Airtight Garage

The Airtight Garage (Le Garage Hermétique)
The cover of the 1987 US edition of The Airtight Garage
Series	Major Fatal
Creative team
Creator	Mœbius
Original publication
Date of publication	1976–1979
ISBN

The Airtight Garage (French: Le Garage Hermétique or, in its earliest serialized form, Le Garage Hermétique de Jerry Cornelius) is a lengthy comic strip work by the artist and writer Moebius (real name Jean Giraud). It first appeared in discrete two-to-four-page episodes, in issues 6 through 41 of the Franco-Belgian comics magazine Métal Hurlant from 1976 to 1979, and later in the American version of the same magazine, Heavy Metal, starting in 1977. It was subsequently collected as a graphic novel in various editions.

The book-length version appeared first in the original French and with the original black and white art, and only later in a US edition in English and in color. The US edition, published by Marvel Comics' Epic imprint in 1987 (as the third volume in a series devoted to the collected works of Moebius), used a new translation, by Jean-Marc Lofficier and Randy Lofficier, different from the Heavy Metal serialisation, and presented the work with the pages colored. This version, along with most of the other Epic volumes collecting Moebius's work, was later reprinted in a signed & numbered limited edition hardcover series from Graphitti Designs.

It was also published in the UK as a graphic novel by Titan Books in 1989, in advance of a Sony film adaptation that was never made.

It was also reprinted in 1992 in the smaller, standard comic-book format, as a four-issue limited series that included several new pages drawn especially for that edition.

In the twenty years since then, no English-language edition has been published. In France, however, as of 2012, the French version (Le Garage Hermétique) is available in both the original black-and-white "classique" edition and in a "Moebius U.S.A." format that combines the color art from the US editions with the original French text. Various deluxe editions featuring larger pages and/or a slipcase have also been offered, indicating the book's continued popularity and centrality in the Moebius canon.

The Airtight Garage was followed by L'Homme du Ciguri (The Man from the Ciguri) in 1995 and Le Chasseur Déprime in 2008. The latter has never appeared in English, but the title translates as The Depressed Hunter.