Updated: Aug 3
In the summer of 2011, I decided to borrow my father’s collection of Heavy Metal and start reading through it. I’d read the whole thing when I was 16 years old, but my memory of that first reading are patchy and inconsistent. This time, I would be bringing a more in-depth knowledge of the artists and the general context of the market to the task.
At some point, I figured out that I could get daily content out of the process if I posted a handful of pages from each issue as I read through them. The first page was posted on October 24, 2011. This blog has been running continuously since then. It started on Tumblr and had to migrate to WordPress when the censors showed up, but a feed from the WordPress site posts on the original Tumblr site now – with only occasional automatic censorship from the Tumblr overlords.
The really weird thing about this particular ten-year anniversary is how it lines up with what I’m reading as I write this; I’m currently finishing up the 2011 issues. In fact, the last of those pages just posted a few days ago. I’ll be well into the 2012 issues by the time this goes live. An interesting twist is that the May 2012 issue is also the 35th Anniversary issue, which means that it took me ten years to read 35 years worth of Heavy Metal.
Now that I’ve read these issues, there is another syncronicity worth noting. As it turns out, 2010-2012 were pivotal years in Heavy Metal’s publication history. Kevin Eastman’s final Publisher’s Note ran in the September 2010 issue, which ran to 130 pages. From November 2010, the issues lost eight pages and the Publisher’s Note, a bellwether of things to come.
In Summer of 2011 – right as I was contemplating my re-read – the last of the seasonal specials was published. These seasonal specials had been running since 1992, the year after Kevin Eastman purchased the publication. In 1999, they increased to three times a year, making them a full third of the annual output of the magazine for over twenty years. And they just sort of stopped in 2011.
Four issues later, the magazine switched entirely to a completely different format for indicating what issue the reader was holding. From 1977 to 2012, Heavy Metal was designated by a Month or Season and a year, making it very easy for this archivist to keep things straight. The next issue, Kevin Eastman decided, was number #259.
The immediate reason for this change was to hide the fact that the issue was several months late – a side-effect of certain organizational issues caused by Howard Jurofsky, who was notably absent from the masthead for the first time since the magazine was founded in the offices of National Lampoon. It’s not entirely clear what happened specifically, but I’ve been told that Kevin Eastman still has nothing good to say about Jurofsky.
The events of 2010 and 2011 were transparent to me at the time, but I remember the sea change that was switching to issue numbers, mostly because it was such a random number to pick up on. (My own calculations make me wonder which issues were counted and which ones were excluded, mostly because the seasonal specials were obviously ignored.) I also remember thinking that I’d eventually get to that point in the re-read and ponder the impact at the time. Thanks, past me.
I doubt that it will take me ten more years to finish reading the remaining issues of Heavy Metal. From 2012 to 2021, fifty issues were published, which comes to about five and a half issues a year. By contrast, there were 108 issues (including specials) published from 1977 to 1985, a comparable period. That took a long time to read through. Reading through half that amount of issues will be far less onerous.
The one thing that I’m looking forward to is the Grant Morrison issues. From what I’ve seen, they look like a throwback to the peak issues of 1982-84, when each issue felt like an unique art object. On the other hand, I’m not looking forward to the point where Heavy Metal started boosting their sales using alternative covers.
Normal posting resumes tomorrow.
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