Son of Heavy Metal (May 1984)

On the last day of fifth grade my mom took me to the College Mall, and while she browsed the shelves at B. Dalton I checked out the magazine rack at the front of the store. Usually, at that age, I was looking for the latest Archie Digest, but I'd also keep my eyes open for an issue of Dragon, the Dungeons & Dragons magazine. Instead, what I found that day was Son of Heavy Metal--and I was not ready for it.

This being a blog about my early love of comics, I don't plan on talking a whole lot about sex here (because, in the '80s, anyway, sex didn't have much of a presence in Marvel comics), but let's just say that Son of Heavy Metal contains a memorably perverse little ten-page story that planted itself in my brain, lounged around in the frontal lobe for a painfully long duration, and didn't migrate to the amygdalae until a couple of months later--and even then it remained, hovering, taunting me, for many years. So much so, in fact, that I spent a prodigious amount of time trying to relocate this issue a few years later, once I'd begun collecting comics and had access to old issues of Heavy Metal via the two comic book shops in my hometown.

Frustratingly enough, despite combing through dozens of issues of Heavy Metal throughout the late '80s and the '90s, I wasn't able to relocate this issue until just five years ago, when I randomly happened upon a posting of the story on some comic fan's blog. Hooray for the Internet.¹

Anyway, despite (or, more likely, because of) its shock-and-awe impact, this special issue of Heavy Metal did not turn me into a preadolescent alt-comics acolyte. Quite the contrary. In any case, those ten shocking pages pushed the rest of the magazine's contents (including its cover, hence the epic search) from my young mind but, all these years later, it's the stories illustrated by Druillet, Moebius, Caza, and Bilal that appeal to me now. Still, this notorious issue is more important to me for its deleterious effects (and its affirmation of the power of comics) than for its superior European content.

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Pointless Footnotes

¹ Sidebar: What I found most shocking, twenty years later, was how little the story shocked me when re-read it. Though still perverse, the story didn't twist my thirty-something brain the way it did my ten-year-old brain. In fact, viewed with mature eyes, it's clear the story's execution is intentionally silly, but its premise--which is 90 percent of what shocked me so much as a kid--still gives me that stomach-sinking feeling when I really think about it....