Look what I found in the attic. This is a collected volume of five issues of Metal Hurlant in its original french language. I can't understand much (if any) but still, it's nice to look at. Ten points to the anonymous commenter who noticed that the Blade Runner cover is actually issue 79, not 78. There must be a misprint here because there is no issue 77 inside the book, we start at 78 and end at 82. The chapter that constitutes issue 79 has a large Blade Runner feature featuring stills, artwork and a nice photo of Ridley Scott with Philip K. Dick (who died six months before the magazine was published). For the curious, the other cover reproductions aren't anything special, issues 80 and 82 for example feature Dragonslayer and Tron promo photos on the covers.
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| Page from Salamandres - Axolotls by Philippe Caza |
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| Page from Logiciel - Coup D'Etat by Philippe Gauckler and Charles Imbert. |
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| Cover for Metal Hurlant 79 by Ralph Reese. |
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| Page from Richard Corben's Den II. |
Gorgeous as always, of course.
ReplyDeleteCould you explain why issue 78 (or 79? your caption says 78, but I see a 79 in the image..) carries the text "c'est philip k. dick qu'on assassine!"? Since it carries a still from 'blade runner', it should be from around the time of pkd's death...
thanks!
Well spotted! I didn't look that close, it must be a misprint - inside the book are the original covers and contents pages; they start at 78 all-right and end at 82. Issue 78 was printed in September 1982, 6 months after PkD's death - I did consider scanning the Blade Runner article, it has nice stills and photographs of PkD with Ridley Scott.
ReplyDeletecheers!
(I'm going to pop all this info into the post I think.)
Thanks for the info!
ReplyDeleteI am curious about this because the french were the first to apparently really respect PKD (he was always extremely depressed about not getting more recognition, something which I feel bleeds into his writing.. many main characters have a certain despondence..).
But anyway, the phrase literally translates to "PKD is being murdered!". The significance is that the film is of course quite unrelated to the book, and PKD and ridley scott argued over all sorts of stuff (this is documented in various places, not really hidden knowledge). The french, being more in tune with what pkd wanted to say, may have considered the hollywood-ized 'blade runner' to be 'murder' of PKD?
anyway, clearly i am just burning time on a sunday afternoon.. but if you could provide some explanation of that phrase, me and other PKD nerds creeping around the 'net would all continue to love you.
but regardless, great blog, my friends and I all love it.
It's times like this I wish I had a French friend or could speak the language, I'm considering spending the afternoon with Babel Fish at the moment - from what I can gather from the article what you said sounds correct - I see the word salauds (bastards) also the article is actually called "the second death of philip k. dick"
ReplyDeleteHi Jeff (I'm the commenter from earlier--we're all friends here, might as well use my identity). If you can be bothered to post some pictures of the article, I'll try to push it through some software to do the translation. I think this is a pretty interesting find.
ReplyDeleteHi again,
ReplyDeletefunny you should mention it but I actually started scanning it earlier! Should be up here in a new post very soon ;)