Moebius/Jean Giraud

When I was a kid, my father had these comics that I read all the time. The crown jewel in his col­lec­tion were Moe­bius’ Inkal series, which chron­i­cles the adven­tures of sci-fi  pri­vate inves­ti­ga­tor John Difool. Ever since this first meet with Moe­bius, I have kept an eye on his work, and tracked down every­thing I could find of the old stuff he did.

He is per­haps most known for his cre­ation of the west­ern comic Blue­berry. He started this comic in Pilote, and went grad­u­ally over to doing sci­ence fic­tion when he started Metal Hurlant, a french sci­ence fic­tion comic (later incar­nated into Heavy metal in the english-speaking world)

One espe­cially note­wor­thy story is that he was deeply involved in the film adap­ta­tion of Dune, together with Ale­jan­dro Jodor­owsky and Sal­vador Dalí, among oth­ers. The entire project was killed due to dis­tri­b­u­tion issues, but then the gang said “crap. Now what?”. So they made Alien instead, just like that.
Now that we’ve seen Avatar, Star trek and so on, it’s only a ques­tion of time before some­one picks up the pieces and makes the Dune film, for real this time.
Another film project with Giraud that was actu­ally fin­ished? The fifth ele­ment, that’s what. Oh, and Tron, noth­ing less.

The emi­nent blog Sci-fi-o-rama has col­lected some of Girauds work for Dune, it’s all amazing.

It is now impos­si­ble for me to read any of his comics for more than a cou­ple min­utes straight, before I have to make a run for my sketchbook.His com­plete mas­tery of form achieved by sim­ple line work is incred­i­bly sat­is­fy­ing and inspir­ing. I have a pock­et­book copy of Arzach, which now is quite a bit heav­ier than when I bought it, thanks to all the notes and paper clips I put in there.

As an inter­est­ing side note, Giraud is a good friend of Hayao Miyazaki, the heart of Stu­dio Ghi­bli. Appar­ently, Giraud named his daugh­ter Nau­si­caä, after the lead char­ac­ter from Miyazaki’s film Nau­si­caä of the Val­ley of the Wind. Which just hap­pens to be on my top three most awe­some films ever list.

his offi­cial home­page is in french, so you’re bet­ter off at wikipedia. Here is a really nice doc­u­men­tary about his his­tory as an artist.

Egon Schiele

This guy really brings the human fig­ure to a whole new level. I don’t remem­ber much about him from my art his­tory class, so use Wikipedia if you must know. Any­ways, he was a pro­tégé of Gus­tav Klimt, another of my favourites. He was an early expres­sion­ist, although his style is being referred to as art noveau a lot.   And he got him­self in quite a bit of trou­ble with the moral­ity police thanks to his con­tin­u­ous por­trayal of naked women, and on one point got locked up for it, too.

His paint­ings are awe­some, but it’s his draw­ings that inter­est me the most, where I can ana­lyze it for myself. I remem­ber a lot of the stuff I did in early art school was all based on my ref­er­ences of Schiele.

I guess that does it for this edi­tion of Jacob tells you what makes him tick. If you want more posts like these, holler back in the comments!