There has been some discussion in the letters column of the magazine over the course of the previous few months about whether Ranxerox is too violent. In this page, we see an unnamed character get his head blown apart in the fourth panel – as brutal a visual as I’ve seen in the pages of Heavy Metal to this point.

The concept is that the two cars are recreating a Ben Hur-style chariot race, complete with video cameras and ultraviolence for a music video. And, at the end of this episode, Ranx destroys both cars – completely forgetting that his friend the car crash fetishist has been locked naked in the trunk the whole time. If this strip is satire, it’s lost on me.

(Heavy Metal issue #84, March 1984 – Page 64 Ranxerox by Tamburini and Liberatore)