Inside Moebius, Part I by Jean "Moebius" Giraud

One of the dangers of being hot is that you will inevitably cool down. Jean Giraud, the French comics creator who was most famous as "Moebius" and also worked as "Gir," got very hot in the world of American comics in the late '80s, with a big album series from Marvel and various other reprints, so that most of his work was in-print in English thirty years ago, well ahead of most of his contemporaries.

There was a comics-industry crash soon after that, and the usual shifting of tastes over time. And the fact that it was Marvel that was so strongly into Moebius didn't help in the long run: Marvel has been famous in publishing circles for decades for being horrible at backlist, and they lived up to their reputation once again. So all of Moebius's best work was in print at one point, and probably is still under contract, but now is unavailable except in second-hand form.

It feels to me like Moebius fell out of the American-comics conversation almost entirely in the late '90s - the people who like Eurocomics cared more about more realistic, newer creators, and the Marvel zombies who liked his random Silver Surfer comics moved on to other random foreign artists working on Marvel properties. He kept working, as far as I can see, up to his death in 2012, but he didn't have a moment like he'd had in the late '80s and early '90s.

(In the past decade, after his death, I saw fairly new editions of The World of Edena, a big omnibus including some material from the Marvel sequence, and Madwoman of the Sacred Heart, a tedious slog scripted by Alexandro Jodorowsky that is vastly less coherent and interesting than their "Incal" series.)

The last big series he did in his life, over the decade from 2001 to 2010, was Inside Moebius, six big volumes of metafictional meanderings, with multiple versions of Giraud as characters, plus all of his most famous fictional protagonists (Blueberry, the Major, Arzak) and other surprising characters.

The first two of those books were collected in English, translated by Diana Schutz and with extensive introductory notes by Isabelle Giraud (who I think was Giraud's second wife; her connection is unexplained in the book but she presents herself as an expert in the work) under the title Inside Moebius, Part I, in 2018. There were two more volumes collecting the rest of the series; Moebius hasn't always been lucky in the longevity of his editions, but he's always been quite lucky in getting those works out into new markets in careful, well-designed books.

Inside Moebius takes place in the mostly-featureless "Desert B," which is apparently a complicated pun on bande dessinee, the French term for comics. There, a version of Moebius is central, while other characters appear, bicker and engage in philosophical debates, while Moebius tries to create new comics and to maintain his pledge to stop "smoking weed."

Yes, in the end, at least this stretch of Inside Moebius is largely an attempt by the creator to distract himself as he gives up a bad habit. I gather he did stop, as he wanted to, so it's a success on that level.

The other big thing Inside Moebius is about, and which might be part of the reason that it wasn't translated into English for more than a decade, is 9/11. Moebius lived in the US for years a decade or so earlier, off and on, but he's seeing that attack as a distant event here, not something that happened to people he knows or cares about or is closely connected to. It's a big moment in the history of mankind, and needs to be integrated into the philosophies of various characters, particularly those from the far future, who have a longer view. For some conflict, Moebius also has Osama bin Laden as a character here, presenting him in a somewhat sympathetic light by having him argue and compare notes with Geronimo, who shows up (I think) because he's an antagonist in the Blueberry series.

So we get pages of two anti-Western zealots agreeing with each other about the differences between shame and guilt, and the role of "desert warriors" in the world, and various other kinds of intellectualizing loosely related to terrorism and mass murder. Moebius is interested in the intellectualizing level here, rather than the action-in-the-world level, but it can still be somewhat disconcerting. (He said, in one of the larger understatements of this century.)

I've never found Moebius to be intellectually rigorous; his stories are full of people who say and assert things, or play with ideas, but then they fly away or something else happens and the implications of their supposedly-deep thoughts are left unexplored. That happens here, too. His art is also quicker and sketchier than usual - this is a more personal work, closer to therapy than to a carefully executed BD.

I'm going to come back to see the rest of the series; I want to see where this goes. But it's loose and vague and very self-indulgent, and can come across as cruel and misguided as well, so I'm trying to keep my expectations low.