Why Heavy Metal is so great

Thursday, December 14th, 2006 • Horrorthon Posts

I have to interrupt the proceedings to make a simple point. Here is The Metropolitan Museum of Art, on Fifth Avenue in New York:

The above image depicts is a portion of the four-block-long facade along Fifth Avenue, constructed directly in front of the original building by Calvert Vaux and J. Wrey Mould (1880), which was erected entirely out of Indiana limestone, and consists of four separate wings that were designed between 1902 and 1917 by the renowned firms of Richard Morris Hunt and McKim, Meade and White. As you can see, the museum has taken to affixing canvas banners onto the facade, to indicate what sort of art exhibits may be seen if you go in there. Here’s another view of the banners:

Looks great, doesn’t it? In a rather more alarming vignette, here’s an unidentifed American astronaut being destroyed by a glowing green spherical artifact called “The Loc Nar,” which (according to the dense descriptive passages in Heavy Metal, 1981) constitutes a sort of sentient distillation of all evil:

Where may one find such a malevolent, terrifying artifact/entity? I had forgotten this, but apparently the answer is at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (where it shall be on view for a mere twenty-nine days; an unusually short exhibition schedule for the Met, since, for example, their current, month-old “Cezanne to Picasso” retrospective exhibit will continue running well into January):

I’m sorry, but this is just completely making my day. I wonder where they’ve put it (from both a presentational and curatorial standpoint)? Is there an exhibition catalog? Did J. P. Morgan or U.S. Steel contribute funding for the exhibit? Was there a gala reception, with the mayor in attendance? At how many points during the saga of “The Loc Nar – At the Metropolitan” did somebody go “AAAH” and collapse into a puddle of melting green bones or did the Loc Nar take it upon itself to float around talking to specific (young, female) patrons? Did the entire eighth grade class at Spence School For Girls end their museum trip by becoming sword-wielding warriors flying away on big dragonflies or did they just write “reports” about what they learned at the Metropolitan? I’d love to know either way—wouldn’t you?