Jean “Moebius” Giraud died yesterday. I’ve been looking for a comprehensive and meaninful obituary and I think Sean Witzke’s is pretty much on the mark.
In a medium where so little is profound, even the worst of Moebius’ comics achieve a level of serenity simply by how they have been drawn. Each panel is imbued with a sense of absolute assurance of the line conveying meaning, motion, feeling, story. Moebius’ surfaces are tactile, his characters are not only defined by their design but by expression, by how they carry themselves, how they move. His pages are fraught with detail, but rarely are those details overworked or sterile. The consistency of his hand gives his landscapes and cityscapes a kind of depth that is different from the way most illustration renders depth; his faces convey just how deft and expressive his hand could be – and how that meant a face battered by life or one untouched by stress.
via Simon Gane
