I first became aware of MOEBIUS as I read STARLOG voraciously absorbing every detail about the making of Ridley Scott's ALIEN. Along with Ralph McQuarrie, MOEBIUS was my fave childhood conceptual artist. When TRON came about... I was... blown completely away. By that time, I was already reading HEAVY METAL MAGAZINE - I'd seen HEAVY METAL about a dozen times at the drive-in with my parents. The TAARNA sequence just screaming Jean Giraud aka Moebius. We know his work cinematically on films like WILLOW, MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE, THE ABYSS, THE FIFTH ELEMENT and we can see his influences upon countless other films.
I met Jean Giraud at COMIC CON about 17-18 years ago. It was before AintItCool, I was just a rotund geek wandering Comic Con with my sketch book. I'd just ran into Jack Kirby, who drew me a quick happy face when I recognized Jean Giraud. I quietly walked up to him and asked if he would do a quick sketch for me. He looked at me and said, "You know, I'm not Moebius." and I responded, "Moebius is a dream, you're Jean Giraud." He smiled and drew a full page sketch that became one of the centerpieces of that particular sketchbook.
I stand by what I told him. Moebius is a dream. A dream that I never will fully wake from. From the spacesuits in ALIEN to the world of TRON - to the brilliant work on Alejandro Jodorowsky DUNE which never came to be. Where I truly fell in love with him was when I picked up BLUEBERRY - his Western comic which was adapted into a film, that couldn't quite do the pen & inks justice. Though I'd be lying if I said I loved anything more than his AIRTIGHT GARAGE, ARZACH or L'INCAL which he made with Jodorowsky.
He had a style that was instantly recognizable, his stories thoroughly rocked my mind as a child and as an adult. But more than anything, I'll remember when he handed me back my book and my face lit up, I caught his smile and a twinkle in his eyes. He said, "I don't usually do that, but there's something special about you." At the time, that meant the world to me. When a hero tells you that, it means the world.
Jean Giraud was one of our great comic and film artists. He gave us entire worlds to live in & dream in. I utterly despise living in a world where I don't have new work of his to wallow in, but the work he lived to give us, it's enough to ponder for a lifetime. It is cold and rainy today. Somehow fitting. But for now, I just want to ride some manner of flying beast through the rock formations of Utah.
