36 EXCURSIONS & EXCAVATIONS in the HERMETIC GARAGE
11: The criminal hand
In his voice, too, there was an undertone of irony that seemed to lose itself in the dark immensity of Africa, mingling there with all the far-fetched legends his fellow-passengers, avid no less of gossip than of their day-long card games, had woven around the man’s strange personality—that fabulous aura of scandal, fantasy and fiction which always hovers about the white man who has played a part in the affairs of independent Asiatic states.
(André Malraux, The Royal Way, chapter 1)
In Heavy Metal #7 (October 1977), the opening caption of episode 3 of the Garage was translated as
SUDDENLY A GUARD APPEARED... IN THE BACKGROUND COULD BE SEEN A SCULPTED OTTER FROM “TAR’HAI,” AND IN THE DISTANCE, THE TERRIBLE TUNDRA...
Why is the tundra “TERRIBLE”? Probably because it’s vast and inhospitable. Or perhaps, to be more precise, because it requires an adjective to elicit the collaborative act that makes a world of fantasy hospitable to the imagination.
In Marvel’s 1987 version, the caption reads:
SUDDENLY A GUARD APPEARS! IN THE BACKGROUND, WE SEE A SCULPTED OTTER OF TAR’HAI ORIGIN, AND, IN THE DISTANCE, THE TERRIBLE STEPPE ...
Well, which is it? Steppe or tundra? If we consult the French, we find it is “LA TERRiBLE STEPPE”. The tundra was where Jerry Cornelius was driving in episode 2. Yet the splash page Giraud drew for Marvel’s 1993 reprinting of the story depicts an aerial view of the garage from which Barnier will shortly attempt to flee, and the caption reads, “SOMEWHERE ON THE SECOND LEVEL’S TUNDRA ...” Seventeen years after its initial appearance, the Garage was still emerging into life out of an original confusion.
Introducing Marvel’s printing of the story in 1987, Giraud recalled that it was “only with the third chapter that I began picking up the loose ends and giving the story a direction”. It’s certainly here that the Garage begins to develop momentum. The playfulness of the résumé, which will become a key feature of the series, is fully established:
RÉSUMÉ OF PRECEDiNG CHAPTERS :
ANYTHiNG CAN STiLL HAPPEN iN THE HERMETiC GARAGE
And the manner in which things happen in the Garage—a sputtering engine of obstruction, frustration, diversion and invention—is as exposed here as at any subsequent point. So it’s as good a place as any to illustrate the generative strategy underlying the story. This can be briefly stated: the invention of detail (both narrative and illustrative) diverts as often as it resolves the obstructions and frustrations by which the action is interrupted.
The opening panel is already stuffed with visual invention, taking its cue from the title—it’s a garage—and from the preceding installment, where the front part of a rather eccentric or old-fashioned car had been pictured. The garage has heretofore been rather a vague interior space, whereas Cornelius’s truck and Jasper’s flying vehicle were in motion in or above a desert setting. Giraud here brings interior and external elements into relation, as Barnier looks out of the garage onto the desert.
Obstruction is immediately evident, both in text and image, as Barnier is confronted by an armed guard. “THERE HE iS !.. ” says the guard (in French, “LE VOiLA”). So he’s been looking for Barnier? It would appear so: “iT ’S BARNiER ABOARD THE ARANGUE!.. ”
But why is he looking for Barnier? For the purposes of immediate narrative impetus, the answer is of no consequence—armed and uniformed men are looking for him—and it’s likewise reasonable to suppose that, at this stage, Giraud didn’t know.
Every month, I would try very hard to recreate a coherent story from the existing elements. Then I would break them apart again in order to create again a feeling of insecurity, so that, the next month, I would again have to pick up the pieces and do it again...
(Introduction to “The Airtight Garage”, 1987)
The guards will recur throughout the story. And amid the prodigality of invented details in this panel are two more that, in the short term, advertise a world the reader does not yet know. The sculpture is of Tar’haï origin. It suggests something exotic, possibly ancient. Who or what are (were) the “Tar’haï”? Though there are hints, no explicit answer is given in the story that follows. It remains a tantalising mystery; but in later years the Tar’haï will be fused with the “third level”, becoming part of the imaginary architecture of the extended Garage—this original serial plus its branching sequels.
(By the way, I always thought the sculpture looked less like an otter, and more like a seal or a walrus; but “loutre” in French is “otter”. On the other hand, it’s also true that sealskin has been referred to, historically, as “peau de loutre”. Possibly it’s a hermetic seal.)
In the meantime, what is the “third level”—3D NIVEAU—referred to in the writing in the shadows on the garage wall? The text on page 2 suggests it’s a physical space with flat steppes. Given that “THE TERRIBLE STEPPE” looms in the first panel, and that Barnier is seated in a vehicle “POPULAR IN THE FLAT STEPPES OF THE THIRD LEVEL”, it seems reasonable to suppose the action’s taking place on “the third level”. The free elaboration of an improvised plot, however, may lead to inconsistencies—even if it’s too early to suspect it just yet.
In panel 2,
BARNiER iMPETUOUSLY DRAWS HiS FUSiL-PÉTARD ... AND SHOOTS ... iMBECiLE!.. WHY DiD HE DO THAT ?..
Well, obviously he shoots because the guard is in the way. (Here, at least, Giraud meets an obstruction head on.)
But why do that rather than something else? What is it that conditions Barnier’s action? What desire for liberation and escape conjures out of nothing the brutish guard and answers him with an obliterating violence?
Not only for its sudden and reckless violence did I find the second panel memorable, but for the specificity and the persuasive physicality of its location. Whereas in the first panel the desert was seen from inside the garage, now the garage is situated in the desert. From outside, I’m now looking into its shadowed interior. Posters and racks of tools are visible. Barnier, standing in the cockpit of an open-topped, three-wheeled racing vehicle, fires the fatal shot. The guard’s head explodes (it’s perhaps clearer in French than in English that the gun fires explosive charges) and he’s lifted off his feet; his body is suspended above the bare, rutted ground, in the middle of the panel. Against the outer wall of the garage, another guard watches with evident dismay and alarm. The shaded side of the building has circular vents, barely visible. In the background, the steppe (or desert) recedes to the horizon, with only one low, featureless structure (possibly a ruin) interrupting the view. Illustration here seems to offer more than the accumulation and presentation of visual details; I had the impression, in images such as these, that Mœbius wasn’t so much inventing a world of fantasy as opening a window onto an alternative reality, virtually as solid, as spacious, and at times as grubby as this one.
And what follows from Barnier’s impetuous act? Now set to flee, he’s frustrated again when the damned engine refuses to start—notwithstanding it’s a type so robust that some consider a breakdown impossible. As in the first episode, Barnier is again let down by technology. Giraud offers an explanation:
iN MY OPiNiON, A CRiMiNAL HAND MUST HAVE SABOTAGED AN ESSENTiAL COMPONENT, LiKE FOR EXAMPLE THE TWO-WAY PiPE ...
And whose criminal hand but that of the writer, the artist?
The manner of Moebius consists in using drawing to place myself in different states of perception. To plunge into what the surrealists call the “waking dream” or “explosante fixe”: a lucid oneirism that is a sort of light trance. An oracular state...
When I work as Moebius, I open myself to the sole necessity of being there, in the moment. This obliges me to mobilise all that I know, all that I am, all that I’ve read, seen, experienced. In these moments, I no longer exist: my hand becomes autonomous...
(Giraud, Mœbius/Giraud, histoire de mon double, pp.167, 175)
But, faced by the problem of Barnier’s stalled vehicle, Giraud defers its resolution. Let the reader worry. In fact, he’ll dodge it entirely—let the critic worry—but here, on this page, he resorts to diversion: “MEANWHiLE, ABOARD THE “CIGURi”, MAJOR GRUBERT’S SPACESHiP.”
The introduction of two more characters in a new setting further thickens the plot. A man and woman are conversing. The man, whose back is turned to the reader, is evidently the Major—an ambivalent and frequently ridiculous figure Giraud has deployed in a handful of short strips. Here he has an erect bearing and is wearing what looks like a military uniform, possibly of the nineteenth or early twentieth century. His hair is smoothed down and tightly combed to the back of his head. The woman, seen in profile, also has hair tightly plastered to her head, trapped under some kind of bonnet that may be attached to her collar, and decorated with a bow under her chin. She has rather a heavy jaw. Grubert is waiting to find out what she has to report, and she tells him, “OUR SECRET BASE HAS BEEN DiSCOVERED”—okay, there’s a secret base—“AND iNVADED BY STRANGERS”. An invasion implies hostility, at the very least an unwelcome incursion, and possibly defensive action or countermeasures—in other words, plot, suspense, excitement. A reason to keep following the continuity.
But who are these “strangers”, these “iNCONNUS”? The term is vague enough that I might suspect, were I not so habitually passive in the face of story, that the writer doesn’t yet know. What the Major wants to know is whether the invasion has taken place on “ALL THE LEVELS...?” (I’m sure it didn’t occur to me to wonder, when I first read it, how many levels there were.)
“iMPOSSiBLE TO TELL ... FROM HERE...” says the woman with the rather heavy jaw—which means (more plot) that the situation will need to be investigated. But let me review what I know at this stage:
The Major has a spaceship. I haven’t seen it from the outside. I don’t know where it’s been, or where it’s going. For the moment, it’s simply the location of the Major, somewhere above the action that started down below, on one of the levels—probably the third—in the opening episodes of the serial. Giraud also verbally reintroduces the Bakalites, one of whom the Major assassinated in a previous story (“Major Fatal”) two issues earlier.
And, for the first time, Giraud extends the plot by advertising the possibilities of the next episode:
WiLL THE MAJOR’S SPY FALL iNTO THE TRAP THAT JERRY CORNELiUS WiLL NOT FAiL TO SET FOR HiM?.. YOU’LL FiND OUT WHEN YOU READ:
STAR BILLIARD... OUR NEXT EPiSODE.
A burlesque of the clichés of serial adventures is clearly signalled: a trap must be set for the spy because what else can happen if we are to be excited, and not bored? Well, we’ll find out, won’t we?
Unlike the résumé, however, this teaser of forthcoming developments did not become a recurring feature. This was the first of only two occasions on which it was used, and the second occurrence was deleted when the serial was reprinted in book form.
But meanwhile... what the hell is a “Star Billiard”?