Last month comic artist Simon Bisley uploaded a series of candid YouTube interviews which are worth nothing for two reasons: 1.) I haven’t seen them publicized anywhere, and 2.) I now respect Bisley even more. He seems like chill dude.

Various Simon Bisley art. On the far left you have the cover he did for one of Verotik's horribly colored issues of the entirely skippable Shin Devilman manga. Seriously, that cover is the best thing to come out of any of that mess.

You’re probably familiar with “BIZ” even if you don’t know him by name: his style warps male and female figures alike into tight collections of tense muscles and corded waists obscured with very little clothing. His flair for enormous boobs, butts and biceps is only matched by his raw painting ability, which imposes upon these forms what I can only describe as “fleshy volume.” Don’t let the crudeness of some of these illustrations fool you, he’s an immense talent.

Bisley is from the United Kingdom, where he drew for the comics anthology 2000AD in his early career. Some of that material is newly available in the States, including ABC Warriors: The Black Hole, a terse sci-fi yarn about a bunch of robot losers tasked with saving the galaxy. Bisley’s black and white work can be just as compelling as his paintings, though it’s obvious in the weekly grind of 2000AD he preferred to sacrifice a bit of readability rather than omit a maddening barrage of detail.

Bisley hit it big in the United States with Lobo: The Last Czarnian (1990), a collaboration with Alan Grant and Keith Giffen that re-invisioned the DC Comics character Lobo as a heavy metal mass-murderer who both channelled and mocked the stylistic excesses of superhero comics at the same time. Bisley’s art could not be ignored and the series was a hit, leading to a role he plays to this day: making American comics appear much cooler than they actually are with badass painted covers.

One year before Lobo, back in the UK, Bisley painted the best selling 2000AD graphic novel of all time: Slaine: The Horned God. It features Pat Mill’s fantasy hero Slaine, an Irish take on Conan the Barbarian, in the original Robert E. Howard sense of the character. Slaine is an adventurer, but he is also stilled, unassuming, and reasoned. The book is really, really, ridiculously good-looking, and it’s infused with Pat Mill’s writing sensibilities: unrestrained in both violence and action, with a free-wheeling sense of humor no one could blame you for calling a little bit corny.

Most recently the Biz has been whittling away at a still-incomplete biblical art project, not for especially religious reasons, but because he wants to play with the power of those symbols in his work. He’s also involved in an upcoming series called Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, which sees him doing comic interiors at Heavy Metal for the first time in almost a decade.

I read the news of French artist/cartoonist/awesome guy Jean Giraud’s death as I browsed Twitter Saturday morning, between gulps of cheap, bitter coffee. The news chewed at my stomach, not because it was highly improbable or deafeningly tragic, but because in the last few weeks I’ve felt as if I was beginning to truly appreciate Jean Giraud (also known as Moebius and Gir) and his work.

It was inevitable among the Internet’s rush to memorialize that his life would be reduced to a few soundbites. They’re now ubiquitous. He’s the man who defined the look of Alien, Tron and Blade Runner (an overestimation, and slightly rude to the other visionary talent who worked on those movies, but fine. It’s not like Moebius’ greatest achievement was drawing for Hollywood, anyway.) He was besties with Hayao Miyazaki (fair enough, but this information says little about him, instead bridging a superficial gap to people disconnected from his work, similar to the way Brian fucking Bendis was selected to write the foreword to the US edition of The Incal.) You get the idea.

I’m not writing this for people who are intimately familiar with Jean Giraud and want to revel in his magnificence. I’m writing this for you, for people who know next to nothing about Moebius, and perhaps associate him with a certain kind of impenetrability complimented with an air of pretentiousness. Moebius comics are a real pain in the ass to find translated into English, often running for ludicrously high prices on the secondary market. And a lot of his later work still isn’t translated, so as far as I’m concerned, there aren’t a lot of English-speaking Moebius experts out there. It’s an almost tragic association we’re burdened with, because Moebius was as far from pretentious as someone of his repute could possibly get.

You Should Read The Incal

The Incal is a science fiction epic written between 1981 and 1989, available uncensored and most affordably from the UK. Written by the moderately insane Alejandro Jodorowsky, it’s everything science fiction should be: weird, exotic, unnerving, and psychological. And drawn by Moebius’ hand, it’s a work of art, gorgeously imbued with his masterful sense of atmosphere and space.

It is said Moebius is one of the few to bridge the gap between “art” and “comics.” If you accept the underlying pretension of that maxim, it’s true. Moebius can be as appreciated in the comic shop as he is in the museum gallery. Still, I find it most rewarding when his abilities are focused towards telling a story. Even if comics weren’t so looked down upon in the art world, the simple fact is most traditional artists could never draw good comics, because it takes too much work to do well. Moebius excelled at it, and he excels at it here.

The Incal is a sweeping futuristic adventure in which a strange artifact causes upheaval across the universe. A petty, whoring detective sporting 18th century European clothes named John DiFool  comes across the Incal shortly before creatures willing to kill for it come across him, and over the course of his tactical retreat he makes friends (a man with a wolf head, and a universe-feared assassin named The Metabaron, for example), and enemies (including a president with a penchant for cloning and body impermanence.)

The Incal is fun, unpredictable, and just plain weird, three things which you can say about comics with increasing rarity. And unfortunately, it’s meager taste of Moebius’ capabilities. Somewhere beyond tumblr posts, platitudes, and aged comic scans, Moebius the comic artist can be found in all his breadth and width. I hope American publishers realize we all deserve the privilege of knowing him and work out the logistical details necessary to get more of his material published over here.