The Incal by Alejandro Jodorowsky and Mœbius

The Incal is an extremely dense comic book, possibly to its own detriment? I don't think I could give it a high-level overview that'd do any justice to what it's actually about. Every story detail is so strange that it'd sound like I'm describing a surrealist comedy but it's played almost completely straight. And there are, like, a near unreasonable number of story details, few if any of which feel properly developed. From cover to cover you are subjected to a torrent of images, ideas, strange people and creatures. It never lets up. Even the ending feels like getting blasted in the face with a water cannon and drops off quite suddenly, pun intended.

The book was originally published in instalments. It makes me wonder if you had the opportunity to read something, be fascinated by it, and then sit with it for a few weeks, if that'd have changed the experience. Maybe if I gave everything it had to say some time to marinate in my head before immediately going on to the next section, it wouldn't have felt so overwhelming. But coming at it all at once with no prior experience was quite something.

It was still fun to read, though, I might read it again before returning it. I feel like I'd need to go through it a few times before actually getting it. Dense here doesn't mean uninteresting or not entertaining. It's just… a lot. It feels like it could have been seven times as long.

One thing I will say I earnestly didn't like about the book was its relationships. Partly because there's so much, and the reader gets comparably so little time with them, it's kind of hard to take them seriously. The worst offender for this is the relationship between John Difool and Animah. Without getting too into it, their relationship is quite important in the second half of the book and it feels completely unjustified. It was important justification for some of the story beats, so it just feels obligatory and I don't feel like that does Animah's character justice.