This week I wrote two entries for a sci-fi story contest, the prompt being what fetishes might an alien life experience.

Having myself a good chat with the editor, who encouraged me to write a second story after my first submission, I got to telling her how the contest theme reminded me of Heavy Metal, the “adult illustrated fantasy magazine,” for which I’ve had a long love affair. I’ve stupidly had one collection after another of Heavy Metal built, then sold off to either make space or make the bills, but historically, this is one the greatest realms of hard sci-fi, fantasy, pulp and cyberpunk that’s ever come about.

So popular, so revered in the underground is Heavy Metal magazine, I once had a silent, snarling skirmish with a younger woman over a box of back issues a vendor had on the cheap at a comic book convention. Me being a gentleman to a fault, I gave her a silent wave to have first dibs. With a brisk nod but a noticeable leeriness about her while pawed through the vendor’s stock of The Spectre comic series, she got all the ones I wanted, but I came out fine with a handful of my own. Geekdom supremo.

I mean, the covers alone have hosted the who’s who of sci-fi and fantasy art royalty, H.R. Giger, Boris Vallejo, Simon Bisley, Frank Frazetta, Berni Wrightson, Olivia De Berardinis, Barry Windsor-Smith, Walter Simonson, Jean “Moebius” Girard, Richard Corben, Neal Adams and Esteban Moroto, to name a few.

Now, the term “adult” with Heavy Metal magazine comes with a very real caveat. In the later 1970’s and Eighties, there was no term “mature audiences,” not until DC Comics spun off their Vertigo line of non-mainstream, cutting edge material unsuitable for younger eyes. Back then, things were more full-frontal, in warning and in content. Accordingly, any real Heavy Metal fan has a Pavlovian, one-word phrase to sum up the entire imprint’s experience: “Den.”

Richard Corben took Conan the Barbarian, shaved him bald and set him in an X-rated sword and sorcery realm. Softcore chop ‘n slop with a lot of payoff sex. Sometimes Den was the conqueror. Often, he was conquered himself. Sexually, of course. Raped, even, if you can imagine it. Den got laid ten times more than Conan, and like James Bond, it’s prerequisite that Robert Howard’s timeless Cimmerian gets a shag or two per adventure.

I always enjoy telling the story of being age 12 and going into a local convenience store chain called 7-11, and I would go get my comic books every week at another convenience store. I would save just enough of my allowance money hoarded over a few weeks to pick up the latest Heavy Metal issue and Savage Sword of Conan. Both forbidden fruit to younger eyes of any decade, but especially 1981-83.

I was always pushing the button at 7-11, since you know a curious lad at that age was all about the naughty contents inside material youngsters aren’t supposed to have access to.  The Hispanic clerk always on shift knew it, knew me, always gave me a devilish grin and sold them to me anyway. He only gave me a refuting “Eh eh” once when I pawed an issue of Penthouse on the shelf in his store. His chuckling at me gave us an unspoken bond, nonetheless.

It’s always fun, just little more delicious having an “in” at certain points in your life. It was better than pinching my dad’s Hustler and Playboy magazines when he shoved them into a box he thought was stowed away from me. Heck, I wasn’t above crawling into dumpsters back then when I saw someone throw their skin and porn mags away!

I grew to love the writing in Heavy Metal as I grew up and was a religious follower during my time working in a comic book shop in the early 1990s. I hopped back on a few years ago, because I just cannot resist this magazine for sci-fi literati and porn pundits alike.

Thus, it was not just the naughty stuff that attracted me, though I was thinking upon it when writing my second entry for this contest I titled “A.I. Love.”  I’ll be lifting an extra smirk on my face if it gets published.

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.