Crepax’s Valentina shows up in the pages of Heavy Metal for the first time. There was mention of the feature in an international comics column a few months back, followed by a letter from Crepax himself in a subsequent issue, which makes me wonder if the column prompted the inclusion of this piece.

The blue-on-blue artwork is probably not the best presentation of Valentina, but I’ve always regarded the fractured panel breakdowns as the real innovation that Crepax brought to the table and those are on display here. The rapid back-and-forth intercutting between the eyes of the two characters in the upper right corner (with accompanying eyeball close-up) really draws the attention to the interplay between the two characters, far more than the dialogue does. In fact, most of Crepax’s work is intelligible without the dialog, seeing how it contains a lot of dreamstate images.

(Heavy Metal issue #45, December 1980 – Page 55 Valentina by Crepax)