Jean Giraud | Comic-book artist, 73

Jean Giraud, 73, a French comic-book artist whose dark, intricately drawn fantasy worlds profoundly influenced graphic novels worldwide and U.S. science fiction films like Alien, Tron, and Avatar, died last Saturday at his home outside Paris.

Mr. Giraud was seen in the comic-book world as a kind of artist-avatar of the unbounded interior human landscape. Mr. Giraud's pen name, Moebius, referred to the disorienting, curved plane known as the Mobius strip.

In France, where the line between popular and serious art often blurs, he was a source of national pride.

His reputation as a comic book master was established in 1963 with Les Aventures de Blueberry, a Wild West story about a fugitive Union Army lieutenant running from the law. His densely packed panels depicted a U.S. West he knew mainly from the movies. But the drawings conveyed the minutest natural details and an outsider's sense of the menace lurking in the vast badlands - a combination that would later define his science fiction work.

In the mid-1970s, Mr. Giraud worked for the French comic magazine Pilote and helped start Metal Hurlant, a monthly comics magazine that was introduced in the United States as Heavy Metal. In The Masters of Comic Book Art, a 1987 documentary that featured interviews with a wide spectrum of artists, Mr. Giraud said he had turned to comic strips as a young man to escape what he considered the shackles imposed on graphic artists by the conventions of commercial art.

"Comics gives to the artist a very interesting field of exploration and research," he said. "Everything is possible. You can be very small or very big or very modest or very ambitious. You can stay in a regular style like everybody, or you can escape and be completely unusual and incredible. You can give more to the world, more to the drawing. Everything." - N.Y. Times News Service