Moebius: Dune & The Time Masters

Following on from yesterday's post semi-concerning the ill fated Dune movie by Alejandro Jodorowsky, I'd thought I'd see if I could find some of Moebius' design work for the film, and, lo and behold, over at www.duneinfo.com, I did! Here's Jean's conceptions of some of the characters.
For instance, this is Paul Atreides:


While this is Paul's father, Duke Leto:


Here's The Lady Jessica:


While this, obviously, is The Baron Harkonnen:


Here's Prince Rabban The Beast, looking not at all like the David Lynch version:


While this, believe it or not, is Feyd Rautha. As embarrassing as Sting was in the movie, he'd've looked even worse in this costume:


For more of Moebius' Dune design's, check out that site. I also mentioned yesterday, an animated feature the great man worked on called The Time Masters, directed by Rene Laloux. Here's the poster:



If memory serves, it was about the Han Solo-esque hero racing to save a small boy stranded on a lost, dangerous planet, while Time itself collapsed around them. Here's a couple of stills.



Laloux is to animation what Moebius is to comics, sharing a lot of the same visual aesthetics, and though the animation is quite dated now, his films are always worth a look, particularly this one, Gandahar ( also released as Light Years ), which had design's by another legendary Metal Hurlant alumni, Philippe Caza. Laloux also made an incredibly weird & surreal cartoon called Fantastic Planet ( La Planete Sauvage ), which creeped me out so much as a kid, that even now I can't look at images from it. Hence there's none from it here. If you want to see it, go look yourself. Brrrr.

Moebius: The Long Tomorrow

Today is French genius Moebius' birthday, and to celebrate, here's something really cool. Back in 1976, Jean Giraud was working on Alejandro Jodorowsky's ill-fated production of Dune, supplying concepts and designs.
One of the people in charge of special effects for the movie was Dan O'Bannon, who wrote Alien, Blue Thunder & Return Of The Living Dead, but who fans of a certain age will always remember as whiny astronaut Pinback in his & John Carpenter's sci-fi black comedy Dark Star.
Both men were sitting around Paris for months, with basically nothing to do, while the film shuddered to a slow halt around them, so O'Bannon started drawing comics.
One of the comic strips he drew was a futuristic detective story called The Long Tomorrow. Moebius loved it, and immediately drew his own version, which was eventually published in Heavy Metal.
A few years later, O'Bannon was working on Alien, and asked Moebius to come in and do some more design work. He met with director Ridley Scott, who later asked him to work on Blade Runner, but Giraud regrettably had to pass as he was already working on an animated feature called The Time Masters ( which I recommend if you ever get the chance to see it )
So if this story reminds you of Blade Runner at all, well, that's why.