u/LHMathies

After getting help with "Yellow Heat" the other night, I'll ask if anyone remembers this thing that I've been looking for perfunctorily over the years. I think it was one of the little extra stories in an issue of Elflord, where the main story often didn't fill all the pages, or possibly another Aircel title.

Plot: There's a sort of alien invasion that the US military tries to repel. I forget how the alien tech looked, but I don't think they were shown outside their craft... But finally, the Secret Service has to try to get the President out of harm's way. However, he is having a tryst with a young lady, so his bodyguards have to break down the door to his hotel(?) room and hustle him away. The young lady is dealt with summarily as surplus to requirements, i.e., she's killed on the spot. That is the horror element that sticks with me.

I'm trying to track down a black-and-white comic story I read around 1979-1982, likely in Heavy Metal (US) or possibly its French source Métal Hurlant. Art style was ligne-claire. Story was short — maybe 4-8 pages. I recall the harsh savanna sunlight was a strong visual element in the art, possibly even reflected in the title.

Plot: A young warrior in an African village wants to marry a young woman taken from a rival village during a raid. The village chief — depicted as grotesquely obese — wants her for himself instead, and sets the young man a task: track down and kill the lion that killed his own mother and sister(s) some time before. The warrior succeeds. Twist ending: the village turns out to practice cannibalism, and the young woman ends up as the meal at his "reward" feast.

I've already gone through the entire Heavy Metal back-catalog on archive.org myself and couldn't find it, so it may have run under a different title, in a different anthology (Métal Hurlant, Épic Illustrated, À Suivre, etc.), or wasn't reprinted in the US edition. Any leads — artist name, issue number, alternate title — much appreciated.