The Art Of Heavy Metal
                                             (1981 - New York Zoetrope)  

      (by Carl Macek)   I just happened to watch the Heavy Metal movie once more and that made me pull this book off the shelf.  I remember the original release of the film was somewhat of a disappointment and buying this book back then followed right in line with that.  Artists like Moebius, Bernie Wrightson, Richard Corben, Chris Achilleos, Howard Chaykin & Mike Ploog were all associated in the movie's development, but they are pretty much bit players in this book.  I'm looking at the first edition here - be aware that this book, with a bit of re-jiggering and an additional 16 pages about the film's legacy, was re-released as HEAVY METAL: THE MOVIE in the mid 1990s.  Anyway, this smaller-than-usual 7-by-9-inch edition has 128 pages, with art on both the front & back covers.  Most of the 65 main art pages simply display numerous color animation cell images (12 show six double-page-spreads, most o.k.) with 14 more pages pulling multiple smaller images together.  There is on hand a not-insignificant amount of supplementary materials like concept-drawings, character-roughs & background settings along with the story-boarding, model-sheets, production pictures and a somewhat breathless narrative about the ground-breaking animation artistry at play.  The collaborative exercise such filmmaking makes it too complex for me to isolate singular names to associate with the movie images, but the other 'well-presented' material does allow me to identify that the collection's highlighted contributors that have one piece each:  Chris Achilleos, Michael Guerin, Mike Ploog, and George Ungar.