The Most Important Series Heavy Metal Ever Published
I'm Age
More than anything else, Jeffrey Catherine Jones was a painter. The vast majority of her early professional output were commissions for painted covers for a wide variety of fantasy and science fiction books from the mid 60s onward. She was nominated for the Hugo Award for the best fan artist in 1967 and the Hugo for best professional artist in 1970, 71, and 72. Everyone talks about the beauty of her paintings. Frank Frazetta called her "the greatest living painter.”
However, it is my fervent belief that the most personal work that Jones created was a series of one-page strips for Heavy Metal called I'm Age, which started in September of 1981. These were not painted, they were drawn. Simple pen and ink, black on white pages. I’m Age was neither the only nor the first comics work that Jones did, but the most obvious antecedent to I’m Age was Idyl, which ran in the pages of National Lampoon magazine starting in January of 1972.
Because National Lampoon was a humor magazine, Idyl was ostensibly a humor strip. The humor in Idyl varied from absurdism to dad jokes that didn’t quite land. But the real appeal of Idyl was the art. The vast majority of the characters in Idyl were naked - sometimes they were prepubescent children having deep conversations, sometimes they were pregnant women who never seemed to give birth - all wandering around a variety of unspoiled landscapes. Imagine a much better drawn Peanuts with far more naked people and far less character development.
At first, the principal difference between Idyl and I’m Age was the materials Jones used. Idyl was done with a brush, while I’m Age was done with a pen. She deliberately made the change because she enjoyed the resistance of the pen on the page. The difference in linework is immediately obvious and I’m Age feels more like a series of refined sketches where the audience gets to see some of the rough work on the page.
Content-wise, the first handful of I’m Age strips were cut from the same cloth as Idyl - elliptical setups with jokey endings. This makes sense - it’s very likely that the relationship Jones had with National Lampoon got her the gig at Heavy Metal (which was published by National Lampoon at the time) and it seems clear that her first instinct was to replicate the formula that worked before.
Within a few months, Jones loosened up and got more comfortable and seemed to realize that she could do just about anything as long as there were breasts on the page. The pages opened up, with backgrounds becoming more and more minimal until they disappeared entirely. The text got sparser and almost poetic, approaching a monologue that might or might not be intended to be heard by another person - and, if they did hear, the subject was almost never obvious or evident.
One of the exercises that students are taught when they are learning to draw is to draw the negative space - the outline created by the shape instead of the shape itself. If you look closely, you can see this manifest in Jones’s work in general; I’m Age almost relies on negative space for its effect. It also feels like she is doing this with her text - interrogating something by describing the negative space around it instead of addressing it head-on. This is one of the main reasons why I’m Age is such an under-appreciated text - it’s an extended series of allusions that doesn’t offer a clue as to what is being referred to. Even the name of the strip is a puzzle - if you remove the punctuation, you have the word “image.”
Jones died in May 2011, a few months after I had started reading the complete run of Heavy Metal, but well before I got to her pages. One of the things I learned from her obituaries was the fact that she was trans. When I got to I’m Age, I was astonished to discover that this piece of information was the key that unlocked her work. Specifically, certain I’m Age strips clearly reflect Jones’ ambivalence about her gender identity.
(Ironically, Gene Phillips wrote a review in the December 1981 issue of The Comics Journal that covers I’m Age, among other features, and says Jones “communicates nothing of significance.” This is typical of reviews at the time.)
Some of my early memories come from about the age of 4 or 5. By then I knew I wanted to be a girl. Maybe I was born with a kind of gender inversion-- some call it a birth defect. I know nothing of these things. I do know that my identification has always been with females-- in books, movies, art and life. My best friends have always been female and I have always been exclusively physically attracted to females. So, along comes puberty. Whoa! We were all confused, I know, but within that maelstrom was my desire for, and the desire to be, a girl. Until the age of 12 I knew nothing regarding sexual matters. I saw boys with girls. That's what I saw. In the south, in the '50s there were no gays and no lesbians, and certainly no one like me. So I became secretive. In my own mind I became ashamed, guilty and worthless-- this was the road I started down so long ago. After many years of therapy, and many years of trying to drink away the shame, I arrived, ziiiiiiiiiiiiiiip in the year 1998. In August of that year I decided to stop the denial and start living as a woman. In October I finally obtained the name of and saw the leading expert on the subject-- the New York endocrinologist who wrote and rewrote the book. After extensive tests, both mental and physical, I started hormonal gender re-assignment therapy. It's been about a year now, but back in May blood tests showed that I had become medically female. The process continues. Hair and androgens are tenacious. As my doctor put it, "I will induce menopause in you so you can enter puberty again. This time as a female." My development is just that. People have been unimaginably supportive, and slowly that shame is passing away. My wife, Maryellen, has been my backbone through all of this. I've never known such acceptance and love. People have also said to me how brave I must be. If I understand courage to be self- possession and resolution in the face of fear, then there is certainly no bravery here. I had no choice really. There is certainly no fear of being female. Is it the fear of castration or the loss of testosterone-- that wall of defense around the precious y-chromosome-the fear they speak of? Who knows men? And I WAS one for 55 years! I suppose I could go on forever about all this.
It’s important to note that Jones was thirty, married, and at the height of her popularity when she created Idyl for National Lampoon. By 1981, she was divorced, approaching forty, and had switched art materials specifically because she wanted a challenge - or, perhaps, she wanted to externalize her struggle. I know for a fact that the approach of birthdays that can be expressed as significant fractions of a century can lead people to contemplate their status quo. I believe that’s where Jones was at in her life. And Heavy Metal provided her with a forum where she could talk about the most intimate thing she had on her mind, as long as it was couched in allusion and riddles with a sort of funny punchline at the end.
Jones produced 36 strips for Heavy Metal and, of them, almost a third obviously contain content that could be best understood through the lens of Jones’ ambivalence about her gender identity. There may be others that I, a cisgender AMAB person, may not notice. The important thing is that I think it’s fair to state that Heavy Metal unknowingly published a critical work by an early trans creator.
The April 1982 strip starts to lean in this direction, but the June 1982 strip contains the following text: “One of the earliest lessons learned and taught was that if you pull away forcefully from something in life, you either take more with you or you leave more behind than if you just wait until you are released.” This is accompanied by two characters breaking a turkey wishbone, which is rendered in a way that is suggestively vaginal in the first panel.
August 1982 is an extended meditation that starts with “I’ve heard of cutting off your nose to spite your face, but where would you cut?” and continues with “If you can find a place where something stops, I’m afraid it must be a parasite.” There is also a single panel of a twig with a couple of small berries on it.
The strips from January and February 1983 both show women with obvious phallic symbols jutting from their groins. The text of April 1983 is about blending in and wearing a disguise, ending with a woman holding a branch from her groin saying “I’m not myself today.” July 1983 ends with a female presenting character hiding behind a sheet saying “It’s more interesting to live not knowing than to have an answer that might be wrong.”
January 1984 has a single panel with a crouching woman almost entirely in shadow except for a single visible hand at her crotch with the text “But I don’t always think about germs. Sometimes I think about other things.” February 1984 is an entire strip of contemplative wordplay about the word “member” where the word “dismember” is prominently featured. July 1984 has a female presenting character wearing a shirt who says “I became different to make me right.” Finally, there was a single strip in the Summer 1987 issue that starts with a female presenting character saying “They say when I refuse to admit something, it's called denial.”
September 1981 - the first appearance of I’m Age - was a pivotal time in the publication history of Heavy Metal. The movie had just been released the previous month and, according to Heavy Metal CEO Matthew Medney, what people remember about the Heavy Metal film was Taarna, the sexy action hero wearing very little clothing. The September 1981 issue featured the iconic cover of Taarna by Chris Achilleos. A lot of people were going to discover the magazine in the coming months and readership jumped significantly. For all intents and purposes, the movie brought the existence of the magazine to the notice of mainstream culture.
At the same time, Heavy Metal had been expanding the scope of its content. There had always been American creators in Heavy Metal, but by 1981 the balance had shifted to the point that about half of the magazine was translated European reprints and half was American artists, unlike issues in the 1970s which were almost entirely translated European reprints. If you’re looking for a specific point where the balance started to shift, I would point to the appearance of Paul Kirchner’s The Bus in the January 1979 issue.
I’m Age arrived in a magazine where strips like The Bus, John Findley’s Tex Arcana, Jim Steranko’s adaptation of Outland, Richard Corben’s Den II, Rod Kierkegaard Jr’s Rock Opera and Howard Chaykin’s Cody Starbuck were the main ongoing features; these were all by male creators and all had male protagonists. August 1981 had also seen the debut of Dossier, the review section masterminded by Lou Stathis that ran until 1985.
Most importantly, John Workman was the art director. He was largely responsible for the look and feel of the magazine during this period, to the point where it was obvious when he left in 1984. Workman also produced an occasional single page strip during this period, which speaks to the fact that they needed to fill pages. In an environment like that, a single page strip like I’m Age was perfect because it can be put anywhere in the magazine they need to fill a gap. As long as it wasn’t actively offensive material, Jones was free to do whatever she wanted to do.
In 1981, Heavy Metal featured a lot less ultraviolence than you would expect and about as much nudity as you would expect for a magazine with its reputation. It was really much more of an art magazine where the focus was on showcasing several different kinds of artists and genres. There were multiple artists producing nudity in each issue, but the two strips where it was most likely to find nudity in each issue were Den II and I’m Age. Because yes, for some, the entire value of Heavy Metal came down to the existence of cartoon breasts rendered in a loving manner by a foreign master.
Which is ironic because I’m Age is, in many ways, the antithesis of Den - a story about a young man who builds an apparatus that transports him to another land where is incarnated as the character Den, a bald burly man with a large penis who spends most of the story naked. Both artists liked drawing naked women, but for completely different reasons. Both stories contain an element of fantasy regarding their penises, but Corben is much more confident about expressing his fantasy because it is more socially acceptable. Or perhaps less socially challenging, even for someone living in New York City in the early 1980s.
Heavy Metal was a vital market for comic artists in the early 1980s and I’m Age became the outlier that proved the rule that Heavy Metal would publish just about anything, as long as there were breasts in it. This is not the environment that I would have expected to find a trans narrative, minimalist diary comics written in the third person that could only be decoded by the events in the creator’s life, years later.
To this point, the only intersex character that had appeared in Heavy Metal was in a short story by Jean-Michel Nicollet in the November 1977 issue called Master. A female presenting character is abducted and brought to a high castle where a lord rants about the fact that radiation has killed all the women, but here is one survivor. His current concubine kills herself in response because monogamy is a thing that still exists in the post-apocalypse. And then we are shown that the person who was abducted is intersex. The reaction is to throw the intersex character out the window and call them a demon in the process. Not exactly the progressive stance on trans characters that the existence of I’m Age would tend to suggest. Instead, having read the entire run, I can say with some confidence that Nicollet’s story is more typical of the attitudes of the magazine as a whole than Jones’ work is.
The last regular strip of I’m Age ran in the July 1984 issue of Heavy Metal. There was a follow up strip in the Summer of 1987 issue - the 10th Anniversary issue, where a number of strips were brought back - but that was it. John Workman left Heavy Metal later in 1984, which means that I’m Age ran during the height of what I consider to be Heavy Metal’s golden period.
In fact, I would go further and assert that the existence of I’m Age by Jeffery Catherine Jones in the pages of Heavy Metal significantly contributes to why it was a golden period for Heavy Metal. Even though I’m Age leaned towards minimalism, the quality of her art was equal to any of the other artists that were running at the time. Although nobody recognized that Jones was a trans voice (and, I would argue, Jones was not confident about that either) the fact that the magazine gave her enough creative freedom to express herself to the degree that she felt comfortable really means that the magazine was successful as a platform for a deeply disparate range of voices.
If I had to argue for the artistic merits of Heavy Metal, I would use the existence of I’m Age as my primary proof. Yes, Heavy Metal brought us Moebius. But it also brought us Jones. And we should be celebrating the latter just as much as the former.
The Idyl and I’m Age strips were published in a beautiful collected edition by Donald Grant in 2015. There is no mention of Jones’ gender transition and she is misgendered throughout, but it’s worth picking up just to have the whole thing in a single book so that you don’t have to lend someone a stack of magazines. But if you have access to the stack of magazines, I recommend that as the preferred reading experience because then you get a sense of how much of a male gaze the magazine was courting into in late 1981 and how much it leaned into the audience it attracted by 1984. I'm Age demonstrates how far a strip could lean away from that direction and still be published in Heavy Metal.
Either way you read the material, it is absolutely worth your effort to track down I’m Age. Artistically, it’s very much Jones noodling in a corner for an under-appreciative audience (it was consistently panned in the letters columns at the time). But if you only know her from her paintings, it’s a completely different view on an extraordinary artist. The content, though, elevates I’m Age from a marginal work by a celebrated artist into something much more central, almost a defining work of her career. And that work would not exist if Heavy Metal, of all publications, had not been open to work by disparate voices at a critical time in its publication history. In a very significant way, this is the most important work that Heavy Metal ever published.