McQuarrie and Giraud – Grandmaster artists who will be missed

“Ah, Moebius joins McQuarrie.
I wonder what God has in pre-production,
since He appears to be really stepping up His art direction.”
– Dan Curtis Johnson

The two men above — Ralph McQuarrie and Jean Giraud — were integral parts of my formative art collecting years when I was a kid.

The 1970s was the decade I began collecting comics and magazines among other things. One of the publications I discovered on the racks (one I really shouldn’t have been purchasing because of the gads of adult content and images between its covers) was Heavy Metal. But had I not clandestinely begun stealing this magazine away to my room beneath my parents’ noses I might never have discovered the incredible artwork of Jean Henri Gaston Giraud, more commonly known by his pseudonym Moebius.

I was enthralled with Giraud’s artwork. The Marvel comics I was so fond of were nothing compared to what Giraud was doing in Heavy Metal. His lines were fluid and enticing and I found myself just as hypnotized with the art as with the stories. (I later discovered the magazine was the American version of Métal Hurlant, its predecessor.) And then I caught wind of his tales Arzach and The Airtight Garage, mesmerizing words and images I’d never read nor seen the like of before. I devoured the works.

Shortly thereafter, I attended the World Science Fiction Convention in Phoenix, Arizona. Imagine my surprise to find out Giraud was integral in contributing to the storyboard art for Ridley Scott’s Alien. (He also did work for Disney’s Tron, John Cameron’s The Abyss, and many others.)

At about the same time, I also became taken with another artist whose instantly recognizable work graced a paperback whose story I zipped through: Star Wars. Yes … Ralph McQuarrie, the man Lucas commissioned to illustrate the Star Wars script. I still have my Ballantine paperback with the ominous and foreboding image of Lord Vader on the cover, superimposed behind Luke Skywalker, C-3PO, R2-D2 and Chewbacca. I remember gazing at that cover the entire time I read the book, knowing the film was soon to follow. And then, much later, I was thrilled to get the opportunity to purchase McQuarrie’s portfolio of some of the images he drew for that original film. Those of The Empire Strikes Back and Return Of The Jedi would follow, fulfilling a dream of mine to own all three original sets.

As with Giraud, McQuarrie went on to lend his vision to many more films: Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the original Battlestar Galactica television series, Raiders Of The Lost Ark and Cocoon for which he won an Oscar. I was just as enamored of McQuarrie’s works as I was of Giraud’s.

I emulated these artists and made great (but failed) attempts to mimic the grand scale of their visions. (I never did get it right, but I was rewarded with a better appreciation of their crafts.) It was these two men who set me on my love affair with the hand-drawn page … an affair I continue to engage in.

Maybe the quotation above is dead on — maybe God is, indeed, planning some grand production and He’s gathering some of the best in the business to put pen to paper.

Clacked by Michael Noble
on Mar 11, 2012 @ 09:00 EST5EDT