Share your Heavy Metal Story
Testimonials
One of the most interesting things about Heavy Metal magazine is that everyone has a story about how and when they first encountered it. When I was interviewing people for my book I always asked people about their first encounter as the opening question because everyone had a story and I find those stories fascinating. The main intention of this website is to capture as many of these stories as possible and provide an archive that can be browsed and themselves in the larger history of the magazine.
If you would like to participate, please enter your story in the form below, along with your name. Your testimonial about your Heavy Metal origin story will go into a queue for moderation and will be published as soon as I can review and approve.
At the same time, you have the opportunity to add your email address to my mailing list so that you can receive updates on my book. If you don’t want to add your testimonial, but just want to be added to the mailing list, you have that option as well.
(Submissions are moderated and may take 24 to 72 hours to go live, depending on life events.)
Read the stories of other people who have experienced Heavy Metal
RM Rhodes
Featured!
July 22, 2026 at 9:08:32 AM
I can honestly say that I never had the experience of a first encounter with the idea of Heavy Metal in the wild. I’ve always known that Heavy Metal existed. There are pictures of the iconic Heavy Metal binders in the background of family photos from my youth and I grew up with those binders on the top shelf above the family encyclopedias.
My father was a collector and one of the things he collected was Heavy Metal. The family legend was that my father was an early adopter of Heavy Metal and an early subscriber. My mother, the only survivor who has any knowledge of these things, vaguely recalls that my father’s older brother brought a copy with him on one of his periodic visits. Knowing the personalities involved, this sounds pretty accurate.
That uncle would sometimes show up out of the blue and crash on our couch. My father was a collector and had a collector’s mentality and was exactly the kind of person that would latch on to something like Heavy Metal and go out of his way to collect the back issues that he didn’t already have. It sounds like a good story. And that’s how a family legend starts.
When I was sixteen, I sat down and read everything that had been published to date, cover to cover. I skipped over anything that didn’t look interesting and I really had no idea who the creators were, but I read the majority of the magazine. I was reading primarily Marvel comics at the time, but Heavy Metal taught me that comics didn’t have to look like that - they could look like anything the artist wanted them to look like.
It was probably inevitable that I would end up writing about Heavy Metal as I got older - it’s a family thing, after all.
Tom Pajak
August 5, 2026 at 3:32:17 PM
In 1979, I was twelve years old, and my family was on a road trip in Southern Alberta. We stopped at a convenience store in a small town for some snacks and a bathroom break. I headed over to the magazine rack to perhaps pick up some ‘Archie’ digests to read while on the road. A magazine with the intriguing title, ‘Heavy Metal’ caught my eye, and I picked it up, thinking it was a music magazine like ‘Rolling Stone’ or ‘Creem’.
Well. Turns out it was chock full of comics, which to young me was like dog turds to a fly. Not only was it in full colour, but the art was detailed, elaborate, and best of all to pubescent me…there were BOOBIES! On full display! Hot diggity! I cautiously took it to the counter to pay for it, thinking they weren’t going to sell vile porn to a little kid, but I recall the transaction went off without a hitch. Later, back on the road, I devoured the magazine from cover to cover, being introduced to the art of Möbius, Drullet, and Richard Corben. (I remember Moebius drew a story written by Dan O’Bannon, called, ‘The Long Tomorrow’.)
It started a life-long interest in the kind of comics that weren’t just superheroes or goofy teenagers for me. I also learned, thanks to the BOOBIES, that there was more to ‘Little Tommy’ then the drainage of processed Slurpee water…
fred
August 5, 2026 at 3:32:03 PM
I first saw Heavy Metal Magazine when someone at school showed me Number 1, April 1977, when it appeared. I started buying them from then on, through the 80s. I was just 18, I wasn't so into comics growing up, mostly I'd read Mad Magazine and read some of my uncle's comics when we visited ( I liked G.I. Combat and Sgt Rock) and by then I'd read Lord of the Rings. But I greatly enjoyed the other worlds of the Adult Illustrated Fantasy Magazine through my 20s. In 1990 I moved, and gave away my almost-complete collection of Heavy Metal Magazine. I came across an almost-complete set in a resale shop in 2005, and reminiscing the joys of my misspent youth, I bought it, and used the then-new internet shopping to complete the set, and started buying them again. Since then I've enjoyed the excellent heavymetalmagazinefanpage.com, watched the HM website forums come and go, started my own little blog, enjoyed R.M. Rhodes' HM Tumblr, and saw the decline and death of Heavy Metal. And I lived long enough to see its rebirth, and I hope I keep living to see Heavy Metal Magazine's continued resurgence.