Comics News

Tripwire Reviews The Incal: Black And White Edition

Published

5 years ago

February 4, 2022

Admin

Sci-fi In Black And White

Tripwire’s contributing writer Tim Hayes takes a look at Humanoids’ The Incal: Black And White Edition out now…

The Incal: Black And White Deluxe Edition
Writer: Alejandro Jodorowsky
Art: Mœbius
Humanoids

Four decades after it first appeared and unlikely to be drifting out of sight anytime soon, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Jean “Moebius” Giraud’s The Incal story receives its latest republication from Humanoids in the form of this black and white edition. The saga’s initial six short volumes, the ones usually collected together under the title of The Incal and available in various sizes of hard- and softcover book (plus digital versions) over the years, are presented here as uncoloured black and white art in an oversized format, Humanoids removing the colour layers from the art files to leave the Moebius line work standing in splendid isolation.

Jodorowsky has spun his Incal universe out in all directions since he wrote these stories, creating prequels and sequels and spin-offs with different artists; but this initial collaboration with Moebius is the spark for everything that follows. Very influential, to put it mildly, on Luc Besson’s sci-fi films, but mostly an uncut example of the spiritual wanderings that have occupied Jodorowsky’s mind since the 1960s, The Incal‘s themes have seeped into a lot of current fantasy fiction. A coarse Everyman named John DiFool discovers he just might have an unsuspected destiny when he encounters the mystic entity called the Incal, and gets dragged into a set of spaced-out adventures involving a lot of politics and a lot of sex. In the spirit of true philosophical enquiry, he might not actually be travelling very far.

The Incal has had some contentious colouring in the past – a recolouring in the 2000s was felt to have changed the feel of the book too much – although the original colour work from the first Les Humanoides Associés volumes is the accepted version now. Removing that colour for this edition doesn’t produce a Moebius Artists Edition, since these are finished print-ready files rather than raw art, but it does leave you free to analyse the intricate panels crowded with figures and detail, perspectives and lines of sight jammed together in ink lines of constant weight. European artists such as Philippe Druillet were on Moebius’s mind, but it’s not hard to see current comics stylists like Geof Darrow or Phil Winslade taking note of what can happen to the storytelling when the panels teem with individual pen strokes. And like all Moebius reprints, the book makes you regret that there won’t be any more where this came from.