"The Incal" Review
The French Graphic novel The Incal by Alejandro Jodorowsky and Mœbius is quite the experience. If you want to read the graphic novel equivalent of tripping on mushrooms, this is your book. This psychedelic tale takes place in a dystopian world and follows a detective, John Difool, who discovers an ancient and powerful pyramid-shaped object called “the Incal”. The Incal is seemingly all-knowing, and can grant powers to the people who come into contact with it. Soon, other people across the galaxy learn that Difool is in posession of the Incal, and they pursue him for it.
That’s pretty much the story. It does get very weird, though.
Right off the bat, I want to say that the level of imagination being expressed in this book, both from Jodorowsky and Mœbius, is incredible. You can tell there was a lot of time and thought put into the concepts and drawing. I mean, early on in the book Difool is in charge of taking care of this angel-looking woman, and she soon starts going to clubs, partying, hooking up with a man with a wolf’s head whose name is “Kill”, and then it’s revealed that she isn’t this beautiful-angel-looking woman but, instead, is a shriveled up old creature. So that’s the type of weird stuff this book has in store for you.
Honestly though, the weirder it gets, the better I think Mœbius is able to display his drawing abilities. There’s one scene where Difool is being cut into pieces by the Incal to give him a sort of “enlightenment”, and these pieces of his body transform into four little creatures representing different elements. That page is one of the ones that stuck with me most after finishing the book because it’s so random and doesn’t really come back later, but it’s also very visceral and I enjoyed the character designs for the creatures.
There’s also a section towards the end that I won’t describe too in detail, but it has all of the main characters experiencing nightmares, and I think the art throughout all of that is some of my favorite in the whole book. Mœbius also seems to be really gifted when it comes to drawing scifi architecture, because he doesn’t shy away from drawing these massive scenes in cities with tons of intricate buildings and tiny details.
I’m not as familiar with Mœbius’s work, but I’ll definitely look for more of his stuff in the future.
Before getting into my criticisms of the book, I’ll also say that Jodorowsky does a good job at introducing a lot of high concept ideas. This book is a real showcase of his imagination; with John Difool going from protecting an angel-looking woman, to stopping his parakeet from being a prophet after it swallows the Incal, to being cut up by the Incal, then meeting with the “High Emperoress” who transfers their mind into different bodies when they become too overweight, then Difool is in a gladiator match, then he’s being used for sex by the “proto-mother” of a planet to repopulate it, then there’s a war… it just goes on and on. There’s so many little stories throughout this graphic novel, and they often feel disjointed, but maybe intentionally disjointed?
Like I said in the beginning, this book feels like your on mushrooms while reading it, so maybe that’s why Jodorowsky chose to have things happen in sequences that don’t necessarily make sense. For example, there’s a moment towards the beginning where this queen of the underground sends a warrior to retrieve Difool and the Incal, and in exchange she’ll give the warrior his son. Then when the warrior (called the Metabaron), returns with John, the queen betrays him and tells her army to kill the Metabaron, Difool, and the Metabaron’s son. Then the queen’s army is instantly killed by some outside attack, and she immediately tells the Metabaron and Difool they need to work together and they’re all friends after that. And I was confused by why they’re okay with each other when she wanted them dead, and not long after that it’s revealed that the Metabaron’s son is not his son, but is instead Difool and the queen’s son, and then the son goes on to become a human embodiment of the Incal.
Do you see what I mean where it feels disjointed? There’s not a lot of foreshadowing or clear cause and effect storytelling in this, it sometimes feels like Jodorowsky just had ideas for all these different things happening and tried to do them all simultaneously. And I don’t know if that worked for me.
But, I will say again that the art is definitely something to behold. It does a lot of the heavy lifting where my problems with the script are, and I still think a lot of Jodorowsky’s ideas are interesting. I just wish they were tied together in a more coherent way.
I’ll give this 6.5 Incals out of 10.
Till next time!
-RD