[ORIGINAL PLATE] - Lot 190

[ORIGINAL PLATE] MOEBIUS Major Fatal. Les Humanoïdes Associés, 1979 Original plate #56 bis from Garage Hermétique by Jerry Cornélius, prepublished in Métal Hurlant #30, June 1978. India ink on paper 41.5 x 31.5 cm. 23rd chapter of Jerry Cornélius's Garage Hermétique christened "Chez les cow-boys"! Published as an album by Humanoïdes Associés in 1979. "Major Fatal is too good to be true. You're never sure you're going to get in. And yet you can't get out. A vicious circle. A drug!" Jacques Goimard, science-fiction anthologist. It was in 1976, in the mythical issue no. 6 of Métal Hurlant magazine, that we witnessed the launch of Major Grubert, a character who was to establish himself as an emblematic and mysterious creator and surveyor of a universe like no other. It was to free himself from Blueberry's invasive grip that Moebius gave himself free rein, not knowing from one episode to the next what he was going to draw or where the story was going. The result is an original story with neither beginning nor end, in which Moebius bends the laws of the genre, multiplying anti-events and anti-disasters, changing characters and setting as he pleases, ridiculing conventional lines and summaries of previous chapters. The "automatic" style of drawing enabled him to blur the lines with a consummate art of derision, and to multiply the details and their strangeness: the engineer Barnier's pelisse in the middle of the desert, the gait of the baroque procession in the last strip, which has all the makings of a medieval marginalia, and so on. This method enabled him to vary genres and codes, moving from plates with blueberian realism (as in the episode entitled "Chez les cow-boys" from which our plate is taken), to others that unfold in a clear, racy line, sometimes giving an imperceptible sensation of volume thanks to the hatching work. The plate we present is exceptional in that it brings together the two distinct universes created by Giraud/Moebius, namely the Blueberian western and science fiction, as if the author wanted to reconcile the two genres, his drawing board becoming, for a moment of grace, a destiny board.