I just found the website of an artist that I've been trying to find for a long time: Mark s. Fisher. I read his stories in Heavy Metal magazine in the early to mid '80s. His stuff was surreal and new wavish, not what you'd expect to find in there. They where the kind that I could scrutinize for a long time, some sort of parallel new wave/retro/sci-fi world. I found no trace of him outside of HM for a very long time, no interview, no work that I could see outside of comics...until the advent of blogs, where every one can post online easily. His blog, here. There's not a lot of info in there but lot's of art.
At the time, there were sexy women in HM, sure, but not the tacky big-breasts fetish that Kevin Eastman has imposed there after he bought the magazine. You could find a lot of surreal, ligne claire, Memphis style, new wave, film noir aesthetic, most of it translated from European magazines like Métal Hurlant, Charlie, Écho des Savanes, El Vibora, Frigidaire and others. There was also some american works that were very new and interesting. That's where I discovered Charles Burns, Lou Stathis, Drew Friedman, Rod Kierkegaard, Paul Kirchner and...Mark Fisher!
The was an alternative vein in there. It's true that Raw magazine was not that far away...
