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- Jan 22, 2008
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Arzach
This is a collection of four wordless stories ("Arzach", "Harzak", "Arzak" and "Harzakc") from 1975, about a mysterious man in a cloak and large hat, flying around a surreal landscape on what looks like a fat pterodactyl. They were originally published in the magazine Metal Hurlant and are highly-regarded and pretty influential: apparently the "Taarna" section of the film Heavy Metal owes a lot to Arzach, and I suspect several computer games are influenced by its imagery.
I had expected Arzach himself to be a mighty hero, and the stories to be epic in style: instead, he seems an almost absurd figure at points. In two of the stories, he checks out women like a dirty old man, and his expressions of annoyance and shock are almost cartoony (in fairness, he might be rescuing the woman in the first story from captivity in a tower). The first story is essentially a visual joke. The third is a surreal interlude and the fourth has almost no logical narrative at all. It all feels very much like an English parody of "French art": it doesn't make much sense and there are a lot of willies on display.
And yet... it sort of works. None of the stories really explains what's going on, which gives it a hallucinatory quality. The pictures, which remind me of psychedelic band art of the 1970s, are intriguing and very well-executed. The style makes me think of both Georges Seurat and Robert Crumb, although the subject matter doesn't. The third story, which might be the oddest, focusses on another character entirely and feels like a dream. There's something vaguely fascinating about it all.
The volume I bought also includes a fifth Arzach story, from 1987, which has words and gives a very loose "explanation" of what's going on (it's still baffling). Overall, it's hard to know what to make of this: it feels intriguing but slight. I think a better purchase is his later work The World of Edena and particularly The Art of Edena, but this is still worth a look.
This is a collection of four wordless stories ("Arzach", "Harzak", "Arzak" and "Harzakc") from 1975, about a mysterious man in a cloak and large hat, flying around a surreal landscape on what looks like a fat pterodactyl. They were originally published in the magazine Metal Hurlant and are highly-regarded and pretty influential: apparently the "Taarna" section of the film Heavy Metal owes a lot to Arzach, and I suspect several computer games are influenced by its imagery.
I had expected Arzach himself to be a mighty hero, and the stories to be epic in style: instead, he seems an almost absurd figure at points. In two of the stories, he checks out women like a dirty old man, and his expressions of annoyance and shock are almost cartoony (in fairness, he might be rescuing the woman in the first story from captivity in a tower). The first story is essentially a visual joke. The third is a surreal interlude and the fourth has almost no logical narrative at all. It all feels very much like an English parody of "French art": it doesn't make much sense and there are a lot of willies on display.
And yet... it sort of works. None of the stories really explains what's going on, which gives it a hallucinatory quality. The pictures, which remind me of psychedelic band art of the 1970s, are intriguing and very well-executed. The style makes me think of both Georges Seurat and Robert Crumb, although the subject matter doesn't. The third story, which might be the oddest, focusses on another character entirely and feels like a dream. There's something vaguely fascinating about it all.
The volume I bought also includes a fifth Arzach story, from 1987, which has words and gives a very loose "explanation" of what's going on (it's still baffling). Overall, it's hard to know what to make of this: it feels intriguing but slight. I think a better purchase is his later work The World of Edena and particularly The Art of Edena, but this is still worth a look.
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