Chris Achilleos, the Heavy Metal Covers

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December 16th, 2021

Heavy Metal lost another legendary contributor when the artist Christos “Chris” Achilleos, died on December 6, 2021. It is a depressing pitfall any publication will face when it’s had the good fortune to be around for 45 years — the magazine outlives those who built it. In recent years we’ve lost Corben, Philippe Adamov, and Alfonso Azpiri, to name just a few.

In an admittedly narrow sense, Achilleos was the most important Heavy Metal artist of all. How so? Achilleos did the primary movie poster for the 1981 Heavy Metal movie, an image that reached more people than anything from the pages of the magazine (and yes, it was also a magazine cover). Achilleos’ depiction of Taarna riding her winged mount was the portal through which the content and spirit of this Eurocentric, adults-only comics mag passed, on its way to the multiplexes of middle America. Everyone who saw the movie knew the poster, and many people saw the movie without ever cracking the magazine. Achilleos’ Taarna also adorned the soundtrack cover and the VHS box art.

Drawing and painting warrior women was Achilleos’ primary passion, which made him not just a natural fit for Heavy Metal covers, but more than that, an architect of the form. It’s interesting to note that Heavy Metal didn’t feature a sexy woman on its cover until January 1978 — its 10th issue. And in the years immediately following, seductive villainesses and heroines were only occasional. Compare that era to the ’90s and 2000s, when cheesecake was dominant. That mixture of sex appeal and sci-fi/fantasy wasn’t the legacy of Moebius, Druillet or Corben — it was the legacy of Achilleos and Luis Royo.

We could say “for better or worse” here — the Heavy Metal readership is split on covers of that period; some want to see a deadly pinup girl on the cover every month while others feel we got a little, or a lot, carried away. That’s a separate debate; the late Christos Achilleos did not do those covers, but his brilliance undoubtedly inspired most of the artists who did.

Achilleos was born on the island of Cyprus, and in the years before Heavy Metal existed he established himself as a leading cover artist of fantasy novels, excelling at painting dragons, barbarians, and beautiful women with the relatively new tool available to artists. It was called an “airbrush.” He published his first collection of fantasy art, Beauty & the Beast, in 1978. He made his Heavy Metal debut with the back cover of the November 1980 issue, a piece called “Number 13 at Hialeah.”

Achilleos returned in the subsequent issue with a painting of a horn-helmeted warrior, Elle, that appeared on the cover. In its full form, Elle was too sexy for Heavy Metal‘s distributors, so the magazine had to use an edited version on the cover, and printed the full image on the inside. This was the first (but not the last) time Heavy Metal had to self-censor a cover in order to get the magazine to readers:

Like many cover images, Elle had already seen print as the cover of Metal Hurlant. And like some other covers, Elle went on to be a cover of other related publications. Here it is on Metal Hurlant #39 (March 1979), the German Schwermetall #32 (September 1982), and the third issue of the Italian edition of Metal Hurlant (circa 1981-82).

Then, of course, came September 1981:

This famous Taarna illustration showed up as the cover of the German and Swedish Heavy Metal spinoff magazines, as well as paraphernalia relating to the film, such as the soundtrack LP:

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Achilleos next turned up in Heavy Metal on the back cover of the July 1982 issue, a piece called “In Flight”:

Achilleos had two covers in 1983: April and December, both sterling examples of his warrior women, with similar layouts:

Then, after over a decade away, Achilleos returned for the 1996 “One Step Beyond” issue, reprising his interpretation of Taarna for a wraparound scene.

If you think that’s the last Christos Achilleos cover we published, you’re wrong — though we understand if you forgot this one. It’s the Achilleos cover that doesn’t look like an Achilleos cover. The long legs, the corset, the fishnet, the high heels and riding crop, ok, this all sounds on brand. But the bunny-rabbit head? Yes, the cover of Heavy Metal 281 (from 2016), in all its sexy cartoonish glory, was by the master Christos Achilleos.

Christos Achilleos was a phenomenally talented artist who created many other works — ever seen his Whitesnake album cover? What about the Dr. Who books? Perhaps at a later date we’ll revisit some of those. But for now, we close the book on his history as a Heavy Metal cover artist. He wasn’t the most prolific (that’s Royo by a longshot), but he was influential to this magazine and a generation of fantasy artists. We bid him farewell. The Heavy Metal world has lost one of the greats.

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