Dear readers, yesterday was the last post in this blog. There are no more new issues of Heavy Metal to post about. I’ve read the complete run, all 373 issues. And I have made the case for why there is every reason to believe that there will be no more new issues of Heavy Metal.

The twelve years since I started this blog have been crazy. I’ve changed jobs, moved three times, sold a condo, bought a house, gotten divorced, and my father died. I moved the site off of Tumblr onto WordPress, then reactivated the feed back to Tumblr. And I wrote a book about the history of Heavy Metal. If you know someone who wants to publish it, please let me know.

Don’t despair about not having anything new to look at. Instead, dig through the archives of the blog and find stuff that speaks to you. There is a lot of material to browse through. And if you feel compelled to seek out physical copies of the magazine, I recommend that you start with the Grant Morrison material (issues 280-292). They’re good – some of the best in the entire run.

I have a lot of complicated feelings about Heavy Metal. On the one hand, it presented artists to American audiences that they would not have ordinarily encountered. On the the other hand, there is some deeply fucked up material in the back issues. As with any good anthology, there was some very high quality material over the course of the 45 year run. But also, as with any anthology, there was a decent amount of sub-optimal material. It read it and posted about it so that you didn’t have to. You’re welcome.

At the same time, these were my father’s magazines. When he let me borrow them, the magazine was very much a going concern. When he died, continuing the blog became a sort of quiet tribute to him and his collector’s mentality. The news that implied that Heavy Metal had no publisher came out the same week of the tenth anniversary of his death, which was a hell of a coincidence.

And now this blog has caught up with the magazine.

Thank you very much for reading.

RM Rhodes