One ticket to Jodoverse please!

Whenever I've gone to the continent on holiday I always end up wandering into book shops. I suppose it's out of habit. I know that there is nothing in there I'll be able to read (being a very poor linguist) but I always end up wandering around a FNAC store looking at stuff and inevitably I'm drawn to the graphic novels / comic books as I can at least look at the pretty pictures. I always wondered what was going on in these fantastical tales and wished there were some english translations I could buy. I never bothered looking when I got home though, forgotten until the next visit.
One of these tomes that I reckon I must have seen is 'The Incal' and it's something I intend to explore. I've asked the lovely wife to get me the english version for christmas. The reasons it fascinates so much without even having read it intrigue me as much as the book does. So lets delve into my psyche a little and see what has 'hooked' me.



Firstly, as you may know if you've read much of this blog, I'm a big fan of 2000ad and it's characters. 2000ad is a peculiarly british take on sci-fi and comics in general. I prefer it massively to the DC/Marvel universes for it's grittiness and 'punk' attitude. In what I have read and seen so far about 'Metal Hurlant', there seems to be a interesting parallel in attitude and approach which makes me want explore.

If you aren't aware, 'Metal Hurlant' was a quarterly (then bi-monthly) sci-fi and horror comic anthology magazine that began in 1974 and ran until 1987. It was known in english as 'Heavy Metal' when it was licensed in the states (thus the 1981 animated film of the same name). One of the founders of the magazine was Jean Giraud, better known as Moebius. The year after setting up 'Metal Hurlant', Moebius was approached by the Film Director Alejandro Jodorowsky who wanted him (amongst others) to produce character and costume designs for his adaptation of Frank Herberts novel 'Dune'.

For various reasons the film wasn't made (a documentary came out this year exploring this aborted attempt to film the novel entitled Jodorowsky's Dune) but the sketches and designs can be easily found on the interwebs. See below for a taster.

 

Jodorowsky had managed to spend  $2million  of his budget on pre-production costs and had written a script that would have resulted in a 14 hour long film! It was this script that was converted into the basis for the 1981 story of 'The Incal', written by Jodorowsky and illustrated by Moebius. Fair enough, take my money!

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The first Incal series ran until 1988 and was followed by 'Before the Incal' (88-95 and this time illustrated by Zoran Janjetov and Fred Beltran) then another two in series (After the Incal and Final Incal). But it doesn't stop there. Another reason that I'm on the verge of diving head first is the fact that Jodorowsky is expanding on some of the characters and factions with other series and through these creating his own Jodoverse. The most intriguing of these (to me) that I have so far discovered is the tale of the 'Metabarons'.  This link is to a google image search. Just click on it and tell me it doesn't whet your whistle. A new version of the collected Metabarons stories is coming out in february to celebrate the 40th Anniversary of that fist appearance of Metal Hurlant (or at least the Humanoids publishing label that was founded to release it).

So what is it that has me all excited?

 It's a whole new 'Space Opera' that I can immerse myself in, unlike star wars, or dune or even the 40k backstory, it's entirely new (to me) and I'm not sure what to expect and that doesn't happen often at my age.

Visually it looks stunning and want to grab all new kinds of ideas for painting and modelling and seeing where the Jodoverse takes me.

 It's a fulfillment of the curiosity that I've always had about European graphic novels and hopefully it'll be first step in.

I'm fascinated by a sci-fi trope that I haven't seem before, like meeting a relative for the first time and looking for family similarities.

And finally, lets face it, when it comes down it, it's a whole load of sci-fi comics with guns and aliens and robots and craziness and I like that kind of thing!