The Major by Jean "Moebius" Giraud

Moebius was always self-indulgence. That was the name Jean Giraud used on works that were imagistic, symbolic, allusive, surreal. He had other names for other work: Gir, his full name.

Like so many things in anyone's life, it got more so as it went along. Early Moebius stories were short imagistic fantasies. Mid-period Moebius were longer but still generally story-shaped flights of fancy. Late Moebius...well, we all know what happens to an self when it keeps being indulged, over and over again, for years.

I think The Major functions mostly as a warm-up for the longer but similar Inside Moebius project (published in France in six volumes from 2001 through 2010 and in English as three omnibuses in 2018), even though it was completed later. It's also set in Desert "B" - a complicated French pun on the term for comics, bande dessineé, and on a slang term for giving up smoking pot, which Giraud was trying to do at the time - and has a lot of the imagery and ideas of the longer work.

But that's more like looking at periods in a painter's work than like tracing parallels in the books written by a novelist: both Major and Inside are deeply self-indulgent, metafictional, random, vague, and mercurial. The Major even more so, since it was created - according to some notes in this edition, not entirely in this order, either - over a period of ten years in a notebook. It's in multiple sections, which don't entirely cohere, and it also includes a bunch of non-narrative drawings at the end - somewhat like Inside did, but, in Inside, that feels like a culmination of something, whereas here it just feel like some drawings from a notebook.

Major Grubert is the main character; he's living in a hermit's box in that desert. The box is barely large enough for a human being and seemingly made of stone, so the reader may wonder how Grubert avoided dying immediately of heatstroke - but this is not a book in which logical thinking and concerns about consequences will have any purpose. That box - one of many that we see in the desert - is much larger inside, TARDIS-style, and seems to be linked to all of the other boxes through "Corridors" that Giraud doesn't explain. We don't know why Grubert is there, what he's doing, how he got there, how this story connects to any other Grubert stories. Actually, Moebius fairly explicitly says, up front, that anyone with the same little moustache is Grubert, Eternal Champion-style, which he seems to think solves those issues.

Two other men come to Grubert, in his current role as oracle, with random philosophical questions. There are two sets of these men: they may be different, or the same people under different names. The three talk in the ways that people who smoked an awful lot of pot for an awful lot of years talk, and similarly believe themselves to be profound.

Other things happen, mostly randomly. Like Inside, there's a bit of flying or falling, with people impacting at high speed into the desert sands with no ill effect. It doesn't add up to much, but the point isn't to add up: it's to have moments, and indulge those random Moebius thoughts.

So I have to say that The Major is successful, since it does what it sets out to do. That is weird and goofy and borderline pointless, but it does it, and Giraud's art is quirky and fascinating throughout as usual. If you read The Major, spend more time on the pictures than the words.