Contrary to its subtitle (The Adult Illustrated Fantasy Magazine), the stories featured in Heavy Metal vary in tone, style and genre, but a typical story will be rooted in normal comic book or Speculative Fiction tropes, and then mix them with varying doses of Mind Screw, gratuitous gore and nudity, Black Comedy and artsy experimentalism. Its countercultural take on Speculative Fiction and comics in general made it a spiritual ally of both New Wave Science Fiction and the Underground Comics movement, and it published material from both (such as a short story by Harlan Ellison and a serialized comic by Vaughn Bodé).
Works that have appeared in Heavy Metal include:
- The Airtight Garage of Jerry Cornelius
- Arawn
- Barbarella
- Champakou
- Den
- Druuna
- Fistful of Blood
- The Great Passage
- The Incal
- Lone Sloane
- The Long Tomorrow
- Lorna
- The Melting Pot
- The Nikopol Trilogy
- Ranxerox
- Requiem Vampire Knight
- Sha
There have been several adaptations in other media, including the Heavy Metal animated movie, its sequel Heavy Metal 2000, and the live-action TV series Metal Hurlant Chronicles. The animated series Love, Death & Robots originally began life as a reboot, but it ended up being a Divorced Installment.
At the 2022 San Diego Comic-Con, Heavy Metal publications unveiled the creation of their own production company
, with plans to produce a slate of various series and films, both live-action and animated.
Provides examples of:
- Adaptational Badass: In their adaptation of Heavy Metal 2000, Kerrie's as badass as her sister Julie. She tries to kill Tyler multiple times and manages to escape him for a while.
- Bee People: The story Hive shows a "human hive." The queen is the only breeding female, sterile female "drones" oversee the masses of male "workers." Occasionally, a drone takes a worker to the queen's temple to mate with her and father a new generation of workers.
- Breakout Character: Druuna was a massive hit with audiences who were attracted to the voluptuous beauty and wanted to see more of her. While Morbus Gravis was intended to be a standalone story, it spawned a decades-long comic series.
- Cheek Copy: An issue has a comic in which office workers at a party do this, including other body parts. Somehow, this leads to a being made of all these parts running around the building. The cops are called, they don't find anyone, but getting into the spirit of the party, one of them copies his gun.
- Criss-Cross Attack: One illustrated Science Fiction story has Earth astronauts venture from their space station into an alien environment seeking vital resources. Always they come away empty-handed, many times with colleagues having limbs sheared off by nearly-invisible, lightning fast creatures. The last two intact astronauts make a foray, only to end up cut into sections like beef cattle after this kind of attack.
- Damsel in Distress: The alien woman in the story Champakou at the beginning. She falls into a trap for big game, is injured, loses her gun, almost gets eaten by a jaguar, and has to be carried back to her ship.
- Demoted to Extra: Germaine doesn't join Julie until after they leave the strip club in their adaptation of Heavy Metal 2000 and he dies not long after.
- Diamonds in the Buff: In the story Hive, the queen is not wearing any fabric, clad only in beads and some other jewelry. Her groin is covered by a piece of ornament, but her butt and breasts are completely exposed. She doesn't need to take anything off to have sex.
- Disintegration Chamber: A one-page comic by Chantel Montellier features industrial workers being told their factory is being shut down, and that they should therefore now "proceed to the disintegration chamber".
- Drop Dead Gorgeous: This trope turns up from time to time:
- In the Vaughn Bode serial Sunpot, Belinda Bump is always topless in every episode, including the final story's "Everybody Dies" Ending where her bare-breasted corpse is shown lying in the wreckage of the space station following an unspecified off-panel disaster. Another episode had one of the station's robots going berserk and shooting two topless crew members.
- The Mœbius story "Ballade" ends with the nude Loona and her whimsical travel companion being shot by an advancing line of soldiers in a senseless and Sudden Downer Ending, though the rest of the scene only frames her corpse from an extreme distance as the story ends.
- Another Moebius story, "The Mysteries of Eroticism #2," features a beautiful woman shown sprawled naked on the floor after fatally overdosing on a Fantastic Drug.
- Heilman: In the first chapter, Heilman has an out-of-body experience while having sex with a Cute Monster Girl and battles an Eldritch Abomination while astrally projecting; when he returns to his body, he discovers that his enemy killed the woman while Heilman's consciousness was on the astral plane. Her naked body is shown lying in a Boobs-and-Butt Pose (the better to show her Prehensile Tail).
- In the final chapter of the serial The Great Passage, the heroine Topsannah is shown floating naked and dead in a pool of water, revealing that she had been Dead All Along since she had fallen into the water in a previous chapter, and that all of her adventures since then had been either her journey through the afterlife or a Dying Dream. The old shaman who discovers her body remarks that her beauty "destroys the pallor of death."
- In the Juan Giménez story "Timescooter," a nerdy scientist is seduced by his boss's wife, then strangles her after she tells him it was just a meaningless fling and laughs at him. He carries her naked body to his time machine and creates a time loop so that he can perpetually relive the sexual encounter and the murder.
- Exact Words: In one Richard Corben story, a swordsman and his female adventuring partner are on a quest to track down and slay a necromancer. They get separated, and when the man finds her he's too late, and she's already a zombie...but the necromancer is lying dead nearby with a split open skull, and there's a goat wandering around. The woman tells him that he zombified her and then made her help with a sacrificial ritual, holding a goat, giving her a sword, and saying "When I nod my head, strike it!" She explains "He... nods head... I... strike it!"
- Fanservice Cover: The magazine, which features fantasy and science fiction comics, used various cover subjects in its early years. But it found that issues with pin-up covers sold better and gradually all of its cover subjects became scantily attired women. It helps that Editor-in-Chef at the time Kevin Eastman was married to the late B-movie maven Julie Strain, as 90% of most of these covers seem to be modeled after her.
- Flying Car: "Austin Grimaldi" shows the famous parachuting Corvette being able to take off from the ground and fly.
- Grand Theft Me: In "King's Crown": in a certain land, a tournament is held every so often to choose the strongest man to be the new king. Entrants must be healthy and free of diseases. Every winner becomes a cruel tyrant, but the hero of the story (called weak and frail all his life) wants to become ruler and end the reign of evil. He wins, and at his "coronation", he's drugged, bound, his skull is cut open by robot surgeons (after he wakes up), his brain is crudely removed over his screaming protests, and the brain of the previous king is transplanted from his freshly-dead, used up, obese corpse. In death, however, the hero is victorious. The stress of the surgery sets off his congenital heart defect, and the tyrant is slain.
- Green-Skinned Space Babe: The alien woman from the story Champakou. She looks almost identical to a slender and conventionally attractive young woman except her blue skin and white hair, but can change her colors as desired. She also spends the entire story stark naked and uncensored.
- Hyperspace Is a Scary Place: The 1976 short comic "Approche Sur Centauri" from the French magazine Métal Hurlant (translated as "Approaching Centauri" when published in the American version of the magazine, Heavy Metal, in July 1977), scripted by Philippe Druillet and illustrated by Mœbius, featured a hyperspace pilot who briefly experienced a hellish dimension when the generator overloaded and he was "thrown outside the T/S continuum". Upon return, he insisted "I saw nothing...nothing..."
- Inconsistent Spelling: The Quail homeworld in Dark Wing is called Tiberius but is accidentally spelled as "Tierius" a couple of times.
- Leg Cling: Simon Bisley with an illustration.◊
- Melting Pot Sci-Fi Setting: The aptly named The Melting Pot by Kevin Eastman is set on a planet where a god-like alien placed aliens from a million different planets, hoping they'd build a utopia. He returned 300 years later, severely disappointed.
- Named by the Adaptation: The 2025 revival gave Grimaldi from the movie the first name of "Austin".
- Non-Indicative Name: Heavy Metal magazine has nothing to do with Heavy Metal music. The magazine is an anthology of adult-themed comics, many of them fantasy and science fiction. Its original French name is Métal Hurlant ("Howling Metal" or "Screaming Metal") and was co-founded by the French artist Mœbius. The movie adaptation attempted to incorporate some early examples of the music genre into the background music, but the film score was still clearly dominated by classical film composer Elmer Bernstein.
- Even when "rock-type" music was incorporated into the soundtrack, the majority of it included then-popular non-metal acts such as Journey, Grand Funk Railroad, Stevie Nicks, Cheap Trick, and Devo. note
- Porn with Plot: The magazine is pretty heavy on Fanservice to begin with, but there are a number of sexploitation-centric issues, featuring stories from noted erotic artists such as Alphonso Azpiri, Milo Manara, Horacio Altuna, and Paolo Eleuteri Serpieri.
- Recursive Canon: One comic in the February 1983 issue of Heavy Metal, the French version, shows the main character, who wants to become a comic book writer, reading an issue of Heavy Metal.
- Remote Vitals Monitoring: One short story by "Azpiri" is about a project that can transmit the conscious mind of an explorer into the body of another person, even one that died centuries ago. The explorer is sent into Galilee, and awakens in the body of Jesus Christ, who shambles out of his grave. The science team for the project closely monitor the subject's vital signs, including his emotional state. The explorer can somehow transfer his consciousness to bystanders, and ends up in the body of someone wracked with guilt and fear. This fellow flees the throng around Jesus, and goes to hang himself. The project team anxiously await an opportunity to retrieve the explorer before Judas Iscariot ends his own life, presumably taking the explorer's life with him.
- Rouge Angles of Satin: The back of Dark Wimg refers to Tiberius as being a "rouge planet" instead of a Rogue Planet.
- Scenery Gorn: At least once per issue of the magazine is a story set After the End or in a still-functioning Dystopia that begins with an Establishing Shot displaying all of its wretched beauty.
- Seemingly Wholesome '50s Girl: In the Horacio Altuna story Cat, the protagonist Jessica Hampton-Brooks is a seemingly wholesome girl (blonde, blue-eyed with Youthful Freckles) from an upper society family, but is in fact a stellar example of The Vamp and The Sociopath.
- Sextra Credit: In the Horacio Altuna story Cat published in Heavy Metal, its Villain Protagonist, a nymphomaniac sociopath, at one point seduces one of her professors to bump up her grades. They're later caught, but she threatens the dean with making sure that her wealthy father's handsome donations to the school will dry up and gets off scott-free.
- Shapeshifting Excludes Clothing: The serial The Great Passage has this. Topsannah, the main character, is transformed into a bird, but her clothes are left behind. When she turns back into a human, she's completely starkers.
- Spared by the Adaptation: The "Cold Dead War" story shows that Skip survived his Bolivian Army Ending from the movie's "B-17" segment.
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Tuckerization:- Their reprint of The Melting Pot names the woman crash landing on the planet Casey Jones after a character from Kevin Eastman's more famous Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series.
- "Austin Grimaldi" gives Grimaldi from the movie a first name. Apparently after a guy who worked in the film's sound department.
- Villain Protagonist: Jessica Hampton-Brooks, the protagonist of Cat. She only cares about her own gratification, ruins the lives of people who she cames in contact with and gets away with everything scot-free.
- Walking Shirtless Scene: In Hive, the male workers wear a loincloth during their entire lives. The exception is when one is chosen to mate with the queen - he must remove his loincloth and remain naked when in her temple.
