by Geoff Boucher

‍One-hundred and fifty-nine months have passed since the man called Moebius left this world, but the sci-fi visionary’s relevance and reach continue to expand in fascinating ways. One of the final interviews of Giraud’s lifetime was conducted by journalist Geoff Boucher in November 2010 in Southern California. In the essay below, Boucher reflects on the encounter and shares previously unpublished material from the interview.

There are certain famous names that become so supercharged by otherworldly mystique that their syllables practically crackle with cosmic possibility. I’m thinking of names like Hendrix, Houdini, Kubrick, Frida, Miles, and Coltrane. And other legendary seekers of the sacred, the surreal, or the subversive: Dali, Castaneda, Warhol, and Zappa as well. It’s an impressive roll call at that point, but an incomplete one without the man called Moebius.

Moebius. It sounds like the future and on the printed page it practically pulses with sci-fi intrigue. Moebius. It’s a name I’ve known since the Reagan Era, and my middle school days in steamy South Florida. The first Moebius story I ever read was in the April 1983 issue of Heavy Metal, which was my introduction to the magazine as well.

That short story, “The Twinkle in Fildegar's Eye,” was a quirky and trippy tale about Fildegar, a doleful spaceman who takes an ill-advised chomp out of a giant talking mushroom named Kurbalaganta, which is allegedly Sumerian for "The Cone of the Erect Phallus." To my 13-year-old sensibilities it seemed bonkers, like comics sent from another dimension. The story was dream-like, casually irrational, and decidedly European -- in those ways it reminded me of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy or Doctor Who.‍

I was accustomed to American comics, whose essential figure was Jack Kirby, whose art was kinetic, melodramatic, and grotesque. By contrast the art of Moebius was spare and stately, nuanced, and airy in a way that suggested optimism and a calm intellect. And the work of Moebius had a sense of whimsy and existential humility that reminded me far more of The Little Prince than King Kirby.

When I started pulling away from comics in my college years, it was Moebius (and Alan Moore, and Neil Gaiman) that kept me from cutting the cord completely. Comics stayed on the periphery of my attention, but as a fan my focus was music and film. In the Summer of 2010, however, I plunged back into the comics scene when I launched a blog called Hero Complex for the Los Angeles Times. A few weeks later I received a fax (just ask your dad what it means): Moebius was coming to Southern California for his first visit to America in 22 years.

I’m not sure what qualifies as the most appropriate setting for a sit-down meeting with Moebius. A Parisian cafe? A Martian citadel on the banks of an alkaline lake? Elon Musk’s house? I had to make due with the beige-on-brown splendor of the Marriott Burbank Airport, which falls a bit short in the cosmic grandeur department. Moebius, however, lived up to his billing. The beloved artist was gregarious, curious, playful, and candid, and seemed as interested in my world view as I was in his perspectives on art, life, and the art of living. He was 72 when we met that November day in 2010 and by every indication he was energized and optimistic about the months ahead and his many projects. There was no hint of the cancer diagnosis that would upend his life in 2011 and then take that life in 2012.

That’s not to say that the Moebius I met that day was free from dread. His most powerful instrument, his eyesight, had begun to betray him.

“After all the years I have a problem with my eyes. In my left eye I have the cataract. They took my eye out, they took it to a shop. They did the sort of sushi chef stuff to it” — at that point he did a chopping-board pantomime — “and they put it back, and now it is special. It is like the Terminator and his android eye. The vision in my left eye is different than in the right eye, and it is very difficult to have the skill I had before the cataract.”

Computers helped Moebius magnify his work but they couldn’t multiply the hours in the day. Tough choices presented themselves. Should he follow the money or pursue his art? Taking lucrative commissions from well-heeled collectors or following his muse with storytelling projects that might connect with a wide audience.

“With the painting, it is very expensive. There are a lot of people who want to have my stuff. The level of price increases every year. It is a better, for me, way of life. But with my eye it is not that easy.

"My pleasure is to do the stories. I am a storyteller. I must manage between the pleasure and the  work. It is also a pleasure for me to do the paintings, but is different. I try to make time for both. To find, uh, to get a...”

He looked to Isabelle Giraud, his wife and business partner, who glanced up from her laptop to help her husband close the gap between his French thought and his English expression. “A balance?”

“Yes, that’s it. A balance,” he said with a gesture of exaggerated defeat.

Long before he (literally) made a name for himself as Moebius, he was simply a little boy named Jean Giraud growing up in the suburbs of Paris. He was born in May 1938 the same month that the first copies of Action Comics No. 1 were hitting U.S. newsstands with a caped hero called Superman. It was a big year for fantastical storytelling. Walt Disney released Hollywood’s first animated feature film, "Snow White and theSeven Dwarves"; Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein each made their publishing debuts; and Orson Welles alienated radio listeners with his infamous "The War of the Worlds" broadcast.

German tanks rolled into his hometown but, sheepishly, Moebius concedes that the adult world’s crisis was largely “only in the background” of his youth. Essentially, he was so possessed by his own imagination that he didn’t much notice the Nazi occupation. He fell in love with comics and illustration and a life of art beckoned.

“In the beginning I had two different levels,” Giraud said. “To be an artist in comics because it was my dream as a teenager and when I was 7, 8, 10. I was such a fan. I committed already to drawing. The comics were not only stories to enjoy for me, they were drawings that possessed me. I saw very early on the difference with my friends. They were using comics like a book, but to me I saw a drawing exposition. The purpose was different for us, the experience was not the same.  The second level for me, another side  – which would maybe be my Moebius face – was the other wonderful art I was discovering with a lot of appetite. The expression of art as something bigger than life, bigger than anything. There was something very mysterious about that and beautiful. It was a kind of heaven with Picasso and everybody at the same table. I wanted to be part of that. For me it was a feast through the ages. Timeless.”

His comics career got underway in 1957 and and he found major success with a character who hailed not from deep space but from the Old West. Lt. Blueberry, a Confederate Army veteran roaming the tumbleweed trails of adventure, would be his most sustained signature success in his native France. It was such a noted success that he invented a new pen name in the 1960s to separate his cosmic expeditions toward a new art style. Moebius was born.

There was revolution in the air in the 1960s and it seized the attention of the gifted young Parisian.

“There was a new generation of comic book artists in America and Europe coming up in the 1960s and 1970s and we wanted to connect the ambitions of art and comics,” Giraud said. “To combine the dream of being artists and the culture and traditions of doing comics. We wanted to put art in comics and comics into art and then send it to the audience. Into the dream, that was the dream of painting and drawing and doing everything. But especially the painting. I started trying to be a traditional painter with brush. I never started with oil. I’m not really completely traditional, but with the brush I wanted to do something almost the same, to imitate oil with the brush and after that with acrylic and after that with watercolor. Always it was about color. The color for me is so very important. It is part of my open dream in art, not only in comics. In the 1970s, I made a bridge between the two things.”

We talked more, mostly about the lavish art exhibit of his work at Fondation Cartier Pour L’Art Contemporain in his native Paris. “An overwhelming valentine I wish I could fold up and keep,” he called it. The collection featured enormous pieces — entire walls have been given over to the artist’s oddly serene images, which veer from Old West frontiers evoking Sergio Leone to dream-time landscapes that channel Salador Dali, Winsor McCay, and Rene Magritte.

Moebius dipped his chin in modesty. "These are some of my heroes you're mentioning. Now I am the hero to others and that is a mixed thing. They said that I changed their life: ‘You changed my life. Your work is why I became an artist.’ Oh, it makes me happy. But you know at same time I have an internal broom to clean it all up. It can be dangerous to believe it. Someone wrote, ‘Moebius is a legendary artist.’ I put a frame around me. A legend — now I am like a unicorn.”

Carrying the thought forward, I asked Moebius if he felt like his art connected him to the world while his pursuit of art isolated him. He nodded and, after chewing on the idea for a moment, answered carefully.

“I have no explanation, but I am interested in being alive. No, seriously, staying alive for an artist means to always be in an unknown part of himself. To be out of himself. The exhibition in Paris, the theme was transformation. Art is the big door, but real life is a lot of small doors that you must pass through to create something new. You don’t always need to go far. If you are in the Spacestation Mir and you need to fix something, you go outside, but not too far. If you travel too far you’ll die. Outer space is not human but you can visit. You need to be a little bit out there but you need to stay close to human.”

Then it was time to go. I started to leave but I remembered something. It took some rummaging but I found the artifact deep in my overstuffed work bag. The cover had faded and the staples had gone loose, but the April 1983 issue of Heavy Metal had aged far better than a lot of the people I knew in middle school.

I explained the history and Moebius smiled as I handed him the magazine. “Let me see, ah, so this is where we met...” he said as if I handed him a picture postcard or a street address. “And here we are now, together here sharing a ‘future’ that was just a dream to us then.

"How lucky we are to be in the future and to be in the past.”

It was a lovely and odd and perfect thing to say.

I shook the hand of the Unicorn and grinned.

“Yes, and in Burbank no less.”

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