The work of the comic artist Jean Giraud, better known as Moebius (or, more stylishly, Mœbius), has often appeared on Open Culture over the years, but even if you’ve never seen it here, you know it. Granted, you may never have read a page of it, to say nothing of an entire graphic novel’s worth, but even so, you’ve absorbed it indirectly through generations of international popular culture. If you enjoy Blade Runner, Akira, the manga and anime of Hayao Miyazaki, and even the Star Wars movies, you must, on some level, enjoy Moebius, so deeply did his comic art shape the look and feel of those major works, to say nothing of all it has inspired at further remove.
The new video above by Youtuber matttt goes in depth on the biographical, cultural, and psychological force that shaped the artist’s vision on the page, whose sheer imaginative force and persistently strange sublimity looked like nothing else in comics when he hit his stride in the nineteen-seventies. It helped that he was French, and thus an inheritor of the grand Francophone tradition of the bande dessinée, an art form taken much more seriously than comic strips and books in America. Belgian comics like Spirou and Tintin caught his attention early on, and time spent as a teenager amid the vast desert landscapes of Mexico instilled him with a taste for spiritual grandeur.
An apprenticeship under the Belgian comic artist Joseph “Jijé” Gillain, whom he idolized, helped Giraud — who had not yet become Moebius — to refine his style. His creation of the Jean Paul Belmondo-looking cowboy Blueberry in the early nineteen-sixties produced what turned out to be his most lucrative franchise. But it wasn’t until his encounter with taboo-breaking American “underground” comics that flourished later in that decade, and especially the work of Robert Crumb, that he found it within himself to let loose, exploring technological, mythological, and psychosexual realms hitherto unknown in his medium.
It was with the launch of the comics-anthology magazine Métal Hurlant in 1974, later repackaged in the United States as Heavy Metal, that Moebius’ work found its way to a much wider public. Notable readers included William Gibson, Ridley Scott, Luc Besson, George Lucas, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and the Wachowskis: some imitated Moebius, and others hired him. Through the Japanese edition of Starlog magazine in the late seventies, his art re-shaped the aesthetics of mangaka like Akira creator Katsuhiro Otomo and Studio Ghibli co-founder Hayao Miyazaki. Moebius himself later took on Otomo as one of his own influences, and in tribute to Miyazaki, named his daughter Nausicaa. For Jean Giraud, inspiration wasn’t a one-way street; it was more like a Möbius strip.
Related content:
Watch Groundbreaking Comic Artist Mœbius Draw His Characters in Real Time
Mœbius & Jodorowsky’s Sci-Fi Masterpiece The Incal Brought to Life in a Tantalizing Animation
Watch Moebius and Miyazaki, Two of the Most Imaginative Artists, in Conversation (2004)
Moebius Gives 18 Wisdom-Filled Tips to Aspiring Artists
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
