How Grotesque Can Metallica Look? A New Comic Book Aims to Find Out
According to Loudwire, a company named StormFront Media, who have done comics about rock stars like Ozzy in the past, is producing a new comic book about the history of Metallica called Orbit: Metallica. The comic will showcase major events in the lives of the band, such as Dave Mustaine’s firing and Cliff Burton’s death.
Which is cool… until you see the artwork. Here are some of the sample pages that StormFront recently posted on their Facebook:
Bleugh. Why does everyone’s face look like so pinched and bizarre? Look at Lars and Cliff on the first page — sweet Jesus! The use of shadow coloring all over everything implies that this was a digitally- and not hand-drawn comic, and man, Metallica suffer for it.
This isn’t the first time that a metal musician’s comic book has been shoddily drawn; I remember reading this piece-of-crap Ozzy comic and being taken aback by the awful art (that and the moment where they portray Dio as egocentric and deeply self-conscious about his height). The problem is always that these characters are real people, and so the artist tries too hard to make their drawings look like photographs. What they don’t realize is that no one cares if your portrayal of James Hetfield looks exactly like the real James. It’s a comic book. We want the guys to look cool.
The only example of a musician’s comic book doing them justice that I can think of is Alice Cooper: The Last Temptation. It was written by Neil Gaiman of Sandman and American Gods fame, drawn by the incredible Michael Zulli, and reinterprets Alice Cooper’s work and the album on which it’s based into a bizarre horror story. That’s what makes it amazing — it’s not just an illustrated biography of a band, it’s something original and different.
To StormFront’s credit, the writing doesn’t appear terrible. I like the L’Amours shout-out, the mental dialogue is solid, and the layout of the characters’ lives looks at least somewhat inspired. But that would’ve been good for, you know, a book. Comics rely on their art, and man, this is some nightmare fuel right here.
Anyway, you can buy your copy of Orbit: Metallica here. Just know that if you leave it lying around, you might wake up in the middle of the night and see this picture of Lars staring at you:
God help you.
