A Review: The Incal

Title of Work: The Incal
Author: Alejandro Jodorowsky
Format:
Published: 1981
Started:
Finished: 2025-11-08\

Posted: Goodreads
Rating: 4/5

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Really cool art style in this graphic novel/comic from an iconic duo: the Chilean-French film director Alejandro Jodorowsky and the great French artist and illustrator Jean Giraud, better known by his alias, mœbius. Visionaries, the pair of ’em and their works influenced massive franchises like Star Wars, Bladerunner, and The Matrix in subsequent decades, both visually and spiritually.

My first contact with mœbius was seeing The Time Masters (1982, dir. René Laloux), a cute animated space adventure, at the neighborhood independent cinema. The type of place that shows arthouse, foreign, and campy cult classics. Titles you’d see in the Criterion Collection or maybe a Reddit comment listing the most underrated Japanese films you’d be a big dummy if you hadn’t seen yet. I like that little, one-screen theater but the chairs feel like they were salvaged from the renovation of an ’80s-era high school auditorium. The padding evidently did not survive that transplant and weathering a Tarkovsky-thon while riding what is, essentially, a scrap of dusty burlap on plywood starts to wear weary on my tender cheeks. The butt ones, I mean.

But back to Incal. I enjoyed the visuals, the illustrated world of vibrant colors and characters, much more than the story/dialogue itself (sorry Jodorowsky). My experience of Jodorowsky’s infamously provocative 1973 surreal film, The Holy Mountain, went over similarly. I thought the film was visually incredible but mostly disorienting story-wise. I assume this was intended.

See also: Jodorowsky’s Dune (2013, dir. Frank Pavich), a wild doc about the insane, gigantic Dune film adaption (no, not the Lynch attempt) that almost was (okay, not that close).