Moebius The Airtight Garage (Le Garage Hermétique) Ep 36, p 2

Original title: Le Garage Hermétique de Jerry Cornelius
First published in Métal Hurlant 41 (June '79), and soon after in Heavy Metal magazine. Moebius is responsible for every single thing on this page - writing, drawing, inking, and lettering (and later coloring in some collected versions).

There are 36 episodes, with this final episode being the longest at 8 pages (most are two pages). The title of the episode is “Nearly Everything Explained.” The page features the three main characters: Major Grubert (aka Major Fatal), Jerry Cornelius (later Lewis Carnelian), and arch villain Sper Gossi.

I bought this page in 2024, my first piece of comic OA in 22 years! It kicked off a binge of buying till today, though none of the rest are as significant to me, as I’ll explain. In 1988 I bought several L’Incal pages from Moebius’s reps Jean Marc and Randy Lofficier. I was hoping to buy Airtight Garage pages, and was disappointed to hear that all that art was long gone, scattered across Europe, supposedly often given away to friends. I bought the Incal pages as consolations. I didn’t see any Garage pages for sale later, and stopped buying OA around 2000. Then the craving reawakened, and this page appeared. A train trip to Belgium and it was mine, closing a circle that had started long before.

'Le Garage' was created a few pages a month over almost three years, without script or outline. It is completely the creation of the fertile mind of Moebius. After the grind of 12 years of 'Major Blueberry' for Pilote, Giraud co-founded Métal Hurlant as an outlet for science fiction/fantasy and stories more in sync with the current culture. 'Le Garage' began in issue 6, in a 2-page story that Moebius didn’t even intend to publish:

“It’s J.P. Dionnet, Editor-in-chief of Métal who’s responsible for what followed, because if he hadn’t had the perverse idea to have these two unhappy pages in Métal No. 6, Engineer Barnier’s damaged cabler would have forever remained what it was in reality, a machine with no past, with no future, with neither tail nor head!
I’d put the pen in gear, the rest had to follow . . . circumstances lent themselves to it. I had Blueberry to do, which took a lot of time, and plenty of other things, and still others, etc . . . so it seemed good to have a minimum presence of two pages in each issue of Métal.”*

Moebius has described how he often didn’t consult the previous episode, and frequently tried to leave the story in an impossible place. Sometimes he forgot the deadline until the last moment and in a late-night rush generated another couple of pages just in time. The result is whimsical, erratic, enigmatic, mesmerizing, but concentrated. Like reading Borges, I think - best done in small doses, with time to reread and ruminate.

That's how I read these stories, as they came out, in Heavy Metal magazine in the late '70s. Later I cut all of Moebius’s pages out and created my own ‘album’ of The Airtight Garage. Reading the story month to month was exhilarating. Rereading it years later, in one sitting, wasn't as satisfying. I don’t recommend anyone read it that way. It should be read the way Moebius created it, episodically.

It’s hard to overestimate the impact that Heavy Metal magazine in general and Moebius in particular had on the US/world comics scene (and film, and culture). Personally it ruined me for regular comic books ever since.

There were 99 original Airtight Garage pages. An additional page was added to the reprinting as an album. Major Fatal/Grubert was born in several short stories by Moebius published prior to the Airtight Garage, and Moebius continued the story later. These original 99 pages, along with the 13 page story ‘Le Major Fatal’ that preceded them, are the foundational Moebius experience.

Note 1 - when my wife saw this page, she said “Wow, that’s a lot of words.” Of course that’s only the case in the sixth panel, and to me is part of Moebius’s magic. It’s all his words and his lettering; it’s part of the art and design of the page. Plus, Sper Gossi is a fussy prig, and his droning speech is hilarious sendup of villainous monologues.

*For those who are fascinated by Moebius and Le Garage Hermétique, I highly recommend this website: https://www.openlistpublishing.com/watch-this-space/36-excursions-excavations-in-the-hermetic-garage/