April/May 2024 Edition of Devin's Chicago Comics Book Club Digest

The Incal by Alejandro Jodorowsky and Mœbius

Hello, everyone! I’m on my way to McCormick Place to pick up my badge for C2E2 as this goes live, so forgive me if it feels a bit rushed. We had another small group this month, but we met the threshold for the bare minimum of attendees. Hooray! Lol I brought my copy of Arzach by Mœbius, which was a gift from a friend and is a treasured possession of mine. Our resident retailer, who has plenty of experience with his work, brought Mœbius trading cards. The other person who attended introduced us to the band TWRP (“It's pronounced ‘twerp’ but it actually stands for Tupperware Remix Party.”). I defy anyone to not find them delightful.

“This was a slog!” the second person to arrive said in a chipper tone with a bright smile as they sat down. That set the mood for our discussion better than anything else could have. While we all enjoyed the book, we couldn’t help but point out the flaws that are much more apparent forty years after its original publication date. But the lack of coherence, characterization, and consistency was part of its charm, and in accordance with the loose, grungy aesthetic of the 1970s that led to its original publication in 1980. Because it was published from 1980 to 1988, it was easy to trace the development of Mœbius as an artist. We had fun joking about the “Boomer New Age spirituality” that informed the plot, haphazardly incorporating everything from the Tarot to the Kabbalah to “the power of positive thinking.” The Incal’s legacy and influences are undeniable, as we referenced everything from Guardians of the Galaxy to Preacher and everything in between. One person pointed out similarities between the Metabaron and Saga’s The Will that went beyond the superficial and should probably be the subject of somebody’s thesis if nobody’s written that yet. The nudity may not have been as equal opportunity as it would have appeared at first blush, but I pointed out that there were plenty of phalluses on display in the spaceships, jellyfish, and architecture throughout the book. Lol Our next meeting will be Wednesday, May 15 to discuss Superman Smashes the Klan.

What We're Reading

May 15 - Superman Smashes the Klan by Gene Luen Yang and Gurihiru

June 19 - Bitter Root, Volume 1: Family Business by David F. Walker and Sanford Greene

July 17 - It’s Lonely at the Centre of the Earth by Zoe Thorogood

August 21 - The Secret to Superhuman Strength by Alison Bechdel

Next month’s selection is not available on hoopla for reasons that remain impenetrable to me. Fortunately, there are plenty of physical copies available. If anyone has trouble getting one, please let me know.

Shameless Self-Promotion

CyberSync is available for purchase! This section is gonna begin with that for at least another year. I apologize in advance if it gets old. This might seem like too much enthusiasm for a one-page story, but I’ve been waiting thirty years for this experience and I’m gonna savor it.

Unfortunately, the second anthology in which I was set to have a comic appear has been cancelled. This was rough news to receive, but I understand these things happen. I hope everyone involved in that book is able to recover.

In the meantime, I wrote more one-page comics for The Comic Jam! The theme for April 8 was “Moonshine and Heartbreak.” The comic I wrote, “Wednesdays at 9:00!” had art by Ryan “Dougal” Devine and letters by Kenneth Fontano. Between the title and the cadence of the opening below, you can probably guess how it plays out. I had a lot of fun with it. Enjoy!

The theme for April 25 was “Heroes of the Decades” and I was assigned the 1970s. I reimagined queer icon Sylvester as the decade-defining superhero the Disco Avenger, meting out justice and a contemporary message at Disco Demolition Night. I honestly didn’t think anyone would touch my script! I thought it was too obvious and full of obscure references, but Jack Van Thomme did an incredible job. And he’s got a Mœbius profile pic! XD I’ve had “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” stuck in my head since writing this, so it was worth it.

About What We’ve Read

I normally don’t cite Wikipedia in this section, but Alejandro Jodorowsky, Mœbius, and The Incal all have complex legacies and histories, so it’s probably not the worst place to start.

Back in 2020, The Hollywood Reporter spoke to Jodorowsky about the fortieth anniversary of The Incal. Taika Waititi is supposedly in talks to adapt it to film, though that was back in 2021. Rolling Stone listed it as #30 on their list of the 50 Best Non-Superhero Graphic Novels.

Similarities to The Fifth Element were obvious from the opening splash page, and there’s no shortage of posts claiming Jodorowsky and Mœbius sued Luc Besson, the director of that film. Meanwhile, other sources claim it was the editor or the publisher who sued the producers. Unfortunately, the only sources I could find to shed any light on this are in Spanish or French.

“Have you seen Jodorowsky’s Dune?” might as well be a line uttered by one of the Kens in the third act of Barbie. However, it does inform this comic, since it’s a direct result of the events in that movie. As a making-of documentary for a movie that never got made, it’s pretty fascinating.

Finally, here’s a Strip Panel Naked video on another Mœbius work, The World of Edena.

You can find the latest NEWS digest here. The next NEWS digest will be posted in two weeks.

Some Thoughts on Science Fiction as Art

I have a friend who insists that genre fiction cannot be art. Regardless of technical proficiency, thematic depth, or storytelling ambition, anything created as a genre exercise will never be a work of art in his view. The designation of “art'“ must be reserved only for works of realism, abstraction, or maybe some combination of the two. The best anything science fiction, fantasy, horror, etc. can hope for is to be condescended to as having “transcended genre,” a backhanded compliment at best that was clearly dreamed up by someone wearing a tweed jacket with felt elbow patches.

I take issue with my friend’s argument for several reasons, not least of which because he thinks I should agree. I try very hard not to call him pretentious to his face, falling back on an old joke of mine about how people have been calling me a snob since I was six years old (true story). Taken to its extreme, my friend’s artistic philosophy would force all films to resemble Victorian stage plays and all literature to be miserable. Who would want to live in such a world?

Emotional honesty is a common reason given for how we “know” something is Art, because it Teaches Us Something about the Human Condition. This is the primary reason my friend dismisses genre fiction. “I can learn about the human condition without aliens or monsters showing up in a story,” he says. To which I can only reply, “And?” If aliens or monsters cause you to remove yourself from any openness to a theme or truth, that doesn’t sound like it’s the fault of the aliens or the monsters.

One of my all-time favorite films is Arrival from 2016. Without giving too much away if you haven’t seen it (or if you didn’t like it, I know it’s not for everybody), in the final minutes of the film, the main character makes a decision that speaks to a question fundamental to humanity: Knowing what you know now, would you have done anything differently? I was left a sobbing mess. The giant squid aliens did not detract from the experience.

Excellence of craftsmanship is another super generalized criteria for Art, and is easier to get behind. How many times does a terrible movie get praised for its cinematography? Heck, even my friend enjoyed Mad Max: Fury Road!

I recently went to see Dune: Part Two and made sure to see it in IMAX. The scale, the scope, and the pacing were all awesome in every sense of the word. There’s an extended sequence in black and white! Did it need to be? Who cares?!

It’s not a coincidence that I’ve chosen two films by Denis Villeneuve to illustrate my point. Unfortunately, I learned too late that he’s French Canadian, so the connective tissue is stretched a bit thin, but this brings us back to The Incal!

It might seem odd for me to assert that The Incal is art, since I started this newsletter joking about its flaws, but those flaws are easily forgivable based on the craftsmanship and the number of ideas on display. The human imagination is vast! Why exclude any of its more outrageous concepts from being art? Why create a definition of art that rejects the fullest expressions of what we can invent? If anything, the more outlandish an idea, the more proof there is of how human and artistic a work can be.

I know there are whole schools of art and philosophy who embrace this view and publish manifestos more articulate than my rambling here. This whole essay has been a crude distillation of an Art and Philosophy 101 group chat, but these are concepts I think about often. If we can imagine alien worlds into existence, we can imagine one where the definition of art is expansive enough to include them.

I know I kinda made my friend a straw man here, but his views are more pervasive than many of us would probably admit. Feel free to share any thoughts or comments below! Do you have a favorite sci-fi comic? What’s your favorite sci-fi story? Please subscribe if you haven’t already. Thanks for reading. See you next month for Superman Smashes the Klan by Gene Luen Yang and Gurihiru!