This Sunday I’m thankful for the return of Heavy Metal magazine.
Late in 2024 Heavy Metal ran a Kickstarter to relaunch the magazine with a new #1.
Such a great cover.
I backed it. And then I decided to support them for the first while by buying a one-year subscription for the next four issues. They’re all out now and apparently my sub includes an Annual issue as well, so not bad.
All five of these issues include chapters of the ongoing dark fantasy stories Gladiatrix, by John Stanisci …
… and Millstone, by Michael W Conrad.
They’re both quite good, and still running.
Also in these first issues I rediscovered Vicente Segrelles’ The Mercenary.
This story recalled something familiar. I was sure I’d seen that character before. And the art style. Long ago. Well it turns out Segrelles has been telling the tale of The Mercenary in Spain since the ’80s. So I must have read some of it somewhere in the deep dark past. This chapter is a well-told moment, beautifully illustrated, that hopefully will lead to more events in later issues.
There’s also an eerie story called Cold Dead War: The Aftermath, by Craig Wilson.
It picks up where the segment in the Heavy Metal movie about the WWII pilot parachuting onto the haunted island leaves off:
Kinda creepy. It wraps in issue 5.
But after all of the above, the big win for me is discovering an ongoing story about a couple of characters I’d never heard of before. Burton & Cyb.
Lucky for me they’ve been adventuring since the ’80s. Yes, again. And yes, in Spain. Again. And it turns out they’ve been appearing in Heavy Metal for decades; I just never came across them. I don’t know if the ones I just discovered are new stories or old. But I’m liking them a lot.
Something I’ve been thinking about is taking the palette of a serialized story from Heavy Metal and using it as the guide for painting a unit or two from my collection for Xenos Rampant. I think Burton & Cyb would make a good place to start for a squad of scavenging scroungers. And Millstone might be a good source for my Black Spiral Dancer Vargr.
If you want to know more about the history of Heavy Metal, the wiki entry is a pretty good place to start.
