The Incal, Vol. 2: The Luminous Incal by Alexandro Jodorowsky and Mœbius

I used to work in the book-mines, years ago, so I notice things about the veins of books and how they've been hewn out of the rock. This time, I noticed that the cover of the second book in a series has wandered off from the trade dress established by the first book - though the title page, inside, has the same typography (generally) as the cover of book 1, The Black Incal.

What does that mean? Well, in my experience, it's either a designer, editor, or publisher - or even all three - who likes tinkering, who wasn't quite happy, who didn't value consistency. Or who just forgot and didn't bother to check their work.

Well, I might have to take that back. The cover of this book in the digital platform where I read it is different from the design of the first book - but the cover on Amazon is in the same style as book 1. They also have the main image flipped from each other - in Hoopla, John DiFool is running right; on Amazon, he's breaking left. See Hoopla up top and Amazon slightly lower and to the right, so John is running towards himself.

As far as I can tell, the current republishing of the Incal series by Alexandro Jodorowsky and Mœbius is only available digitally, so the question of which cover is "real" is somewhat academic: Humanoids can (and maybe has) changed the cover at any time, since it's just one JPG in a digital file. (Wait, is it a JPG? Maybe a PNG? I don't think the whole thing is a PDF. Now I want to dig into the file to find out, and that would be silly cat-vacuuming.)

Anyway, I'm vamping to avoid actually talking about The Luminous Incal, second in the six-book space-opera series. This was early in the Jodorowsky/Mœbius collaboration, so it was still fairly a straightforward adventure story, with only a light glazing of mysticism for spice. (That would ramp up in later years.) But it's still a lot of running around and people loudly declaiming things - often with silly names - as Big Important Stuff happens repeatedly, only to be overshadowed by the Even More Important Stuff, and so on.

This book is very much middle - we start with John having been captured by the Technopope and his Technominions - TP doesn't use his prefix quite as lavishly as the Metabaron does, but it does pop up repeatedly - and will be sacrificed to a giant mechanical spider (?) to further the TP's goals of conquering the universe. But John's pet/partner, Deepo the concrete seagull (??) is still free, and smashes through the giant black orb floating above the TP's head - which is not itself the Black Incal, but somehow focuses or gathers the TP's power. That allows John to run away with Deepo, into a giant containment thingy called the Inside/Outside, where he is attacked by the fiendish Cardioclaw (the monster on the cover).

Meanwhile, the Metabaron is metastalking through a metasnowy landscape to get to the Technopope's Techno City, killing a squad of Bergs - an alien race from another galaxy also seeking the incals - along the way.

John kills the Cardioclaw, which super-ages the Technopope and makes Techno City collapse - or maybe his taking the black incal did that, which was somehow tied to the Cardioclaw. Anyway, John emerges from the Inside/Outside with both incals and is immediately met, in the wreckage of Techno City, by a bare-breasted woman, to whom he gives the black incal during a mystical moment without much dialogue. She disappears, and he immediately tries to chase her. (She's Animah, and will be important as the series goes on, as you might guess from the super-portentous name.)

John is metacaptured by the Metabaron, who metadelivers him to his current metaemployer, Tatanah, the head of the Amok rebels. Those rebels have been battling to capture Shaft City, the seat of government (at least on Earth), as we've seen in moments throughout the book so far, and they are close to the Prezident, a handsome but corrupt and stupid leader who flees to his superior, the Emperoress, who I think rules all of human space, while the Prezident just handles Earth (and not very well).

There's a lot of confused fighting, with ever-more powerful superweapons brought out by one side and the other, with their names yelled out in tones of awe by the other side, along with the inevitable many deaths and vast destruction, all reported on gleefully by media personalities.

Tatanah betrays the Metabaron, planning to kill him, John, and the Metabaron's son Solune, who she was holding as a hostage. But those three slaughter a vast number of Amok rebels, and a government superweapon - the Necrodroid, the last piece of the escalation ladder I mentioned last paragraph - breaks even more stuff.

Tatanah's lieutenant Kill Wolfhead - who is, indeed, a guy with the head of a wolf whose job is to kill people, so full marks there on clarity - arrives, to find only main characters left alive. Since they are all main characters, they have to put their differences aside and travel together deep into the earth, to the secret realm where Tatanah and Animah (they're sisters!) originally came from.

The Metabaron and John agree to this, instead of continuing their murder streak to get rid of Wolfhead and Tatanah, as smart people would have done. All head deep into the earth, where they find...another cliffhanger! Come back in the third incal book to find out what happens!

It's all a lot, and it's difficult for anyone with a normal level of intellect to take it seriously. The Mœbius art is supple, energetic, and great at story-telling, so my working theory - everybody fell in love with this back before it was translated, so they don't care about the words anyway - is still intact. Or maybe there are a substantial number of people who find Jodorowsky bafflegab compelling: remember how dumb the average person is, and that half of humanity is stupider than that.

This is a silly space opera that thinks it's profound. It gets much more fake-profound as it goes, and, as I recall, that pretense gets much more annoying. Let's see how I take it this time through.