“I discovered marijuana in Mexico in 1957”. At that time Jean Giraud was 17 and marijuana remained a part of his life until his 65th birthday. For this artist, possibly Europe’s most famous comic book author of the 20th century, the herb has been a creative stimulant which he tried for the first time “under very serious and beautiful conditions, without prejudice, with great naturalness”.
Jean Giraud is also known by his creative pseudonym, Moebius. In his youth Giraud became very popular in France as the graphic artist responsible for Lieutenant Blueberry, a classic Western serial that has managed to fill 32 books over the years. As Moebius, Giraud connects to his subconscious, displaying a dreamy creativeness and breaking free of the conventions so closely observed in Blueberry.
Arzach, Le Garage Hermétique, The Long Tomorrow and The Incal (written by Alejandro Jodorowski) are among the works that won Moebius worldwide recognition as a visionary artist. Owing to the ironic and poetic sci-fi of his comics, our author has been invited to collaborate as a designer on Alien, Dune, Tron and other films. And during all these years, marijuana was his daily companion.
“I tried marijuana with artists who used it not to escape reality, but to grasp it and understand it in a different way than the purely rational”. Giraud always remembers, with enormous gratitude, his first juvenile experimentations with the herb surrounded by Mexican bohemians who used it “as a tool, not as a way of escaping reality”.
In 2005, partly on his own initiative and partly on the advice of his wife, Giraud decided to give up marijuana. “Then I started a diary to record this personal adventure, but I’d forgotten why I was doing it after four pages”. This notebook of his experiences grew and evolved organically into the autobiographical comic Inside Moebius, in which the artist has been able to re-explore his own spirit, to get to know himself better as he begins to get old. “The most interesting thing about this diary was the possibility of appearing myself as a character”.
