Moebius

When I was a kid, one of the best things around Christmas time was that, for a week or so, every night at 6 p.m., on this one French channel, they would show great feature-length animation films that you usually didn't get to see on TV: there were some Asterix and Lucky Lukes, and Japanese anime, and the beautiful French classic Le Roi et l'oiseau. I also remember this terrific Chinese legend with a baby hero who lived in the clouds and flew on the back of dragons...

One of my favorites, which they would play most years, was Les Maîtres du temps (The Masters of Time) — a strange science fiction story based on the drawings of Moebius. It was the story of a boy who was stranded on a beautiful but also dangerous alien world, and who was trying to survive until he could be rescued by a team of space adventurers.

When I was older, I eventually stumbled upon comic books by Moebius, and I was filled again by the sense of wonder that the film had evoqued for me. I always thought the stories were kind of dumb, but the pictures were breathtaking. There's something dreamy about these stark, wide open vistas in dizying perspective, the thin elegant lines, the bright 1980s pastel and acid colors...

I think what science fiction does best is to build whole worlds in which to play with and reveal the scale of things. Moebius is the absolute master at this, with his peculiar repertoire of organicoïd shapes and subtly suggested textures, his myriad wandering figures, his rich but also often bleak and forbidding landscapes or his dystopian futuristic cities. Thanks to the awesome virtuosity of his draftsmanship, he conjures up images that are at once poetic and meditative, but also very grounded and precise. His visions, like dreams, carry a powerful and inchoate subconscious charge. How far we are from the vulgarity of your average manga or super-hero comics or the overwrought and noisy contrivances of so many of today's video games!

Here are some of these fantastic drawings: