Alejandro Jodorowsky

Before the Incal is everything I wanted The Incal to be, a delightful romp through the deranged and decadent Cityshaft with John Difool, and much less "it was spaaaaace Jesus the whole time". The young Difool bounces between acts of crime and charity, experiencing the banned emotion "love", falling in with an obsolete Bible-quoting robot cop, and foiling the machinations of the Technopope and repeatedly clone President. His investigation, into where the babies of prostitutes are show more disappearing, uncovers a scandal of galactic proportions that has him leading psycho-anarchists against the news media in a desperate battle for survival.

There's one quote which I think gets the essence of the story. "We know one thing: The babies have their brains injected with sperm and ova from two non-putrefied ancient saints... Then they're frozen and sent to the Aristo-Maternity Ward... So if we want to resolve this mystery, that's where we have to start!"

Yeah, that's the one thing I know. Strange story by Jodorowsky, great artwork by Janjetov, awesome book. show less

Absolutely batshit insane. The very idea that this could ever be adapted into anything but a super niche, X-rated animated feature is laughable. It's misogynistic, a bit repetitive and totally ridiculous. Dune meets Heavy Metal.

I loved it.

I never knew what to expect on each panel, the artwork is peerless. The detail on the ships, planets, aliens and battles is stunning, I found myself often just staring at a page trying to take it all in. Everything is big here, there's zero room for show more subtlety. 13 year old Henry would have never shut up about this. I liked the narrative of the two robots telling the story, even if it was silly it did tie nicely into the story in the end. Not for everybody, especially those with good taste. show less

The best things I can say about this second volume can be summed up, impossibly, by saying it's HUGE. Skip the build-up. Let's just eat thousands of suns with the black egg, have a revolution, a counter-revolution, and the mixing of the powers of men and women in the great convocation of the Seal of David and the six-sided star in the form of The Incal.

Want a little Hard-SF god-action with great art and a weird story that goes off the deep end? The Incal is all yours. :)

In some ways, this show more goes beyond the strangest bits of Alan Moore's Swamp Thing, skips over all dull bits and lets us have a battle royale for the sake of impregnating an alien queen, sets up the destruction of all the high-tech cities to get back to nature, and throws a s***-load of jellyfish at the stars.

Weird? Hell, yes. Worth it? Even just KNOWING it exists? Hell, yes.

My only complaint is the speed. Reasons are lost in the haze of "Oh, hell, let's just do THIS, now." :)

Even so? Worth it. show less

Enormously influential, wildly imaginative ... and utterly chaotic. I have a really hard time caring about any of the characters, nor do I have time to invest in a plotline before some enormous shift happens. They do lampshade this, particularly the protagonist antihero starts complaining a lot about how they never get a break, but that doesn't really remove the issue -- I rarely found myself having the time to enjoy the goings on. There are too many notions, too many underexplained show more character motivations, too many otherworldly cultures and agendas whose feuds we're dumped into the middle of with little to no explanation or backstory.

In spite of all of that, there _is_ a lot to like here. As I said, it's wildly imaginative, with everything from nihilist techno-zealots to psychic emperor-gods, underwater human societies to centre of the earth trips, human mutant subspecies and alien invaders, interplanetary intrigue and critique of the passive television-enslaved public. While my preferences would have been to explore some of these notions more, rather than gleefully hop from one to the next, it can't be denied it paints a rich and interesting world. While the frantic plot drowns a lot of the emotion, it does not drown it all, and there are many lovely moments of character and pathos interspersed in this six-volume collection. I also found the mystery the story was pretending to be at the beginning (before the pace and scale went insane) to be very engrossing, and the later chapters (when the pace is finally a bit slower again, and I'd learned enough of the world to contextualize and appreciate a bit more of the goings on) to be a step back up.

Considering its popularity and influence, this is clearly someone's cup of tea. But, unfortunately -- though I did get some enjoyment from it -- it wasn't quite mine. That said, my issues are mainly with the pacing and lack of contextual exposition, not the ideas and the plot points, and so I'd actually be very interested to see what else has been done in this impressively elaborate universe since. I hear that the next volume is a much more linear story (and a prequel), so that does sound promising. show less