Airtight Garage
The Airtight Garage ( or, in its earliest serialized form, ) is a lengthy comic strip work by the artist and writer Moebius (real name Jean Giraud). It first appeared in discrete two-to-four-page episodes, in issues 6 through 41 of the Franco-Belgian comics magazine Métal Hurlant from 1976 to 1979, and later in the American version of the same magazine, Heavy Metal, starting in 1977. It was subsequently collected as a graphic novel in various editions. Publication history The book-length version appeared first in the original French and with the original black and white art, and only later in a US edition in English and in color. The US edition, published by Marvel Comics' Epic imprint in 1987 (as the third volume in a series devoted to the collected works of Moebius), used a new translation, by Jean-Marc Lofficier and Randy Lofficier, different from the Heavy Metal serialisation, and presented the work with the pages colored. This version, along with most of the other Epic volumes collecting Moebius's work, was later reprinted in a signed & numbered limited edition hardcover series from Graphitti Designs. It was also published in the UK as a graphic novel by Titan Books in 1989, in advance of a Sony film adaptation that was never made. It was also reprinted in 1992 in the smaller, standard comic-book format, as a four-issue limited series that included several new pages drawn especially for that edition. In the twenty years since then, no English-language edition has been published. In France, however, as of 2012, the French version (Le Garage Hermétique) is available in both the original black-and-white "classique" edition and in a "Moebius U.S.A." format that combines the color art from the US editions with the original French text. Various deluxe editions featuring larger pages and/or a slipcase have also been offered, indicating the book's continued popularity and centrality in the Moebius canon. Sequels and related works The Airtight Garage was followed by L'Homme du Ciguri (The Man from the Ciguri) in 1995 and Le Chasseur Déprime in 2008. The latter has never appeared in English. Some of the characters from these stories also show up in the 1974 comic Le Bandard Fou (The Horny Goof), which can be considered a prequel to The Airtight Garage. The hero of The Airtight Garage, Major Grubert, was also the subject of some shorter comic-strip stories, poster images, and paintings over the course of his creator's long career, and eventually became the central character in an entire sketchbook-as-graphic-novel entitled Le Major, published in a limited edition facsimile in 2011. Major Grubert and his lady companion Malvina also appear throughout the six-volume Inside Moebius series (2000–2008). Plot Moebius has explained that the story was improvised in a deliberately whimsical or capricious manner. For this reason, the story is at times (deliberately) confusing. The "garage" itself is actually an asteroid in the constellation Leo which houses a pocket universe. Major Grubert orbits the asteroid in his spaceship Ciguri, from which he oversees the