Moebius: God

Rather than waiting until the aged genius passes away to bestow heaps of praises upon him, I figured I’d take a moment to create a tribute to the master of illustration: Jean Giraud.

Jean Giraud, aka Moebius, is the single greatest influence on my art. Born in Paris in 1938, he is in my opinion, by far the greatest illustrator to have lived. Moebius doesn’t have a particular style; rather, he has thousands of styles, often unique to the project he is working on. One of the founders and lead contributors to the seminal 1970′s comic magazine, Metal Hurlant (better known on this side of the Atlantic as Heavy Metal Magazine), his career has been as prolific as it has far reaching and influential.

You may know him indirectly from his contributions as storyboard artist for movies such as Alien, Abyss, 5th Element, Tron or countless others. His short comic with Dan O’Bannon, The Long Tomorrow, influenced the phenomenal movie Blade Runner as well as the writings of William Gibson, my favorite science fiction author.

I’ve learned so much from seeing and absorbing Moebius’ works. I’ve focused on drawing speed and line quality. I’ve learned to embrace the surreal and non-clich� in my own work, I’ve learned to adopt countless styles of drawing and creating, I’ve learned to play with narrative flow and just make stuff up as I go along. But my own work pales in comparison to the master.

I’ve long since stopped reading comics, and long since stopped drawing, yet the Moebius influence pervades my work even to this day. He was my last, and single greatest, influence in drawing.

There is precious little of his work on the web, and I don’t have a scanner, so alas I can’t provide many good examples of what he is capable of. Suffice to say I have at least 12 of his graphic novels, my favorite being his and Stan Lee’s epic Silver Surfer: Parable.

A thing of beauty, Silver Surfer is graceful, angelic and renaissance-inspired. Galactus is a massive false god who attempts to destroy human civilization. Page after page of jaw-dropping futuristic cityscapes, glass citadels and epic battles for earth’s fate.

Jean Giraud is a fountain of creativity. He is unto drawing, what Michelangelo is unto marble sculpture: pure genius. Horror, eroticism, fantasy, sci-fi, gorgeous desert landscapes, surrealism… he does it all, and better than I’ve seen it done before or since.

A documentary about Moebius is posted online at drawn.ca.

To see how strong an influence he was on my teenage mind, check out the old drawings at the bottom of my portfolio page.