THE INCAL VOL. 1 REVIEW

[Ryan Day]

Reviewer: Ryan Day Dreamhunter00@hotmail.com

Quick rating: Good
Story Title: Book #1: The Epic Conspiracy

Techno-popes, homeo-whores and metabarons, oh my!

Suggested for mature readers

Writer: Alexandro Jodorowsky
Artist: Moebius
Translation by: Justin Kelly & Sasha Watson
160 pages; $19.95

Alexandro Jodorowsky provides an interesting study in contrasts.

The Chilean-born writer of many of Humanoids’ most popular books, Jodorowsky is quite justifiably known as a man with a lot of crazy ideas. His science fiction epics The Metabarons and The Technopriests are filled to near bursting with new concepts. He takes a distinctly Grant Morrison-like “My head has exploded and I need somewhere to put these ideas” approach, but manages to channel them effectively. Even his less-futuristic stories like Son Of The Gun and The White Lama are full of the bizarre and unique. There are very few things that are too weird for Jodorowsky.

But the insanity populating his tales often obscures the fact that Jodorowsky is at heart a traditionalist. His stories are structured in a distinctly classical manner: Metabarons reads like a tale out of Greek mythology, while Son Of The Gun and The White Lama are near textbook examples of the classical Life of the Hero stories.

Volume one of The Incal is no exception. It’s full of weird, exciting and wonderful ideas: A sun-consuming giant egg; an intergalactic president who’s cloned first into a 7-foot tall androgynous body and then into an unstoppable robot killing machine; rats that grow and multiply in reaction to fear; “suicide alley”, a gigantic pit in the middle of a city that leads to a lake of acid; and the usual variety of subterranean mutants, alien invasions, fascist popes and robot prostitutes.

And just as the ideas come from a man with no concept of reality, the story structure comes from a man well-versed in classical mythology and storytelling. The Incal tells the story of John DiFool, a Class R Detective (where Class A is the best, and competency probably peters out around Class N). He’s offered a fantastic job escorting a high society lady into the bad part of town, with the one condition that he has to get her home by midnight. When that doesn’t work out, he finds himself in the deep, dark subterranean tunnels, where a mutant who’s not really a mutant hands him a precious item: The Incal. Exactly what the Incal is remains to be seen, but the only thing John DiFool knows is that everybody wants it: The supreme Prezident, the Technopope, the alien Berg, the Queen of Amok, and the greatest warrior in the universe: The Metabaron.

In short time, DiFool is relegated to a supporting character as he’s swept up in grandiose conflicts and conspiracies. The first half of the story has a distinctly fairy tale tone, as Difool bumbles in and out of crises. As the scale of the story grows larger, Difool gets by less on bumbling than on the help of others. Difool is the classic literary fool: he’s not terribly bright, but his survival is ensured by his importance to others. In this respect, the story bears similarities to Voltaire’s Candide or Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, where the protagonist is less a primary character than a device for advancing the plot.

When one gets right down to it, nearly all of the characters in The Incal are devices for advancing the plot. They all have their personal motivations, but few are fleshed out as individuals. This is fairly typical of Jodorowsky – he’s often less interested in characterization than grandiose epics – but it seems more pronounced here. There’s also a very whimsical tone to the story that belies the riots, assassinations and wars in the book; it’s at times too silly to take seriously, yet not silly enough to produce consistent laughs.

The book also displays Jodorowsky’s other tendency towards “classical” storytelling. While his books are structurally based on literary classics, the style is a distinctly classical comic book one. For all his pretensions to high art, Jodorowsky writes like Stan Lee. He likes clear, straightforward dialogue, and he suffers from a compulsion to narrate everything. The dialogue is often stilted and mundane, and I’ve now read enough of his books to stop blaming it on bad translations. He finally adds prefixes as though he’s trying to clear out stock: Everything is a meta-this, paleo-that, techno-techno-whatever. While these problems exist to an extent in all his works, it all seems magnified in The Incal.

And when a writer is paired with one of the most influential and respected artists in the history of comic books, one might think he’d lay off a bit on the excessive narration. But Jodorowsky keeps talking through all of Moebius’ work. Things like “A Berg assault squad just blasted through the wall with lasers!” really seems unnecessary, as the esteemed Moebius really is capable of conveying that sort of thing. Really, there are few things Moebius isn’t capable of conveying.

His style here is an interesting mix of the fantastic and the absurd, echoing Jodorowsky’s story. John Difool is pretty well a buffoon, and his pet concrete bird is obviously cartoony. But when the script calls for “wonder”, Moebius delivers: Things like the Technopope’s holy city, the underground realm of Animah, and several scenes in outer space are simply beautiful. Moebius’ style is a simple one that can be underwhelming at first glance, but gets better with each page. Unfortunately, it does suffer from the same problem as Jodorwsky’s story: It frequently veers too far into the comic to make the dramatic scenes truly effective.

The Incal displays Jodorowsky at his best and worst: Lots of interesting concepts, a complex plot and a cast of thousands are pulled down by weak characterization and stilted dialogue. This is not by any means his strongest work – that would be either Metabarons or The White Lama – but it still has its merits, chief among them the presence of Moebius. The Incal hints at the greatness Jodorowsky can reach, but never quite takes off. Fans of Jodorowsky will find much to enjoy, but newcomers to Humanoids would do best to start elsewhere.

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