Just watched another documentary in the COMICS BRITANNIA series tonight, IN SEARCH OF MOEBIUS. It was alright, I suppose. I often find the most interesting thing about Moebius is the juxtaposition of his careers as Jean Giraud and as Moebius, how the man could shift from being this consumate storyteller of straightforward genre fiction, to being this revolutionary who shook up an entire field of publishing. And yes, his work, alongside Druillet and Bilal, at PILOTE and then METAL HURLANT was literally a revolution at the time, one which helped legitimize comics as an artform on mainland Europe in the early 1970s, decades before such legitimacy was claimed for Anglophone comics. Yet after reaching this position as a countercultural icon, he could then travel back and forth between the two trajectories of his career (traditionalist and revolutionary) until Charlier's death, and after - even now, he's working, as Giraud not Moebius, on a volume of Jean Van Hamme's (good but derivative) spy thriller XIII. This docko rather glossed over that, giving the viewer the impression that there was a clean break at the time METAL HURLANT began, concentrating on Moebius the groundbreaker, the visionary, and the collaborative artist (though giving his work with Stan Lee more screen-time than his work with either Charlier or Jodorowsky seems rather daft).
Anyway, it remains one of life's great mysteries that there isn't a publisher dedicated to keeping Moebius/Giraud's work, translated into English, in print (and Druillet, and Bilal, and Pratt, etc, etc, etc). Chalk that up for another job I'll just have to do myself, after winning the next Euro-Lottery rollover.