Reflections on Heavy Metal #1 (2025)
When I was younger, we didn’t talk about sex or sexuality in my house. There wasn’t any conversation about desire or attraction or even good models of what this might be. My parents got divorced around the time I started really exploring my sexuality and since their divorce was predicated on decades of cheating, it didn’t leave me with the best idea of what “love” or “attraction to someone” meant. Since I’m old enough, too, to remember getting my first computer in the house, being online didn’t really affect my early experiences of sexuality or desire. It sure did mess it up in my later teens (anyone else “date” people on AIM? A/S/L?) but that’s a story for a different kind of essay.
Instead, I figured out desire and sexual attraction in a kind of stereotypical straight cis-male way; finding my dad’s porn stash and Heavy Metal magazine including its two animated movies. Though this essay is about Heavy Metal, I feel it important to take a brief aside to let you know about the first part; not only for context but also because it’s always fun to hear how our parents tried to hide things from us. My dad’s literature of choice was Penthouse magazine, hidden on the top shelf of the linen closet that was conveniently in our bathroom, underneath the rarely used extra sheets, pushed just far enough back that no one could see it, unless you were my father and couldn’t be bothered to always push it all the way back. To be extra clear, I only remember one issue that had an interview with a director, I think, but everything else was straight erotica and pictures that were loosely connected, if at all. I feel no shame about this.
But before I found this hidden stash of magazines in my bathroom, I had already come across a few random issues of Heavy Metal magazine and seen both movies (upon further research it seems that Heavy Metal 2000, the second movie to sport the name of the magazine, came out in 2000, who woulda thought. So this means that I must have seen it later in age than I’m remembering here. I’m conflating them as one thing in my head for sure). The movies, in particular, remain deeply influential on me and my tastes. I have a soft spot for them because I was introduced to them young (11? Maybe 12?) and before my parent’s divorce. Both movies are among a handful of things from before their divorce that I haven’t forgotten or have stuck with me. Much of my childhood before their initial separation is still very foggy (I know I watched a ton of Step by Step but I still cannot recall any of it). The magazine was equally influential, though this wouldn’t become clear until my late 20s.
I remember the Heavy Metal mags in the storage part of the coffee table. I mean, it wasn’t really “storage” as much as an almost exact copy of the top of the coffee table but like 8 inches below. A shelf? A floor table? Heh. Regardless, there were always various piles of mail or paper detritus there. This was true of my father’s house, which was at that time my parent’s house, through the entire time I lived there. On the kitchen table, the counters, various ledges or side tables, and throughout our entire basement, there were always piles of things. Often something related to the particular nerd culture I grew up with.
My dad wasn’t a Trekkie but we owned all the movies on VHS, then DVD. He didn’t read anything but The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings on a bi-yearly basis, but there were two crates of mass market fantasy and scifi books stacked next to the oven sized safe the previous owners of the house left. Boxes of dice, terrain for table-top gaming, and photo-copied character sheets took up a lot of space too. My dad and his friends had a gaming group that met in our basement for a couple decades, maybe more. They’d play tabletop roll playing games with half-baked rules they clearly invented that week or that they had played elsewhere, half remembered, or had actual rules for. Sometimes they played Warhammer or D&D, but more often they played historical games. Basically, reenactments of battles from various points in world history using figures and dice. I was a particular fan of the Boxer Uprising role playing game my uncle introduced to us.
Eventually our basement became the dumping ground for his friend’s nerdy cast offs. A kind of mutual aid network of phenomenal things that mainly stayed in the basement until he was forced to move out years ago and it got redistributed elsewhere. It was in this messy wonder that I read a few stray issues of Heavy Metal and wish I had had the foresight to keep them instead of leaving them to find homes somewhere else. While I can’t recall the issues specifically and, I realized on researching the magazine a bit more, to recall the covers is to recall many issues that had similar enough covers I couldn’t recognize which ones I read. But, they were all from the late 90s or early 2000s (or maybe earlier?). They were second hand. And they were stunning.
I think that a lot of my wonder came from my deep love of comics but my refusal, inability maybe, to really get into comics at that point. It would still be eight years before I officially started reading comics more explicitly. So, at this point, it still felt secret and that added to the experience as well. Reading these issues didn’t provide me with a love of comics though, they more made me feel like I was looking at something I shouldn’t. Which I maybe shouldn’t have been.
But they also laid bare a kind of sexuality and desire that I thought was wrong. Yea, I’m sure if I could find those issues today, I’d read them and find a hell of a lot wrong with them. But, these comics didn’t seem to me like “look we drew someone in a sexy way hehe”, they laid it out blatantly. They didn’t shy away from the desire or from the sex, and they were some of my first experiences with seeing actual desire that wasn’t framed around how awful I was for having feelings. It wasn’t until my 20s that I finally found others who could express explicit desire without the baggage of being “wrong”.
Again, I feel like it needs to be said, there have been legit criticisms of the ways in which Heavy Metal has presented desire and sexuality. I’m not discounting that. Instead, it was what was available to me as a midwestern, Catholic kid and it felt absolutely revolutionary.
So, when I heard that Heavy Metal was coming back out with a magazine, I had to pick it up. As I remembered, the issue felt quite a bit hit or miss, but more in the way that not everything is made to my taste rather than not being “good”. I mean I think I have excellent taste but not everyone else agrees.
The first issue in this reemergence of Heavy Metal felt good. Especially the art. I mean, the art is what stood out to me as a kid too. It is also always floating near stunning if not precisely stunning. Even in the stories that I didn’t particularly gravitate towards, the art was always interesting. The variety of styles too is something that I really enjoy in anthology comics. I want to feel like I’m being shown around a large gallery, with generations of artists showing off their stuff.
The issue, though, was mainly led by a stable of male creators, which feels usual for the magazine. Many of the creators were old heads, so to speak, and had work in previous iterations of the magazine. Reading it, one of the things that I wish the magazine took into account was the ways it can change to better suit the current time period. Yea, a lot of the stories felt like throwbacks (in a positive way) but there are other publishers doing “smut” or adult comics that have been able to keep with the times. I’m thinking a lot of how good Iron Circus’s work continues to be, especially the explicit work in its catalogue. I think a Heavy Metal that paid attention to how this could move inside their work in exciting new directions would be successful.
Not only this, but a good mix of new and old could be a great way to keep this magazine on the top of its game. Yea, I’m going to dig the translations of work into English, but why not dig up some more work by more creators in their 20s, 30s, 40s? Get more people pumped about it.
I think that what I loved about the old Heavy Metal mags I would randomly find, is that they felt progressive in the way that they were pushing an envelope. The world needs that envelope pushed. There’s too much pushback as it is. It needs work that is explicit, especially in the ways that this magazine has been. But, catered to an audience that lives in 2025. In my opinion, having work like “June 2050” or the short comics and the historical interludes, where the parts that really stuck out to me. Yea, I like “Bug” and “The Mercenary”, and I love the call backs to the comics that were eventually depicted in the movies. Please give me more of that. The history with the nostalgia is always fun. But I wanted more like “Lester” and “The Last Roots”, or more of a balance between these and the older ones. It’s hard to put a finger on but the issue felt like it dug into the nostalgia with a glance towards the future. I wanted it to stare into the future. I’d like it to be respecting the elders that came before, exploring their work (even reprinting some older stuff), but I want it to be actively pursuing the future too.
I guess I want a Heavy Metal that the younger me remembers as Heavy Metal, which may be a Heavy Metal that never existed. Something that, for its time, pushes what a popular animated movie or a comics magazine can do. Something that is unashamedly looking at things like liberation from the tyranny of conservative ideas around sex, sexuality, and desire. I want it to be what I remember feeling as a kid.
That’s unfair to ask of this magazine and potentially something they’re already thinking about. I’m not in the room where they make these decisions, so I don’t know. And, I’m quite aware that I can find the things I’m looking for elsewhere. Just this past weekend I went to CAKE in Chicago and found a lot of people doing the kind of comics I’m thinking about here. So I know they exist and I read them too.
Heavy Metal, inevitably, will be what it will be. Yet, I still think that the name recognition, alone, could do a lot to connect older generations with younger. It could help speak to people my age, or younger, and bridge a gap between what was and what can be. The past isn’t always backwards, in many cases it can be more liberatory than the now we live in; any seasoned reader can tell you this. Heavy Metal has the chance to really push that by pulling with it the moments when the magazine was transcendent into the now, and uplifting the voices that are aching to be a part of the conversation today. Let it be generational. Let it be for all.
This is my dream: that the younger version of me can be part of the current version of me. That I can learn from my mistakes and be a better me, but that younger self can also thrive and grow and be more. It’s my dream for Heavy Metal as well, though of course this is more about me than the magazine. So it goes.
Oh! And my dream is for more animated movies. That’s never bad. I’d support that.
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