The macabre world of Norwegian black metal seen by a cartoonist from Murcia: murders, devastated churches and infernal music

More than five years after having won the National Comic Award with Spring for Madrid, Magic pseudonym Diego Corbalán (Murcia, 1981), returns to bookstores with a new graphic novel. If in his previous work he built a complaint of systemic corruption in Space founded on mythical bases (where secret societies set their hands with Ibex 35), in Black Metal He teaches a whole lesson in popular and cultural history disguised as a macabra child satire. The Murcia author traces a chronology that covers the fundamental facts that marked the rise and fall of the founders of the Black Metal, a subgenre of the heavy metal born, dead, buried and resurrected in the Norwegian of the last century, which left a history of harassment, suicides, devastated churches and murders.

Magius had already approached the subject in several fanzines of the same name published from 2001 to 2007, but now offers a corrected and augmented version of those works. Over almost 300 pages, the author presents us to the main plana of the Norwegian Black Metal, yes, transmuted into unruly schoolchildren: although they maintain their real names, the protagonists of Black Metal They are the distorted reflection of their latest behavior, some spoiled and spoiled young children who will play with fire until they are burned (almost literally).

Magius’ work is a satirical fable that inevitably refers to the most detailed work done on the explosive scene of the most stark iteration of heavy, Lords of chaosa documentary essay written by Michael Moyniham y Didik Søderlind In 1998, adapted to the cinema in 2018 by the hand of Jonas Åkerlund. The book, published in Spain by Es Pop Ediciones, tells in detail how, from Oslothe young Øystein Aerseth (known as Euronymous) and his band, Mayhem, laid the bases of Black Metal (the name was taken from the homonymous album of the band Venom), a sound characterized by possessing The heaviest metallic rumble, the most extreme lyrics And a syncretic ideology where they embraced equal paganism, satanism, communism and national socialism, in a totum revolution of infamous consequences.

Mayhem inspired a large number of imitators and Black Metal was celebrated by many Norwegian young people, although the earthquake had replicas worldwide. Aarsoth also founded his own business, Helvete (“Hell”, in Norwegian), a record store that was a refuge and pilgrimage place for the incipient movement.

Multitude of bands emerged in the heat of Helvete, but among all of them highlighted one that, however, was a single man project: Burzum, led by VARG Vikerswhat was called Count Grisnackh. Vakernes, an enlightened Sauron admirer (the dark and perverse deity of Tolkien’s novels), which managed to make Aerseth produce his first album, with a relative sales success. During the 1990s, a multitude of scandals and lucrative facts shook the foundations of the Black Metal. In 1990, Mayhem vocalist, Per Yngve Ohlin (known as Dead), the brains lid. Aerseth took advantage of the circumstance to take pictures of Ohlin’s body, and one of them served as the basis for the cover of the band’s debut album, “by Mysteriis Dom Sathanas”, published in 1994 (10 years after its foundation, until then they had only recorded a handful of singles).

The album was A -Arseth’s will, since a year earlier, Vikernes would end his life, hustling several knife after a discussion derived from the alleged scam that Aerseth committed during the recording of the Burzum album. Back to 1994, Bård Eithun (his war name was Faust), the Band of the Emperor Band, was sentenced to 14 years in prison for killing a man in Lillehammer two years before. Eithun would confess that he did “because he was entitled, that guy was a gay.”

Throughout the decade, more than 50 Catholic churches burned to the foundations (the usual material of the temples in Norway is wood), and thousands of tombs were desecrated. The suspects, both to perpetrate the fires and to instigate them, were the members of the Inner Circle, an organization that brought together the members of the main flat of the Black Metal, who advocated the eradication of Christianity and that came to consider the murder of priests as one of their actions.

That all this chain of catastrophic misfortunes has served Magius of starting material to make a book that, in many occasions, causes laughter, is the result of the author’s intelligence, endowed with a special sense of humor that has moved him to make shocking decisions that cause perplexity and that function as a strange element in a dark book in form and background. For example, His characters swear in Murcianoand its behavior and appearance is found in the cartoon tradition, referring directly to South Parkthe irreverent animation series of Trey Parker y Matt Stone. As a counterpoint, Magius goes to classical art to capture the evocative Norwegian landscapes, expressly citing artists as Theodor Kittelsenhe Bosco o Munchcreating shocking images resolved with an extraordinary black and white applied with careful manual plots.

The Murcian author has confessed his genuine interest in Black Metal music, and this is reflected in a book that, Under his formal pyrotechnics, he approaches the subject with journalistic rigor. A work that raises relevant issues to be done in contemporary Europe. What happened in Norway at that time? How is it possible that “a caramel country with houses and churches of lollipop, in a story winter” (in the words of Magius himself) could get to house a similar monster inside and that he manifests itself so openly before the passivity of the authorities? Music was an excuse; The terror was real.