Heavy Metal

I remember back in the 1970s when I was just getting into the fantasy genre. I had been reading Tarzan, Barsoom and other ERB books when Davis began reading Heavy Metal, one of the greatest magazines of the era. Other mags, like Epic, had similar stories, but they never pushed the edge of fantasy/sci-fi like Heavy Metal did.

HM combined great story telling, with amazing, some of it ground-breaking art and threw in enough adult content to keep a youngster's mind in high gear. Some of those images have stuck with me even today, so many years later.

The content was not overly sexual, though it was often highly charged; the sexual was always a part of a greater story, that made it both interesting and memorable. Later they abandoned this approach and just went with the sexual as the driving force.

Some of the early great covers.

I still have a thing about blue, aztec, women . . . .