Moebius

Back in January I commented on how much a piece of Egyptian sculpture I'd seen reminded me of the work of the French illustrator Moebius. I was, it turns out, actually thinking of La Foire aux Immortels by Bilal, another French illustrator. But anyway, I thought it was Moebius and when I looked him up on the internet my brain was flooded by his vast body of intricate and mindblowing work. The best site I found was Quenched Consciousness which, I don't know if you've noticed, I put in my links.

Other than the work itself the most interesting thing I turned up was that the largest exhibition of his work ever put on was currently running. The only thing was it was in Paris. However, I was feeling saucy so I booked myself a Eurostar ticket.

I suspect the first drawing I ever saw by Moebius was the third panel of this cityscape from The Long Tomorrow, which I think was included in some long forgotten sci fi anthology I borrowed from my school library. I'm a big fan of dense, vertiginous future cityscapes and this depiction is possibly the most simply satisfying I've ever seen. The original artwork (in black and white) was on display.

This coloured version is well done - most of the art on display was just black ink on white paper and the lines were so sharp. The addition of colour to most editions of his work seems to bland them out. Seeing the crisp, original pages in the subterranean gallery at the exhibition came close to bringing on sensory overload - it was all I could do to fight the urge to run, gibbering, between all the immaculate little masterpieces. I nearly wore my eyeballs out staring so intently at a picture entitled Chaoma (detail in the second column below) and three pages from Incal Book 4 (detail in first column top).

It's tough finding good images of the pictures I wanted on the internet, and even harder to get hold of copies of paper editions (Moebius should never be out of print). Sadly, I can't find any images at all of his depiction of Jimi Hendrix's disembodied head making its haphazard way, on ectoplasmic tentacles, down some freaky highway. Again, like all the best stuff on display, done in black and white - and somehow, despite how utterly clean the lines of the illustration were, managing to give an incredibly powerful suggestion of motion.

The exhibition catalogue cost 49 euros but having had a chance to look at it I decided it was worth every cent. While I was flipping through it though a bloke came up to the counter, asked about it (in French) and after a short conversation went away looking a bit disappointed. There was a little sign on the counter about le catalogue. I could only make out the last sentence which said "Thank you for your understanding in this matter". Hmm, the preceding sentence all seemed to hinge on this word epuise. After a bit of lurking I strode towards the counter and launched into my spiel: "Je suis anglais. Je ne parle pas francais". The attendant was very good about it but it was clear in about half a second that he didn't speak English. "Le catalogue...", I continued. "Ah, epuise", he said. I pulled my best puzzled face. "Er...sold out", he managed. "Ah, merci". And that was that. Bummer.

I had about four hours before my train so I went for a wander. I remembered from a previous visit a particular book shop and set off to find it. I didn't and drifted to a halt outside Notre Dame. After a refreshing slice of pizza I turned back into the Latin Quarter and immediately hit the motherlode, which, if you're ever comic shopping in Paris, is Rue Dante. Reprints were available in most of them but they were a bit too glossy.

The last shop I went in had a load of slightly earlier, slightly less glossy reprints. I nearly bought the first Humanoides Associes anthology but decided, after about 30 minutes, that I shouldn't really shell out about thirty quid for the sake of the four pages of artwork that I loved. Of course now I'm kicking myself. This was one of the pages that tempted me so.

Further reading

I've just finished reading John Wyndham's Trouble With Lichen. I enjoyed it as much as all the others of his books that I've read, just about. Perhaps I'm getting used to his style. I've praised his originality before but I think having read 2000ad strips like Future Shocks and Time Twisters primes you for this sort of thing.

Back in October I took his The Chrysalids along as a holiday book. I'd nearly bought it once before at that book market under Waterloo Bridge, but I was put off by a terrible cover: an ant warrior thing brandishing a spear. Anyway, on holiday, as with all his books I polished it off in a couple of days. I found it his most disorietating book so far, and that's what you want from science fiction isn't it?

Like many successful authors his most popular novels get reissued as a set and all my copies come from different sets. My favourite of those that I actually own is the Midwich Cuckoos cover that I posted a while back, the rest are fairly bland. My Trouble With Lichen has a cover by Brian Cronin whose versions got a bit of a kicking over at Caustic Cover Critic a while back, and perhaps justifiably. I do like his cover for The Chrysalids though, which is the picture up there, out of all the scenes in the book one of the subtlest to choose from. If I was designing a cover for it I'd probably have gone for a nice, horrific depiction of the chief mutant Gordon Strorm.

Ad astra

I've been having a great run in secondhand book shops recently, the highlight of which has been Spacecraft 2000-2100AD. It was in the window at Oxfam, I had it when I was a kid, I went in and asked: £3.99. How could I resist?

It's a load of sci-fi book cover illustrations gathered together with a narrative spun around them. My favourite back then was the TDA 107C Partisan and I think it probably still is. Published in 1978 its timeline is on the verge of looking a bit ridiculous - work is due to start on Mars Station by 2012. And we'd better get a wiggle on if we're to perfect the warp generator by 2027. But you never know.

Inevitably there's a website dedicated to it now and you can buy mugs, a tee-shirt and little models of the spaceships are planned. I was most intrigued to see that there had been follow up books which I never knew about when I was a kid - Spacewreck: Ghost Ships and Derelicts of Space looks cool.

Reject sleep! Run!

Like most people I like the film Logan's Run. I loved the tv series as well when I was a kid, though I can't remember any of the details now. Better than the film or the series though is the novel. I hadn't realised it was based on a book until I found it in a secondhand bookshop when I was on holiday years ago.

It's only 144 pages long and I think I read it in a day (holidays with my parents were like that). What surprised me at the time was how different it was from the film. For such a short book the authors have deftly sketched one of the most convincing nightmare future worlds I've ever read. The backdrop of a revolution by the young and their society's highly permissive attitude to sex and drugs no doubt stem directly from the book having been written (or at least published) in 1967. Not surprisingly the film makers chose to concentrate more on the cinematic potential of the free lovin' rather than the hallucimills and the Little War. One of the most quietly impressive things about the story is the language or slang used by the characters. Whilst none of the words have exactly come into use they don't seem clunkingly ridiculous - often the fate of sci fi neologisms.

Each and every one of the situations in the film is dealt with with more subtly and/or detail in the book. But that's just films and books for you I suppose. Some of the changes were probably dictated by budget, the robot sculptor Box for instance. In the film he has all the lethal grace of a tin plate wheelie bin, while in the book he's a very plausibly psychopathic cyborg. Other changes though are less forgivable. Francis, Logan's fellow Sandman: his death in the film is easily the most egregious example of how crude the film is in comparison to the book.

One last point - the guns that Logan and all the other Sandmen use in the book are old fashioned pearl handled revolvers rather than the (admittedly very cool) blasters wielded in the film. An interesting twist to the revolvers though was that each of their six chambers is filled with a different type of bullet: Nitro is a high explosive, Homer is a heat seeker, etc. Oh, and the handles are programmed to recognise their user's palm print and to explode if handled by anyone else. All very familiar to readers of Judge Dredd but never in all my years of reading 2000AD did I ever hear an acknowledgement.

A remake is meant to be on the cards - if they want it to stand apart from its predecessor they could always go a bit mad and follow the novel more closely.