Lifting Heavy Metal

How To Write (Prose) For The World's Gnarliest Comics Magazine

So I’m as surprised as anyone who knows me to find myself a fiction editor at Heavy Metal Magazine. Surprised because I’ve only aspired to be a writer, though I’ve cut my teeth editing at Perilous Press and Forbidden Futures. And also because… wait, Heavy Metal wants prose fiction?

Like every dorky outsider kid in the 80’s, I adored Heavy Metal, and loved it all the more because it was forbidden fruit, harder to come by than skin mags or underground comics, and somehow using the salaciousness of the former and the subversive grit of the latter to create something more dangerous than either. I had to binge them during sleepovers at friends’ houses because I couldn’t afford them even if the ex-cons at 7-11 would sell me one. Those binge sessions ruined me for greasy kid stuff and kindled the insatiablehunger to tell these kinds of stories… worldly wise and mystifying, cynical but agape with wonder.

EC Comics used to run a brisk 500-word story in every issue to bypass a postal regulation to save on shipping, but the results were rarely memorable. OG Heavy Metal occasionally threw in a story by the likes of William S. Burroughs or Stephen King, but the new publishers are committed to keeping prose in the mix to engage the thrill-seeking reader and spark the imagination as only words can.

Sourcing prose to run alongside Heavy Metal’s infamous comics kind of seems like trying to sell coffee in a crackhouse. So it’s gotta be strong. We’re looking for addictive, high-concept, brain-smashing, bong-rocking hyperfiction that redefines pulp for the 21^st century. But what does that mean?

As cyberpunk pioneer Rudy Rucker declared in this epic essay, we “seek the gnarl.” If a proper sf story requires what the late, great Theodore Sturgeon called “a touch of strange,” the ideal Heavy Metal story delivers a slap from strange’s dueling glove. We want the lightning, not the lightning-bug. We want kinetic words that give the psychotronic, iconoclastic thrills and burn-it-all-down attitude that readers expect from Heavy Metal. Stories that twist your guts, stop your heart and plant a ticking time bomb in your mind that perverts your dreams and leaves you wandering hitherto forbidden realms of what if.

Your story must detonate from the opening sentence, dropkick us the hell out of crappy reality and take us somewhere more real and radical than our dreams. Grab us with in media res action and leave us gasping with a conceptual shock. We love horror, science fiction and fantasy, and hybrids that subvert familiar pulp tropes even more so. Horror stories must have a pervasively weird setting and plot. A story set in our mundane world where a werewolf or vampire happens just won’t cut it. We will always have a terminal crush on cyberpunk, but not for nostalgic reasons. A tactile, whip-smart sf story that puts a fresh spin on the intersection of technology and pop culture––that vividly depicts a grimy, street-level future––will always find a cherished place in our cold, digitized hearts.

Sex? Yes, please. But get weird with it. We can all find porn online. Give us bizarre new perversions, unthinkable kinks, impossible kicks. (No rape, please, tho…) Ultraviolence? Don’t come around here without it, but make us feel it. We want audacious action that brings the pain and leaves a stain on your brain.

Above all, know the territory. Almost everybody’s seen Heavy Metal (1980), which is a great primer for our brand. But it’s more important to digest the original issues and devour the new HM (at time of writing, we’re up to #3) to know what we’re about. The stories we’ve published, and the writers we’ve interviewed and featured so far, are a better guide to what we want than anything I’ll say here.

Brass tacks: We want original fiction, 1.5-3.5k in length, for each print issue on a for-hire basis. Stories taken for the magazine will eventually be reprinted in an anthology and perhaps developed into comics, cartoons and Underoos and such, with a nice revenue split. Pay is .15 /word, with a negotiable rate for marquee authors (you know who you are).

Keep in mind that we only take one story per quarterly issue, so competition is fierce and, given our very specific fetishes and obsessions, the greatest story ever told might still not be right for us. Each issue is themed, so we might want to hold onto a perfect story for an upcoming issue where it’ll fit. But we’re confident that if you go harder than you ever have on your gnarliest idea ever, magic will happen. We are radically inclusive and always hungry for emerging and marginalized voices.

If all this hasn’t intimidated you, stay tuned for themed submission windows, but we will always consider a query with a short elevator pitch. If we like the idea, we’ll ask to see the completed work.

All subs and queries to cody@heavymetal.com. LFG...