Woo boy. This is the main story in this issue, set in a prison in a remote arctic location. A group of mercenaries are brought in to keep the prisoners in line.

Unfortunately, there are three different instances of sexual assault in this story.

On the first page, an attractive young prisoner is solicited in a very heavy-handed way that veers into assault when the advances are rebuffed. This leads to him being gunned down by guards because of the people he ends up killing in self-defense.

On the next page, the daughter of the prison’s doctor is assaulted by the only female mercenary in the group. The mercenary is called off, but the reaction from the doctor’s daughter (in the bottom tier) is meant to give the reader the impression that she might have been into the mercenary if she’d been a little less aggressive. 

On the last page, that same daughter is straight up raped. The rape is not shown, but there’s no confusion (or subtlety) about what’s happening. The rape is later shrugged off in a single panel. Of course, the fact that his daughter has been raped provides impetus to the doctor to act against the mercenaries who are taking over the prison.

It’s not unusual to see sexual assault in the pages of Heavy Metal, but it’s been a year or two since the last time it popped up. The fact that this episode contains three separate instances pushes the whole thing past the line of “problematic” into outright “repugnant” territory. It’s this kind of thing that has made reading this publication so difficult over the years. I didn’t notice this so much when I was younger, but I’m older and my view of the world has changed significantly in the past two decades.

(Heavy Metal issue #139, July 1992 – Pages 18,32&43 Dawson’s Law by Guiral and Rubio)