Jean Henri Gaston Giraud (8 May 1938 – 10 March 2012)

Jean Giraud or Gir or (as he is mostly well known) Moebius died this week, and it bummed me the hell out. When I was eight or so, my estranged father tossed a stack of Mighty Thor comics in my lap, and started an obsession of mine that lasts until this day. That obsession is comic books. They tapped into an insular introvert vein that coursed pretty heavily within me without shunning my inherit machismo as a young, southern man. I was always interested in art, and ,even though it wasn't apparent to me at first, I quickly realized that is what laid between these stapled pages. I started losing interest in comic books by the time I was a teen, but since I was interested in weirdo things like underground music and art there were still a few books out there for me. The ink scratches of Robert Crumb and Moebius were pretty influential not just because they looked beautiful, but also because they touched on such forbidden topics for the Bible belt. There was the same psychedelic mysticism to Moebius' arid landscapes that I found in the peyote induced segments I half paid attention to in Oliver Stone's the doors or the cover to my dad's Dune hardcover.