New Regular Feature: Heavy Metal Magazine

(Originally drafted on February 8^th)

Well, my first issue of Heavy Metal arrived today and I couldn't be happier! It is a gorgeous book and came, unmolested, in a polymer bag. I haven't read Heavy Metal since highschool for one very important reason (the only one, really): It's porn. 

And the cover price. Two, two important reasons.

Now, I'm not knocking porn. I'm just saying that if I want to view porn, I'd rather see the real thing. That's just how I work; the difference between actual porn and porn in a comic book is roughly the same difference between watching porn and actually having sex.

I was always a fan of Epic magazine and the basic difference between that and Heavy Metal was that Epic didn't show explicit sex scenes. And, since they didn't and Heavy Metal does, Epic featured a wider variety of stories. Even as a teen and young adult, I was more interested in stories than stories told as an excuse to show people having sex. Heavy Metal absolutely has some great stories -- and some of the greatest artists to ever be published anywhere! -- but the overwhelming majority of them feature explicit sex as [one of] the major theme[s].

But Epic hasn't been around since the 1980s and Archie Goodwin passed away many years ago now, so I knew Heavy Metal is the only remaining source for that kind of subject matter (another magazine to which I subscribe is Doomed, which is a horror magazine in the same format). I will begin reviewing the current issues as they arrive.

Since this one just came in today, I haven't had a chance to read all of it, but I can tell you this much: The editor-in-chief is Kevin Eastman (of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fame)! And since I got the whole porn thing off my chest, I'll do the review in a day or two in another post.