The Long Tomorrow is a short, twelve page, comic produced in 1956-76 which tells the noir story of a private detective hired to pick up a parcel for a sultry dame. It has a stock noir plot and the writing is pretty terrible.
But the art and the world it depicted was visionary; a world that is one giant, teeming, vertical metropolis. A super dense cityscape with skybridges and anti-gravity chutes. If it is familiar, then it is because Moebius was a big influence on Ridley Scott and The Long Tomorrow depicts a world strikingly similar to Scott’s Los Angeles in Blade Runner.
William Gibson too, was aware of Moebius’ art and cites it as an influence in the germination of cyberpunk and the future imperfect:
“Years later, I was having lunch with Ridley, and when the conversation turned to inspiration, we were both very clear about our debt to the Metal Hurlant [the original Heavy Metal magazine] school of the ’70s–Moebius and the others. But it was also obvious that Scott understood the importance of information density to perceptual overload. When Blade Runner works best, it induces a lyrical sort of information sickness, that quintessentially postmodern cocktail of ecstasy and dread. It was what cyberpunk was supposed to be all about.”
Take a look at the entire comic here.
October 18th, 2006 at 9:15 pm
dont know if you realised this but moebius also worked on alien ( 1979 ) under ridley scott . giger is the most obvious artist in alien, but the liquidic detail of moebius blend quietly with giger’s horror . if you like moebius, you might like darrow . he lacks the elegance of moebius, but intensifies the details . detail is what i think characterises bladerunner
October 26th, 2006 at 8:44 am
I remember reading that Moebius worked on the uniforms for the crew of the Nostromo.
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I love Darrow’s art - particularly in ‘Hard Boiled’.
December 5th, 2006 at 3:11 am
More Alien connections — the script (yah, it’s not great, but I don’t think it was meant to be) was written by Dan O’Bannon, sci-fi scriptwriter who wrote Alien.
Also, the sex-with-a-tentacled alien thing is straight out of “Morbius Gravis.” Have no idea who was first with that. I, too, wasted years reading Heavy Metal/Metal Hurlant, but didn’t keep track of the dates.
Last note: Moebius contributed production design and sketches for the Luc Besson movie “The Fifth Element, which may be — for all its faults, which are legion — the best visualization of the
“Vertical Megalopolis” pictured in this comic. This is from the IMDB Trivia page for that movie:
Luc Besson, an admitted comic book fan, had two famous French comic book artists in mind for the film’s visual style when he started writing the movie in high school. Jean Giraud (Moebius) and Jean-Claude Mézières. Both artists have long-standing comic book series in France. Moebius is best known for “Blueberry” and the (French) Magazine and (US) movie Heavy Metal (1981). Mezieres is best known for the “Valerian” series. Both series are still in production today. Mobeius and Mezieres, who attended art school together but had never collaborated on a project until The Fifth Element (1997), started renderings for the film in the early ’90s and are responsible for the majority of the over all look of the film, including the vehicles, spacecrafts, buildings, human characters and aliens.
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