{"id":4586,"date":"2010-02-06T06:00:34","date_gmt":"2010-02-06T06:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/?p=4586"},"modified":"2010-02-03T17:58:29","modified_gmt":"2010-02-03T17:58:29","slug":"lone-sloane-delirius","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/2010\/02\/06\/lone-sloane-delirius\/","title":{"rendered":"Lone Sloane: Delirius"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"
\nBy Philippe Druillet<\/strong> (Dragon’s Dream\/Heavy Metal)
\nISBN: 2-205-00632-0<\/p>\n

The seminal fantasy icon Lone Sloane<\/strong> revolutionised graphic fiction not so much in his own country but in Britain and America when his adventures began appearing in the adult fantasy magazine Heavy Metal, <\/strong>which combined original material with the best that European comics had to offer. In 1975 French comics collective Les Humanoides Associes<\/em> began publishing the groundbreaking magazine M\u00c3\u00a9tal Hurlant<\/em>, but one of their visual mainstays had begun nearly a decade earlier\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n

Philippe Druillet, born in Toulouse in 1944, and raised in Spain, is a photographer and artist who started his comics career in 1966 with an apocalyptic science fiction epic Le Myst\u00c3\u00a8re des ab\u00c3\u00aemes<\/em> (The Mystery of the Abyss<\/em>) which introduced a doom-tainted intergalactic freebooter and wanderer called Lone Sloane<\/strong> in a far distant future: a tale heavily influenced by HP Lovecraft and A.E. Van Vogt. Later influences included Michael Moorcock’s doomed anti-hero Elric<\/em> (and I’m pretty sure I can see some Barry Windsor-Smith also tinting the mix\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6)<\/p>\n

He began working for Pilote<\/em> in 1969, and revived his cosmic and deeply baroque star-rover in a number of short pieces which were gathered together in 1972. Prior to the large scale (310mm x 233mm) 1991 collection from NBM (see The Six Voyages of Lone Sloane<\/a><\/strong>) this cool and memorable album was the only place they could be found in an English translation, and yet they are merely a prelude for the fantastic fantasy that makes up the rest of Lone Sloane: Delirius.<\/strong><\/p>\n

So by way of recapitulation those Six Voyages<\/em> were ‘The Throne of the Black God’<\/em> wherein Sloane is captured by a demonic chair and dumped on a desolate world to await possession by a cosmic god of chaos, whilst in ‘The Isle of the Doom Wind’<\/em> he thwarts space pirates. In ‘Rose’<\/em> he is trapped on a world of robotic junk and faces oppressive piracy in ‘Torquedara Varenkor:<\/em> the Bridge over the Stars’<\/em>.<\/p>\n

In ‘O Sidarta’<\/em> Sloane regained control of his long-lost super-spaceship and began a quest to return to Earth and overthrow the despotic Imperium, a quest that culminated in startling revelations of his destiny in ‘Terra’<\/em>: a portentous prelude before the main event\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n

‘Delirius’<\/em> was scripted by celebrated comics writer Jacques Lob (Jerry Spring<\/em>, T\u00c3\u00a9n\u00c3\u00a9brax<\/em>, Blanche \u00c3\u2030piphanie <\/em>and Superdupont <\/em>among others) and in a jarring cacophony of visual Sturm und Drang<\/em> pitched the intergalactic vagabond into the midst of a power struggle between the Imperator of all Galaxies and his own clergy, the deeply fundamentalist Red Redemption.<\/p>\n

Delirius<\/strong> was a useless mudball until the supreme overlord found a way to make it pay. By converting the entire world into a highly-taxed cash-cow of legal debauchery \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The Planet of a Hundred Thousand Pleasures\u00e2\u20ac\u009d became a perfect way to placate the populace and generate revenue for further conquests. Now the priests have approached Sloane with a perfect plan to steal all the cash and thereby remove the planetary governor: but priests can’t be trusted, nothing can be planned for on a world of utter licentious chaos and Sloane always has his own agenda\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n

This is a graphic odyssey of truly Byzantine scale and scope: the twists and turns, the visual syntax and tone created here dictated the shape of science fiction – especially in movies – for the next two decades. Character and plot were winnowed to bare essentials so that Druillet could fully unleash the startling graphic innovations in design and layout that seemed to churn within him, and which exploded from his pen and brain.<\/p>\n

As the scheme went inevitably, utterly awry the sheer energy of the artist’s cosmic Armageddon achieved levels of graphic energy that only Jack Kirby has ever equalled. This is a tale crying out for re-release in large format and with all the bells and whistles modern technology can provide, but until then this book will have to do – and do very well. Luckily for you it’s still widely available and remarkably inexpensive\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6
\n\u00c2\u00a9 1972, 1973 Philippe Druillet\/Dargaud Editeur.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Philippe Druillet (Dragon’s Dream\/Heavy Metal) ISBN: 2-205-00632-0 The seminal fantasy icon Lone Sloane revolutionised graphic fiction not so much in his own country but in Britain and America when his adventures began appearing in the adult fantasy magazine Heavy Metal, which combined original material with the best that European comics had to offer. In … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Lone Sloane: Delirius”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[63,107],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4586","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-european-classics","category-science-fiction"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4AFj-1bY","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4586","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4586"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4586\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4586"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4586"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4586"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}