Moebius Library: The World of Edena

Lovely artwork. And the payoff from knowing that the first chapter originated as a promotional piece commissioned by Citroen gets a laugh. For the most part, the plot bowls along with new ideas introduced at a leisurely pace. The central conceit is that our two protagonists, Stel and Atan – later Atana – live in a technological world of constant transplants, processed foods, and supplements that (without them knowing) suppress any sexual characteristics. Kidnapped by a mysterious alien pyramid and subsequently dumped on the suspiciously pseudo-natural paradise planet Edena, their natural forms gradually reassert themselves: much to their surprise.

In the last section, the speed of the plot builds up and it frankly all starts to fall show more apart a bit. We all remember our first attempts at fiction writing as small children: piling complexity upon implausibility and then, when faced with the problem of resolving it all, coming up with the genius plot device of “it was all a dream!” … only to be told by our teachers that this was not new at all and a terrible clichéd old cop-out. And of course, the first variant we think of on that is “It was all a dream! ... or was it? Aha!” ... which is of course still also a cop out. Well: the final stages of this book try to weave an Inceptionesque narrative in which Stel’s dream state is being controlled by a telepathic lizard-being, in order to lead it to Atana (whose role has gradually tailed off from being an active character to merely a sort of vague sought-after abstract goddess-Grail) and it all goes a bit ... haywire. BUT hey, the book as an object is cool and the draughtsmanship is gorgeous and the ideas in the first three-quarters are imaginative, so perhaps we should forgive it the stumble at the end. show less

I’m a big fan of The Incal, although I’ve never really made an effort to track down Moebius’s solo work, possibly because it’s so hard to find in English-language editions. I’ve mentioned before, for example, the beautiful collections published in Danish I saw in Faraos Cigarer in Copenhagen (and, I discovered last Christmas while showing them to one of my nephews, actually published by Faraos Cigarer’s own imprint). Which is a bit of a long-winded way of getting around to the fact that last year Dark Horse collected all of Moebius’s Stel/Atana bandes dessinées and published them in a 350-page collection under the title The World of Edena, and I spotted it on Amazon but they had run out of stock so I ended up buying it show more from an eBay seller and saving myself a fiver… The original Stel/Atana story was written for Citroën for an advert in 1983, but Moebius expanded it a great deal over the years following. Basically, Sten and Atan visit a friend on an asteroid community, but it crashes onto the giant featureless planet it orbits… where Stel and Atan discover a giant pyramid, around which is a city 700,000 years old containing members of all the intelligent races in the galaxy, living and extinct. It transpires the pyramid is a giant spaceship and Stel is the pilot it has been waiting for. It transports everyone to the paradise planet of Edena… Once forced to live off the land, Stel and Atan develop secondary sexual characteristics and Atan proves to be Atana, a woman. The two are separated and the rest of the story describes their attempts to find each other, which are prevented by the masked inhabitants of the Nest, who are a particularly cool invention, and especially their semi-godlike creator, the Paternum. The action takes place both in dreams and on Edena itself, and it sometimes gets a little confusing. And even the final twist, with its deliberate attempts to leave everything unresolved, doesn’t quite work… But the artwork is gorgeous throughout, the Nesters are brilliant, and it’s clear from page one this is high-quality bandes dessinées which any self-respecting fan should own. show less

eh, Moebius just doesn't do it for me, I guess.

His anti-technology, anti-bureacracy, pro-nature scenarios could be construed as satire if he wasn't constantly confusing the very subjects of his drawing - features, coloring, and even relative scale of characters change between panels. Charitably, this could be referred to as a dreamlike qualities, but when this occurs in a film we call it continuity error. This lack of cohesion means that while Moebius' drawings are nice to look at, his storytelling comes across as the ramblings of someone confused by the modern world, and unwilling to come to terms with how it operates.

It’s hard to recommend this for the story, but fortunately the art is so good that it doesn’t matter. It’s funny, because while the story seems to wander and not know what’s happening, the art never suffers from that problem. Each page has a clear depiction of something that flows logically from the page before. There are jumps to new milieus sometimes, and (at least toward the end) these are attributed (inexpertly, IMO) to dreams. There are some fantastic elements, but this is most accurately read as science fiction, even with the dream stuff. (Lots of drawings of heads with wires coming out of them.)

One of the few graphic novels that lives up to the novel part of the name (at least in scope), this felt long, and at least for show more the first half or so, kept up a steady pace of interesting new developments.

Highly recommended if you are at all a fan of science fiction comics. show less

A gorgeous comic, an amazing story into strange worlds illustrated by Moebius, something magical about this book.

Not for kids...

One star for the art and another for the v lived in world.

it's Moebius