Draughtsman of Two Signatures
Jean Giraud signed his westerns Gir and his dreams Mœbius: Blueberry’s dust, Arzach’s wordless flights, and a serial improvised issue by issue in the magazine he co-founded.
Comics Artist & Film Designer
Jean Giraud signed his westerns Gir and his science fiction Mœbius, and for most of his career he kept the two hands apart on purpose. Gir drew Blueberry, a broken-nosed cavalry lieutenant written by Jean-Michel Charlier, with a brush, heavy blacks and the authenticity his teacher Jijé demanded. Mœbius worked with a pen, coloured straight onto the drawing and, in Métal Hurlant, the magazine he founded with Philippe Druillet, Jean-Pierre Dionnet and Bernard Farkas, published comics without a single word and a serial he made up month by month. The desert runs through both: first seen from a Greyhound bus in Mexico at eighteen, revisited with marijuana and mushrooms, and finally drawn sober as a place he called Désert B. Ridley Scott hired him for Alien; Hayao Miyazaki said he made Nausicaä under his influence.
Jean Henri Gaston Giraud was born on 8 May 1938 in Nogent-sur-Marne, east of Paris, the only child of an insurance agent and a clerk. They separated while he was small, and he grew up mostly with his grandparents in Fontenay-sous-Bois, where, he later recalled, he was known at school as the boy who draws. Post-war cinemas fed him American B-westerns; the Catholic and Communist children’s papers of the late 1940s, and the Belgian weeklies Spirou and Tintin, showed him how a comics page is built. At sixteen he entered the École des arts appliqués Duperré, failed to get into the illustration course and was set to designing wallpaper and textiles, and met Jean-Claude Mézières, a friend for life. He left after two years without a diploma. In early 1956, at seventeen, he sold his first strip, the comic western Frank et Jérémie, to the magazine Far West.
That summer he spent his earnings on a trip to Mexico, where his mother had recently remarried, and stayed for months. “I first saw the desert on a Greyhound bus trip and that vision burned my brain forever,” he told Paul Gravett in 2010. A circle of radical, anti-American artists, writers and journalists adopted him as a mascot. “They initiated me into the practice of art, modern jazz, playing chess, and to marijuana. Not for fun but to use as a tool for creation.” He drew almost nothing there; he walked, argued and watched, missed his third year of school, and said the trip “completely transformed me.” The flat plains and enormous skies became the ground of nearly everything he drew afterwards, cowboy or alien.
Back in France he drew earnest western and historical strips for the Catholic publisher Fleurus, so close in manner to the Belgian master Jijé (Joseph Gillain) that his pages are told apart from a colleague’s mainly by his signature. Military service from 1958 to 1960 took him to the French zone of Germany and to Algeria during the war of independence, where his drawing got him out of front-line duty and onto the army magazine 5/5 Forces Françaises. Then Jijé took him in as an apprentice at his family home near Paris. Giraud tried to draw a Jerry Spring story alone, finished half a page in a week, and ended up inking Jijé’s pencils on La Route de Coronado for Spirou. What he learned was the trade: simple layouts, blacks placed for composition, rhythm, photographic reference. Jijé, he said, was a father to the fatherless student as much as a teacher, “an emotional experience as much as a professional one.” He then painted historical plates in gouache beside Mézières for Hachette’s Histoire des civilisations, where he met the picture researcher Claudine Conin; they married in 1967.
Blueberry came by way of Jijé. Jean-Michel Charlier, co-founder of the weekly Pilote and the most prolific adventure writer in French comics, asked Jijé for a western, and Jijé passed the job to his pupil. Fort Navajo began in Pilote on 31 October 1963, written by Charlier and signed Gir. It was planned as an ensemble story, but Lieutenant Blueberry (born Mike S. Donovan), drawn on Jean-Paul Belmondo’s face, took it over: insubordinate, a gambler, often wrong, with a broken nose that Giraud said was all that finally remained of the actor. The early pages were so close to Jijé’s that readers wrote to Pilote accusing Giraud of plagiarism, and when he left for the United States and Mexico in 1965, Jijé pencilled plates 17 to 38 of the story then running so that the serial would not stop.
That second Mexican trip was a hinge. He could not find the artists who had adopted him, or his mother’s house. “For six months, I learned how to be alone,” he told Gravett, and Gravett adds meditation, fasting and hallucinogenic mushrooms. When Giraud took the pages back from plate 39, his line had visibly come away from Jijé’s. Gir’s is a brush method. Heavy, deliberately placed blacks carry the shade under hat brims and in doorways; the brush flicks texture into leather, horsehide, rock and stubble; photographs keep guns, harness and uniforms honest. As the series darkened under the influence of Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah, Blueberry aged on the page, unusual for an adventure hero, and Giraud took a growing hand in the plotting. The Confederate-gold cycle, from Chihuahua Pearl (1973) to Angel Face (1975), is the series at its most hard-boiled, with a hero who is manipulated, betrayed and tortured in a dirty, sweating West.
Pilote was changing around him. After May 1968 Giraud joined the artists who demanded, and won, more freedom from the editor René Goscinny, at the cost of a friendship that never mended. In January 1973 Goscinny passed La Déviation, still signed Gir, in which Giraud and his own family take a holiday drive that swerves into a landscape of soft, impossible towers. In 1974 he revived the name Mœbius, first used for some twenty satirical strips in Hara-Kiri in 1963–64. Cauchemar blanc, in L’Écho des savanes, drawn from a news story that year, shows four white men beating an Arab man while residents watch from their windows. Le Bandard fou, an album for the same rebel group, follows a law-abiding citizen of the planet Souldaï who wakes with a permanent erection and is hunted across space, while the facing pages run a wordless sequence of a man transforming after he snaps his fingers. When Pilote printed his short L’Homme est-il bon?, Giraud said later, he realised he was enriching a publisher with the work he cared about most. He left Dargaud in 1974, tired of the deadlines, in a royalties dispute he shared with Charlier, and put Blueberry aside.
By its own legend, the company was born at four in the morning on 19 December 1974, at the edge of Livry-Gargan, when Philippe Druillet, Mœbius, Jean-Pierre Dionnet and Bernard Farkas resolved to answer henceforth only to the collective name Les Humanoïdes Associés. That is Dionnet’s account in the first issue’s editorial, which also gives the plan: reissue Le Bandard fou and bring out a science-fiction comics magazine every three months. Druillet and Giraud were Pilote stars; Dionnet was a young critic and writer; Farkas, from outside comics, ran the money. Nikita Mandryka supplied the name Métal Hurlant, “screaming metal”, and Étienne Robial drew the title lettering and laid out the pages. Issue 1, dated January 1975, had 68 pages, eighteen of them in colour, cost 8 francs and carried the words “Réservé aux adultes”. “We just wanted freedom,” Dionnet said half a century later. He also said they started with no money at all, always paid the artists, and never told Mœbius or Druillet how close the magazine came to dying; by the early 1980s artists including Druillet were leaving, tired of being badly paid.
Mœbius drew the first cover and eight pages of Arzach. Coloured directly on the drawing, it has no balloons, no captions and no sound effects. A hooded rider on a white pterodactyl sees a woman undressing in a castle tower, lassoes the guard who shouts at him and ties him to a dinosaur skeleton in the sand, climbs to her window, finds her face is monstrous, and flies off, leaving the guard where he is. The joke lands only because nothing is explained: the eye has to follow the glide, the tower, the bones and one face. The title was spelled differently in each instalment (Arzach, Harzak, Harzack, Arzak, Harzakc) over five issues to January 1976, four eight-page stories and one of two pages. Freed from Blueberry’s “choking captions and balloons”, in Gravett’s phrase, the founders gave a large share of a magazine’s scarce colour pages to pictures that had to carry the story alone.
The Airtight Garage began as an accident of editing. In a foreword written in 2006 Mœbius describes coming home in “slightly exalted states” to draw a page or two late at night until he collapsed. Two such pages he regarded as a graphic joke that “could not, should not lead anywhere”, and he put them in a drawer. Dionnet, who had a habit of going through his drawers, found them, took them away, asked for a short continuation that could serve as sequel and ending, and printed them. Just before the next issue he phoned about the delivery. Mœbius had done nothing, and he had kept no photocopies, so in two days of panic he drew two more pages “whose coherence was not guaranteed”; the whole story, he wrote, was made “in that kind of disjointed panic.” The magazine’s index shows Le Garage hermétique de Jerry Cornelius starting in issue 6, March 1976, the issue with which Métal Hurlant went bimonthly; from issue 9, in September, it was monthly, and the Garage ran in every issue to no. 41 in June 1979. “Every month the series would descend into pure improvisation,” he said, as Gravett quotes him: two, three or four pages, no script, Major Grubert building a three-level universe inside an asteroid while everyone hunts Jerry Cornelius, a character Michael Moorcock had offered to any writer who wanted him. It ends with Grubert stepping through a door into a Paris Métro station, and became the album Major Fatal in 1979.
Cinema arrived through the same door. Alejandro Jodorowsky, who admired Blueberry, recruited Giraud in 1974–75 for his adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune; Giraud rushed Angel Face to get to it. Jodorowsky, Giraud said, “gave me direct proof that it was possible to open the door inside.” Beside H. R. Giger, Chris Foss and the effects designer Dan O’Bannon he drew the storyboard, about 3,000 drawings by the count of Frank Pavich’s 2013 documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune, before the money ran out in 1976. Jodorowsky also handed him Carlos Castaneda’s books about the Yaqui sorcerer don Juan, and Castaneda’s vocabulary drifted into the comics: the Garage’s villain is called the Nagual. O’Bannon wrote The Long Tomorrow, a future noir of stacked vertical cities that Mœbius drew for Métal Hurlant 7 and 8 in 1976 and that later fed Blade Runner, a film Scott asked him to work on when he was already committed elsewhere. O’Bannon, writing Alien, brought the Dune team to Ridley Scott; Giraud designed the Nostromo crew’s costumes, including the bulky, samurai-like spacesuits that the costume designer John Mollo realised, while Ron Cobb designed the ship and Giger the creature. “Fifteen days of work and years of media and publicity fallout,” Giraud called it. Jodorowsky’s first comic with him, Les Yeux du chat (1978), was told in single images, a blind boy on one page and his eagle hunting eyes on the facing one. In 1979 the two signatures shared one magazine: Métal Hurlant serialised Charlier and Gir’s Blueberry album Nez cassé in issues 38 to 40, beside the last instalments of the Garage.
In December 1980 issue 58 opened with John Difool on the cover and nine pages of a new serial written by Jodorowsky and drawn by Mœbius. The magazine had just changed format so that from issue 51 all but sixteen pages were in colour, and The Incal was born a colour serial. Its first page drops a cowardly class-R private detective from a walkway into the shaft of a vertical city; the last of the six albums (1981–1988) drops him again, so the cosmic adventure in between, with its Light and Dark Incals, the Metabaron, the concrete seagull Deepo and the Technopriests, is built as a loop. Difool’s name is a pun on the tarot Fool. Jodorowsky brought the metaphysics and much of the Dune material; Mœbius made the city legible, from the spherical rescue robots to Suicide Alley, and gave the comedy its timing. It became his biggest seller, more than a million copies in France alone by Gravett’s count.
Freedom had become another treadmill. “The more you free yourself, the more powerless you become,” he said in 1982, and promised in Métal Hurlant that once Blueberry and Difool were finished he would quit comics. He did not. Steven Lisberger, who had found him in Heavy Metal, the American edition launched in April 1977, hired him for Disney’s Tron (1982), on which American Cinematographer credited Mœbius primarily with the costumes; he also redesigned Syd Mead’s solar sailer and drew storyboards, while Peter Lloyd designed environments. He designed René Laloux’s animated feature Les Maîtres du temps (1982). The family left Paris for a village near Pau, and Giraud joined the following of Jean-Paul Appel-Guéry, teacher of a UFO-tinged discipline called Iso-Zen; from 1983 to late 1984 the Girauds lived in his commune on Tahiti, where Giraud gave up meat, tobacco, coffee, alcohol and, for the time being, drugs. The Edena cycle, begun in 1983 as a promotional album for Citroën, carries the commune’s ideas about raw food, purity and the self.
Late in 1984 he moved the family to California. Claudine founded Starwatcher Graphics; the editors Jean-Marc and Randy Lofficier persuaded Archie Goodwin to publish Mœbius in English under Marvel’s Epic imprint from 1987, and in English he became simply Mœbius, Blueberry included. Stan Lee wrote Silver Surfer: Parable for him, Giraud’s first job by the Marvel method rather than from a full script; to his surprise, a synopsis was on his desk two days after a lunch at which he thought they were only discussing an idea. It won the 1989 Eisner Award for best finite series. In 1985 he went to Tokyo to work on the story and designs for Yutaka Fujioka’s Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland. Japan already knew him. The manga critic Natsume Fusanosuke records that Katsuhiro Otomo, in a book afterword, named his story Flower (SF Hōseki, October 1979) as drawn after first seeing Mœbius, and that the magazine’s contents page already billed Otomo as “Japan’s Mœbius”; Osamu Tezuka named one of his shading techniques the “Mœbius line”. Hayao Miyazaki, in a 2004 conversation with Giraud, said he found Arzach in 1980, too late to change his own drawing, and directed Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind “under Mœbius’ influence”. Giraud later named his daughter Nausicaa. In 1988 he sold his shares in Les Humanoïdes Associés, and in 1989 he returned to France.
Charlier died on 10 July 1989. Their contracts said the survivor would take over Blueberry; Giraud finished Arizona Love alone, then could not bring himself to draw the lieutenant for nearly five years. The series, he said, had lost its father, and “the mother needed time to mourn.” When he returned, with the Mister Blueberry and OK Corral albums (1995–2005), he followed his own course and turned Blueberry into a loafing civilian who plays poker rather than an officer restored to the army. Relations with Charlier’s son and co-heir Philippe became openly hostile. Philippe Charlier vetoed Blueberry 1900, which Giraud had written for François Boucq: an aged Blueberry living with the Hopi and meditating under mind-expanding substances while a comatose President McKinley levitates in his bed. The hallucinations surfaced anyway in Jan Kounen’s 2004 film Blueberry, l’expérience secrète, a “trip film” from whose credits the Charlier heirs had their name removed.
With Mézières he was a conceptual designer on Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element (1997). Its stacked city and flying taxis looked to many readers like the Incal’s; the Incal side sued Besson for plagiarism and lost, and Jodorowsky later claimed the case failed because Mœbius had worked on the film. His first marriage ended in 1994. In 1995 he married Isabelle Champeval, whom he had met at a signing in Venice in 1984 and with whom he already had a son, Raphaël, born in 1989; their daughter Nausicaa was born that year. Stardom, the publishing house and gallery he founded with Claudine in 1990, was renamed Moebius Production in 1997 and passed to Isabelle and her sister Claire Champeval; Isabelle still runs it.
Inside Mœbius records another withdrawal. In the early 2000s Giraud gave up the cannabis he had smoked, off and on, since Mexico. He told Gravett the project “came after I had some health problems and took medicine which made a hole in my stomach. I was on the bus, I had to get out, I threw up some black blood and fainted.” He kept notebooks, drawing without pencilling first, and they became six volumes from his own house between 2004 and 2010. A cartoon Giraud wanders a desert he calls Désert B, a pun its translator Diana Schutz explains: in French it sounds exactly like désherber, to weed. His younger self from the 1970s, Blueberry, Major Grubert, Arzak and Geronimo turn up to argue with him; after 11 September 2001 Osama bin Laden appears and rolls a joint in front of him (“This has to be a dream”). NPR’s reviewer found it slight and directionless, and it is loose by design. It is also the Garage method turned on its maker: no plan, a page at a time, the author trapped among his creations. “The virginity of a simple sheet of paper is the desert,” he said.
His last years went back to old characters: Arzak l’arpenteur (2010), the first of a planned trilogy, and new Major Grubert books. In 2010 he had surgery to stave off blindness in his left eye, and he drew more and more on a graphics tablet whose magnification helped failing eyes. The Fondation Cartier’s Mœbius-Transe-Forme (12 October 2010 – 13 March 2011), organised as he wished around metamorphosis, was his first major Paris retrospective. He died of cancer on 10 March 2012, aged 73. Read Blueberry beside Arzach and the two signatures stop looking like opposites: the same desert, seen once through a brush and once through a pen.
