Does anyone know the comic book “Arzach” by Moebius?
It?s the story of a “dragon rider”, and it was the inspiration of team andromeda to create the world of P.D. and Moebius himself created a lot stuff for the games.
Maybe you all know this but there is always somebody that doesn?t know.
Moebius created nothin for the series apart from some box covers for the first game. Everything in the games are Team Andromeda’s creations alone. They were however inspired by Moebius’ art.
that?s not right, he made some illustrations, the caracter design and the grafic concept for Panzer Dragoon:
supercable.es/~juanpi/misce.htm
That character link just goes to my site, and I was pointing out some similar ideas but that was not a character design for PD- it has nothing directly to do with it
I have Arzach- there really isn’t much of a similarity. The art style is very different and there are no similar plot points. Beyond a dude riding a dragon, there isn’t much in common.
Are you sure you have arzach?
It doesn?t consist in only one comic!
Even the helmet of the dragon rider looks like the imperial helmets.
there is no denying Team Andromeda was into him, but Panzer Dragoon does not overwhelming take from his look- he uses, for the most part, very different palettes and designs-
while the helmet has a panzer look, the creature does not at all…
fantasticfictionimages.co.uk … n23256.jpg
the rider has some look, but the dragon is far more like a pterodactyle.
ill.fr/Computing/people/Farh … arzach.jpg
I would say even the drawings he did for Sega do not really have a panzer feeling to them.
I’ve looked into Moebius and read Arzach too, and my opinion was pretty much the same; although I did think there were some other small similarities between Arzach and PD. For example, Arzach’s pterodactyl was a bio-mechanical creature with a white stone-like body, and a lot of the PD world’s pure-type creatures seem to borrow from that idea (although of course the final effect is pretty different in PD). I also thought that the scriptlessness of Arzach was mirrored in PD1 and PD2 to some extent, as they had only very minimal scripts and dialogue (which maintained a similar sort of surreal, dream-like atmosphere).
But yeah, ultimately Arzach and Moebius didn’t seem to be a really direct influence on Panzer Dragoon. A while ago I wrote a short article for TWotA discussing Moebius / Arzach in relation to PD, which I’ll try and get finished off and mailed to Solo before Christmas. The gaming press has often been very misleading about the connections between them (saying that PD was heavily based on Arzach or that it was an adaptation of Moebius’ comics, etc.) so it seemed worthwhile to write something on this.
http://www.panzerdragoon.de/arzach.jpg
are you sure it has not influenced the art style quite a bit?
That image is both educational and unnerving at the same time. 
I’d say that things like the moon in that Moebius illustration (with its asymmetrical lines) may very well have inspired some of the Ancient Age designs in PD. There’s a similar use of lines / cracks going on in quite a lot of Moebius’ other stuff:
ctrl-c.liu.se/ftp/IMAGES/moe … ius-06.gif
bpib.com/illustrat/moebius2.jpg
catsuka.com/interf/insolite/ … tetsuo.jpg
… which seem to have a stylistic link to PD’s Ancient Age designs, even if the subject matter is (wildly) different. I didn’t think there was a huge amount of visual similarity in the Arzach strips specifically, though; generally Arzach felt darker and more traditionally surreal than PD to me…
Not that it’s a huge deal, but look at the earflap thingies on the pterodactyl. Look familiar?
Umm, lol, actually, the “earflaps” as you call them, are a huge deal since they make the core design of it nearly identical to the Panzer Dragoon dragons (minus the legs and tail mainly).
But the original design of that creature does not have “earflaps” (or even a horn since what is made the “horn” in this retouched picture was actually the full head). LordCraymen drew over it to show the similarities. The original image was shown by lagi in an earlier post in this thread:
[quote=“lagi_webmaster”]the rider has some look, but the dragon is far more like a pterodactyle.
ill.fr/Computing/people/Farh … arzach.jpg[/quote]
Thank goodness the PD creatures are more eh… sleek. =D
haha, ok, I thought they looked a little out of place. My bad.