HM289ScifiLetter

Mr. Morrison et al;

Re: HM 289

Oh I love seeing a magazine in the mailbox; that’s HM! And I was giddy about and greedy to read this scifi special. I like the themes you’ve been using; seems to add a bit of energy to the work that you select.  I got the “The Artist” cover (keep including alternate cover images in the TOC!) and was pleased to see the regulation science-fiction-fantasy pinup girl, though my favorite was the Rob Shields, like Patrick Nagel and Jamie Hewlett had a baby. The “Same Old Fears” cover, with its great blank robot head makes a uniquely powerful impact as well.

My three favorites this ish are Escorza and Moreci’s “The Door”, Goodenough’s and Oliver’s “Chimeran”, and Tony Leonard’s “The Womb”.  Classic Hurling Metal fare!

Pure paranoia reigns in “The Door” made claustrophobic by industrial detail and surreal draftsmanship. Eager to see more! “Chimeran”, with its soft-edged forms, felt warm and human, and all the more poignant. But the energy, power, and fire of “The Womb” top out this offering! Tony Leonard brings a Romita-esque texture to a story with the same mythic impulse as Druillet’s “Lone Sloane”! Big, like Kirby! Gigantic full-bleed pages of saturated color, intense, electric linework creates overwhelming chaos, power, and violence in Leanord’s legend.  Let’s see some more of that!

After going back to “Animalz” and “Julia and Roem” over and over to figure out what the hell is Enki Bilal doing, I was glad to see the stories begin to converge with “The Color of Air”.  Reading Bilal is like reading manga, sometimes you feel you have no idea what’s going on, so you go back, you research the web, and sure enough, it’s exactly what it seemed like. So, alright, this is really heating up now, been a slow burn so far, but I am bated for next installment.

Keep Richard Corben working, especially horror.  He is always welcome to my tastes! “Murky World” is pretty typical output, but it’s still funny.  

Beeple’s moody, dark, subtly-referential work seems solidly within any scifi tradition with a refined sense of content that seems new and fresh but still connected to pulp scifi covers from forever.

Keep up the mix of one-shot, single-page, and installment stories; as long as there’s a balance the long stories are worth waiting for and the short peices are very satisfying and will hold me during that long dark teat time of the soul between issues.

I have two requests: first, can you publish or post an accurate listing of cover images and numbers? I’m one of us, and have been trying to catalog a complete run of HM. Can’t find a listing that matches my own books. Second, please put a lettercol back in the book. On the web, HM has no obvious social media sight for readers and editorial staff, and, of course, neither does the magazine.  Nothing like seeing your name in a message from Heavy Metal.

Griffin, like the Monster.

PS Could somebody look at reprinting Kirchner’s “The Bus”?