The Incal, Vol.3: What Lies Beneath by Alexandro Jodorowosky & Mœbius

The Incal series is set in a space-opera universe, and I don't think we get a good sense of how it all works - like most space opera, things are big and flashy, with exotic names and complex factions, and the scope is vast. We do see what seems to be the seat of government for this entire polity in this book: the ruler of the human galaxy, and its equivalent of a Congress or Council of Ministers. And I think we're supposed to at least root for one group there, the human crew of a starship who bring a shocking report to the top of their government, but the rest of the political maneuvering was vaguer and less clear, other than a vague "all of these people are corrupt and unpleasant" sense. Maybe that is the point.

The Incal books are a mystical space opera: they're not about strength fixing what's wrong with this universe, battling evil and overwhelming it. They're about what I suppose I should call right-mindedness transforming that universe by the power of its better paradigm. And I should admit that those kind of stories tend to annoy me: I can still probably still work up a good head of steam thinking about Rick Veitch's The One, which is another "if only we all lost every bit of individuality and specificity to be loving cosmic gloop, everyone would be eternally happy and perfect" story.

I don't recall how far The Incal goes in that direction by the end; I think not quite as far.

This is the third of six books, The Incal, Vol. 3: What Lies Beneath. Like the whole series, it was written by filmmaker and visionary Alexandro Jodorowsky and drawn by Mœbius. These stories originally appeared in Metal Hurlant in the early '80s in French and were collected as this book in 1984; the first English edition was from Marvel in 1988 and this corrected edition, translated by Justin Kelly and Sasha Watson, came out in 2013.

As of the end of the second book, the main cast - six humans and a concrete seagull - were hurtling down into the center of their planet. I think I called it "Earth" when talking about the previous books; here we learn this is actually Ter21, one minor world in this far-future polity. See my posts on the first and second Incal books for how we got here, including who these characters are and why they used to hate each other. But they have rapidly lost most of the personality traits that were important earlier: they spend most of this book doing Spielbergian pointing and gasping, or functioning as explanations of the plot, often as speech bubbles pointed at an object.

(There are a number of panels late in this book featuring back-and-forth dialogue, pointed at a spaceship or that spaceship's precursor, where there's no way to tell who is saying what, and no difference in the voice of any of the characters. They all function as Jodorowsky explaining his themes.)

The action of this book is mostly those people doing the old journey to enlightenment thing: down into the depths of their world, through an ocean of garbage, battling the nasty and violent locals, chased by an implacable robot, down and down and down through strange and wondrous places until they hit the point where they can ascend. Late in the book, they do a lot of talking to each other about the significance of their journey: "We're forming an entity of transdimensional energy!" announces one of them.

Meanwhile, we do see that human crew, first on the way to the seat of their government, then presenting there, and then what happens afterward. Note that this is not the kind of story where talking persuasively or "normal channels" in general or human government are ever going to be seen in a positive light, and set your expectations accordingly. The only hope for humanity is The Incal.

Something I noticed this time, which is a bit disconcerting: our hero John DiFool, and Animah, the carrier of the other Incal, are shown as physically different while they have the Incals. In their better, purer form, they have lighter, almost neotenic features, are taller, speak quietly and with authority. Once they lose the incals, they have coarser features and notably much darker skin, besides being vastly more emotional. It's not quite racially coded, but it tends in that direction in an uncomfortable way.

Anyway, the two incals merge with some other stuff to form a spaceship, and one of the seven - the kid, who previously had basically nothing to do - is himself transformed to be the motivating intelligence of that ship. And they will set out to battle a giant black "Shadow Egg" which is eating their sun - at this point, the Technopope's organization is still the main antagonist for the series. (I think that changes, and gets more cosmic, in the back half.)

The bafflegab is still silly here, but space-opera bafflegab is always silly, no matter what kind of space opera it is. This one is silly in a mystical way, but it's mostly grounded in the way this universe works; I can't complain too much about that. I still have trouble taking any of this seriously, but it's a famous series beloved by millions, so that could be a Me Problem, if you want to see it that way.