Moebius’ & Jodorowsky’s The Incal is Must-read Sci-Fi Epic masterpiece of fiction.
This is one of the greatest metaphysical noir SFF epics of all time! And the art is like nothing you’ll ever see.
Even if you are not usually a graphic novel reader, I must urge you to try on The Incal, even from a strictly writing standpoint it is pure genius.
If Akira by Katsuhiro Otomo dominated the East in the 1980s with its grandiose, philosophical, cyberpunk – with extraordinary art in terms of both story and illustration – then The Incal dominated the West during a decade with its innovative metaphysical space opera noir that is equally as mind-blowing, just in wholly different ways.
Each work, Akira and The Incal, are often dubbed “the best comic book” ever written.
And it is hard to argue.
The Incal inspired The Expanse series – both books and film – as well as countless other works of SFF literature and graphic novels.
From the minds of two artists who spent countless hours attempting to adapt Frank Herbert’s Dune – which never completed – Alejandro Jodorowsky and Jean ‘Moebius’ Giraud took their work someplace entirely new as one labyrinth after another are peeled back, like a giant space onion, to reveal deeper dangers, steeper odds, and more intricate plotlines for The Incal’s John Difool and company.
The story’s trajectory evolves as much as the characters do, which is to say a lot because swallowing the Incal can cause a stone pterodactyl to speak its well-formed, growing mind!
I love the dark sense of humor that adds brevity to the most dire of circumstances threatening whole planets, galaxies, and universes and all who dwell within them.
But the visual art by Moebius is enthralling.
I spent hours just staring and studying The Incal’s artwork, panel by panel, illustration by illustration, with my jaw seated heavily on the floor.
There are no words to describe such brilliance, such genius.
Myriad styles converge or stand alone, emergent in exactly the right spot in the story to add the enormity or the intimacy needed to hit home.
And then The Incal ends in an amazing, unforeseen, and a classic fashion that elevates the entire book.
Go and seek out The Incal!
The Forgotten Fiction Grade: YEA (read it!)!
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“Moebius’ & Jodorowsky’s The Incal is Must-read Sci-Fi Epic masterpiece of fiction” Was Written By R.J. Huneke.
