure a trip to Wikipedia would tell me lots about Schoonover but, really, his covers tell me pretty much everything I need. Apparently he wrote big fat adventure novels featuring dudes with swords, exotic settings, and women who had little use for clothing. I’m a fan.

And it certainly doesn’t hurt that his novels were published as Bantam Giants.

There’s just something about the Bantam Giants that really brings out the collector in me. If you’re any kind of paperback aficionado, you know what I’m talking about.

The first Bantam Giants appeared in 1951, during the tenure of the legendary Ian Ballantine. I don’t believe they were numbered separately from Bantam’s usual sequencing, which makes cataloging them somewhat problematic, but their ranks included James Michener, Emile Zola, Harold Robbins, Sinclair Lewis, Robert Wilder, C. S. Forester and many, many more.

Some of the best literature of the 20th Century appeared in paperback as Bantam Giants, such as Robert Penn Warren’s All The King’s Men and Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls.

They also included a superb assortment of classic adventure novels from Rafael Sabatini, Thomas R. Costain, John Masters, John Dickson Carr, and even some dude named Lawrence Schoonover.

If you're the one who outbid me for this eBay lot, you should be ashamed of yourself.

There was also a smattering of science fiction and fantasy, such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Ray Bradbury’s classic anthology The Circus of Dr. Lao, John Collier’s Fancies and Goodnights, and novels by Bradbury and Jerry Sohl.

I think a large part of the appeal of Bantam Giants is their sheer size. They promise a lot of reading for your 35 cents. And dang, they look good don’t they? Just check out that beautiful assortment at left (click for bigger version.)

‘Course, I’d know a lot more about Schoonover if I’d just managed to win that damn auction. Since I didn’t, I was forced to hunt down virtually every single title in the set individually on eBay. I finally managed to complete that daunting task late last week. It’s okay, I’m sure the kids didn’t really need that college fund.

And before you ask which I’m going to read first, I think that should be fairly obvious. I’m curious about all of them, but before anything else I have to find out just what the Great Folly of that young lady in the bottom right is.

Even though I think I have a pretty good idea.

Black Gate

Fantasy Book Critic

I’ve always wanted to write an epic fantasy.

A real epic fantasy, something with sweep and scope, tumbling empires, wizards and warlocks, monstrous fantastical beasts and horses of supernatural speed and stamina and crooked old gods vying for power. Something in the sword-and-sorcery mode, but not exactly a Leiberesque low fantasy… or a Tolkienesque high fantasy either. Rather, a book–a series of books, really, because what I had in mind wouldn’t fit in a hundred and fifty thousand words or so–in which the fate of kingdoms hung in the balance, but which wasn’t uncritical of the role of kings.

I wanted to write a book that had the sense of scope and sense of wonder of the books I loved as a young adult… but I kept running into the same problem.

There’s so much epic fantasy out there. And so much of it looks strangely similar. Not identical, of course… but like different chefs’ versions of the same recipe. The ingredients are all the same.

I’m a fan of Guy Gavriel Kay’s Fionavar books, for all their slightly string-pulling manipulativeness. I love the way he takes every possible overplayed trope of fantasy and dumps them all into the same pot–and then pokes them with sticks and makes them fight. But I knew I didn’t want to do that. I wanted a narrative with elements of quest in it, but not simply a quest to reclaim or destroy the magic widget that makes the story go. I wanted a book that would shift scenes from city to city, from culture to culture — and I knew I wanted a world that wasn’t inhabited by nothing but Europeans.

In fact, I was pretty sure I wanted to dispense with the Europeans all together.

In the meantime, I was researching Central Asia and North Africa and their border cultures, and trying to come up with my own world inspired by those settings but not too derivative of them. I didn’t want to write a historical fantasy — or even an ahistorical fantasy, like Conan, which purports to take place in the antediluvian history of our own earth. I very much wanted a fantasy world, it’s own place, with a few thousand years of history as backdrop.

This was one of the tools I wanted to use to interrogate fantasy monarchism a little bit. Too often, fantasy relies upon eternal empires, which must be maintained at all costs against the forces of chaos. But in the real world, empires fall – -and that’s not always a bad thing. A mature empire is a stagnant thing, and it’s hard in this modern world to ignore the implications of conquest, colonialism, and oppression that come with the act of building empires.

In the rise and fall of the empires of the Steppes, I saw my opportunity. These cultures — from Scythian to Mongolian — are largely ignored in western-focused history, or are cast as the villains — and in western fantasy they have largely been treated that way.

I started playing with some of the ideas in this settling in 2005 or so, and wrote a brief short story — “Love Among the Talus,” which explores one aspect of the setting: the westernmost reaches of an empire strongly modeled on the Mongolian Khanate — in early 2006.

After that, there was a lot of slow research. Picking ideas up, putting them down. Revisiting some of the classics of fantasy, and exploring some of the new trendsetters — from Howard’s Conan stories through J.R.R. Tolkien to Durham’s Acacia with stops at Brust and Feist and Jemisin and Lynch and Rothfuss along the way — all the signposts of what I half-lovingly, half-exasperatedly refer to as Fat Fantasy With Maps.

So I started looking for what made the ones that were different… different.

The influences on this work are myriad, and begin with the beloved books of my childhood: Conan, of course, but also Jessica Amanda Salmonson’s three-volume retelling of the life of Japan’s legendary female samurai Tomoe Gozen, which at one point I read until the covers fell off.

Leiber, but I wanted something with more scope than the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser tales — something with a sense of empire and history. Tolkien, but not just Tolkien, because while I wanted a heroic aspect — not the straight rejection of heroic narrative that comes with George R.R. Martin and his literary descendents, such as Joe Abercrombie. But I didn’t want an uninterrogated heroic narrative either.

Since I have four names anyway, I contemplated changing my middle initials to R.R. Just as a little bit of sympathetic magic.

Cooler heads prevailed.

Moorcock is of course an influence, but I didn’t want to write something that dark. Poul Anderson was probably closest to the mark I was aiming at — humane, accepting of the horrors of war, but also capable of acknowledging the potential for greatness of the human spirit — and its indomitable stubbornness, which is my favorite thing about Tolkien. His people just. Keep. Plugging. Away.

It’s all very admirable — and very British. “Keep calm and carry on” carried to the end of the world.

Also, not quite the mode in which I write, although I have a lot of respect for grit and grim determination.

And then one day — it was June 10th, 2009, because I mentioned it in my blog — I opened up a fresh document and typed the following line: “Ragged vultures spiraled up a cherry sky.”

The book didn’t have a title, or even — really — a plot, yet. It had no antagonist, no female lead. (Now it has both!)

But what I did have was a mental image of a young man, grievously wounded, staggering across an endless battlefield. It was an image in part drawn from family legend about the exploits of my Cossack great-grandfather, an immigrant from Ukraine and probably a descendant of Mongols himself (the Cossacks claim descent from the Golden Horde, and it’s not unlikely). And that image stayed with me through the writing of the nearly six hundred pages that followed.

The book has a title now – Range of Ghosts. It’s the first in a trilogy called The Eternal Sky. It has beautiful Donato cover art and a gorgeous hand-drawn map inside, making it an official Fat Fantasy With Maps.

And a little less than three years later, I have an early copy that I can hold in my hand.

The bit about the vultures is still the first line.

Black Gate

This week saw all sorts of new goodies being released to moisten your pallet for what will surely be two of the upcoming summer movie season’s biggest box office draws.

Let’s start with Dark Shadows and my assertion that if Barnabas Collins were really in his grave somewhere, he’d probably be spinning like a rotisserie ham.

It’s because the original vampire Collins wasn’t particularly heartthrob material (and proper vampires really shouldn’t be) that I didn’t mind some of the initial low-quality stills that came from Tim Burton and Johnny Depp’s rewind of the 1960’s TV cult classic.

Depp had his hair plastered down and was sporting a seriously pasty complexion.

Okay, fair enough. I did fret ever so slightly about the borderline comical nature of his look but, well, that’s just Burton and Depp.

Then on March 16th we finally get the goods: a series of character portraits and a full length trailer of Dark Shadows to hold us over the 55 or so days until its release on May 11th.

Oh joy, oh rapture, oh…. seriously?

A comedy?

I watched the trailer.

Then I watched it again.

Yep, it’s a comedy.

A dark one to be sure; but there’s Johnny Depp in full Barnabas garb, mugging through dead-pan one liners and I don’t know if I should laugh or be outraged.

If Dark Shadows 2012 weren’t a reboot of a dearly-loved original I’d probably be completely geared up for it.

But instead of a vampire Sweeny Todd, we have a vampire Captain Jack and I’m feeling just a tad disappointed.

Watch the trailer and decide for yourself.

Somewhat grudgingly I admit, it does look funny.

Then we have Ridley Scott’s June 1st release of the Aliens franchise pseudo-prequel, Prometheus.

Buzz has been building around this project for the years since Scott first expressed interest, but reached fever pitch last fall when an 18-second teaser trailer was “leaked” back in November, 2011.

Since then plot details have been mostly a blur of speculation punctuated by some interesting guerilla marketing plays like the one I told you about a couple of weeks back.

This week Dune Entertainment has opened the flood gates, releasing two, full-length HD trailers; one for the US and one for the UK both containing more information about the storyline than we’ve seen to date.

In addition, a few new stills have circulated as well as some interesting background info such as Scott tasking H.R. Giger to “reverse engineer” his original Xenomorph design thereby creating an ancestor for the alien we all know and love.

Prometheus is looking more like a prequel every day and there are 39 days until opening – not that I’m keeping track.

Prometheus US trailer:

Prometheus UK trailer:

Are you planning to see Dark Shadows and/or Prometheus? How do you feel about Barnabas Collins being the object of humor rather than horror? Post a comment or drop a line to sue@blackgate.com.

Black Gate

Fantasy Book Critic

This week I take on the sad task of doing the obituary piece for the passing of another great industry artist. I don’t think these things hit me quite as much when I simply read about the death of an artist until I started doing Art of the Genre, but now that I take the time to look back and speak about a career, it’s somehow even more of a loss.

To me, Jean Giraud was simply a man with a strange alias, Moebius. I didn’t know him well, or his work for that matter. He was a Frenchman, a comic guy, and the two didn’t run into my creative circle of artistic knowledge as well I they probably should have.

Still, Moebius was ever my enigma, and when I did my list of the Top 10 Fantasy Artists of the Past 100 Years back in 2011, Moebius might not have made the final list but he did receive a healthy number of votes from all the industry insiders I polled. This fact wasn’t lost on me, but as time is ever crunched and fleeting I went about with other work and never got back to studying why it was that Moebius had placed so highly on knowledgeable people’s lists.

Today, as I write this, I’ve finally come to realize why. I may not have known Moebius in his personal art, but that isn’t to say I don’t know him in so much of the art I love. You see, Moebius, for all the wonderful things he did with his own hand, was perhaps better known for those he influenced with that work.

Like Frank Frazetta, Moebius has a school of followers, and to me those are the folk that I cherish more than most. Had there been no Moebius, then much of my artistic world would be far less colorful.

Perhaps Moebius’s greatest known disciple is another non-American, Hayao Myazaki, who in 1984 created the animated classic Nausicaa and the Valley of the Wind. This movie is a testament to Moebius’s genius, and every bit of its style, a style that has helped define Myazaki’s Studio Ghibli, was a page taken from this French comic master.

Moebius’s influence can also be felt in standard American cinema as director Ridley Scott was heavily influenced by Moebius’s space images when he directed Alien in 1979, and again took a page from Moebius when he created his classic cyberpunk noir Bladerunner in 1982. Bladerunner steals much of its collective anima from Moebius’s unmatched 1975 comic strip The Long Tomorrow.

The Long Tomorrow is an incredible piece of comic lore that helped create some of the best science fiction to come out of the 70s and 80s, including an Imperial Probe Droid pictured in the strip’s very first panel.

His view of a darker, dirtier future continued on in his development of the 1997 movie The Fifth Element, which might not have been a box office powerhouse but I dare you to watch it today and not be blown away by the visual aspects of the film.

However, if this didn’t make me understand how important Moebius was to the genre, I needed to look no further than artists who mean the world to me. Two of my absolute favorites, Sam Keith and Jeff Laubenstein, are perfect examples of Moebius’s talent driving the pen and ink of other artists in the industry.

So I feel this loss all the more, and yet I have to take it as all the rest and thank Jean Giraud for all he did for the industry and the art I love so dearly. He will be missed, but as long as there are those who mirror his work, he will never be forgotten.

Black Gate