The story itself is slighter than it tries to be – the dwarf sells his friend’s body for earthly delights and is haunted for it for the rest of his life. What’s interesting is the the third tier, where said earthly delights are combined into an extremely effective montage. There’s even something in each image that almost serves as a thematic panel break. That panel is very effective.

(Heavy Metal Issue #235, March 2008 – Page 84 A Dark Inheritance by Principe)

If I was assembling my rogue’s gallery of examples of how not to lay out dialogue, the first panel here would be near the top of the list. It makes sense once you slow down to parse everything out, but it’s not at all intuitive. And comics should always be intuitive.

(Heavy Metal Issue #235, March 2008 – Page 75 Colt the Outlander: Wanted Dead or Alive by Aradio)

The high-concept twist ending of this story is that these guys are going to cook the zombie meat and eat them with hamburger buns. Which is gross, but plausible. This page caught my eye because of the interesting approach in the top image. One of the things that comics can do very well is layer a whole bunch of different actions into a single image. It’s not always interesting and it’s not always effective, but it’s a perfectly valid approach.

(Heavy Metal Issue #235, March 2008 – Page 27 Dead Meat by McCormack)

I really like how these features are laid out like articles from a completely different future dimension. There are a lot of underlying cultural assumptions that the reader is meant to just know.

(Heavy Metal Issue #235, March 2008 – Page 8 Galactic Geographic by Kofoed)

The letter and response is very interesting with regard to ongoing sales of Heavy Metal. Eastman points out that the closing of Tower Records and other record stores had a knock-on effect of closing distribution points for magazines, which impacted sales of Heavy Metal. It’s a fascinating snapshot of the struggle that publishers had to deal with in the early 2000s.

(Heavy Metal Issue #235, March 2008 – Page 6 Publisher’s Note)

One of the artists that he doesn’t mention as an influence – but clearly should – is Larry Elmore. That painting looks like it could have made the cover of Dragon magazine back in the day.

(Heavy Metal Issue #234, January 2008 – Page 119 Gallery on Bane)

I had no idea that this website existed, nor did I realize that it was still a going concern. Unfortunately, it’s built on Flash, so I wasn’t able to really poke around very much.

(Heavy Metal Issue #234, January 2008 – Page 92 localbootycalls.com ad)

Oh hey, look – it’s a rape scene in panel five, complete with the woman’s arms being held down. And the guy in the next panel has an arm band that’s clearly modelled on a Nazi armband. I guess there was no other way to identify that he’s not a good person?

(Heavy Metal Issue #234, January 2008 – Page 89 Sataka by Royo)