Inside Moebius, Part III by Jean "Moebius" Giraud

This book is probably close to incomprehensible without its predecessors, so I might have just a short post today.

In the Aughts, Jean Giraud - a French cartoonist who worked mostly as Moebius (for a long sequence of SFnal and imagistic stories, from The Airtight Garage and the Incal stories with Alejandro Jodorowsky to a bunch of film conceptual work in the '80s) and as Gir (for the long, very popular, Blueberry western series with writer Jean-Michel Charlier) - wanted to quit smoking pot.

So he spent six years making a six-volume, roughly seven-hundred-page metafictional epic, mostly in a quicker, sketchbook style than his usual work, in which "he" ruled and/or explored "Desert B" (a complicated pun in French - it's pronounced the same as désherber, the slang term for quitting smoking, and also is an allusion to bande dessinée, the French term for comics), as his most famous characters remonstrated with him to give them more interesting things to do and his younger self also kibitzed, and a manifestation of the unconscious briefly looked to become an important character before disappearing entirely. The author stand-in on the page spent a lot of time flying through this barren landscape (bodily flying, by jumping off a roof and missing the ground, in best Douglas Adams fashion), and rummaging through random doors in a vast "ego-bunker" that led him to various places and times, mostly as pages of comics he created. Oh, and Osama bin Laden was also an important character, before he was turned into a sexy girl.

Yes, exactly.

Inside Moebius is quirky, deeply self-indulgent, and wouldn't have been published if Moebius were not Moebius. But he was, and so it was. It still took nearly a decade to get translated into English, where it was published as three two-in-one volumes, perhaps assuming an American audience could be induced to pay for this weirdness three times, but not more than that.

So earlier this year I read Part I and then Part II. (See those links for more details and my attempt to explicate the plot, such as it is.) Now I'm at the end, with Part III.

And I have to say the end is even looser and less focused than the beginning. The entire second half of the final book is made up of mostly single-page surrealistic illustrations, in Moebius's full-art style, of bizarre transformations and organic forms, mostly involving him. And what comes before that isn't much clearer and focused: this reads a lot like Moebius had gotten all of his random thoughts and ideas down on the page in the prior volumes, and was casting about for something else to do with them, some way to tie them up neatly and make an ending.

I don't want to call Inside Moebius a failure, because it's not aiming to do anything specific enough to define success. It is weird and borderline offensive in its beginning, bizarre and self-indulgent throughout, and descends into random second-hand mysticism and pure image at the end to force a climax. It is very much only for people who are already Moebius fans, those willing to see how far he will go when he has no bounds or controls or script.