The Black Incal by Alexandro Jodorowski & Mœbius

I read The Incal at least thirty years ago, during the burst of Mœbius republications from Marvel. As I recall, I thought it was OK space opera, with an annoying main character and more mystical mumbo-jumbo than I preferred. (At the time, I was much more enthusiastic about the Blueberry stories, a long Western series drawn by Mœbius and written by Jean-Michel Charlier.)

Humanoids republished the original Incal series - in six volumes this time, matching the original French albums, unlike the Marvel 2-in-1s - in 2012, going back to the original French colors by Yves Chaland and taking out some minor censorship that had crept into English-language editions in the '90s. And so, for no good reason, I'm taking another look at this series.

The Black Incal is the first of the six albums of the main series, written by Alexandro Jodorowski and drawn by Mœbius. The stories originally appeared in Metal Hurlant in the early '80s; Jodorowski went on to write a lot more in this universe - some of it under an "Incal" title and some not, a few with Mœbius but mostly not. And I have to admit that I do not have a high opinion of Jodorowski's work, though I've mostly read the comics he wrote for Mœbius - he's also a filmmaker and has done lots of other projects, so I may be reacting most strongly to their gestalt. (The worst thing I've seen is Madwoman of the Sacred Heart, if you want to see my heights of spleen and bile.)

The Incal, on the other hand, starts off as more-or-less conventional skiffy adventure, with only a few eruptions of Meaning. Our hero is John DiFool (a worrying name, admittedly), a "Class-R" private investigator in one of those ultra-urbanized, stratified medium futures, in an underground city on what seems to be Earth. He starts out being beaten and terrorized by mysterious masked figures, is thrown to what should be his death, and then saved by the Cybo-Cops. He tells them a plausible story - which might even be mostly true - about him bodyguarding an aristo woman for a night of debauchery among the lower classes before things went sideways and he ran away and was knocked out in the inevitable gigantic service tunnels.

John neglects to mention that he got a strange box from a gigantic dying "mutant," or that other mutants and the alien Berg (from another galaxy, Jodorowski offhandedly remarks, to underscore how little he understands how any of this works) are fighting over this MacGuffin.

The MacGuffin itself is The Incal, a small luminous pyramid that talks and can bestow strange and wondrous powers on its possessor in ways that aren't clear at all in this book. Descriptions of the series call it "The Light Incal" in distinction to the Dark Incal, the title object that John is sent by the main Incal to find in the back half of this book.

Most of this book is frenetic action overlaid with lots of talking. It's the kind of action story where people narrate their every last action and emotional state, like a '60s Spider-Man comic with slightly less quipping but vastly more emoting. John gets one story of What He Needs To Do and What It All Means from the Incal, but, as I recall, this changes somewhat as the series goes on, and the story gets bigger and more grandiose. There are various forces arrayed against John, but we're not clear yet on who they all are, how they connect to each other, or what they want. But it is clearly John on the run with the vastly powerful thingamabob, with All Hands Against Him.

Oh! Also, near the end, one group of villains hires the Metabaron, a sleek figure in a metaleather jacket with a metashaved head and steely metaeyes, to find John and retrieve the Incal in his metacraft. (OK, not every noun associated with him has "meta" attached to it - but a hell of a lot of them do, in a way that gets silly within two or three pages.)

It ends entirely in the middle of the action; John has been captured yet again by someone we're pretty sure is a villain and the Metabaron is getting metacloser. I suspect every volume ends more or less that way; I'll see.

The Dark Incal is stylish and would move really quickly if it weren't for all of the repetitive dialogue. Mœbius's art is detailed - maybe to the point of being overbusy a few times, but mostly right in that sweet spot of Big SF action, with lots of gigantic constructed stuff looming and swooping around. I have the lurking suspicion that it will all add up to less than it seems, but that may be my memories of the last time I read it. It is the epitome of '80s SF adventure in French comics, in all of the good and bad ways.