THE INCAL and MADWOMAN OF THE SACRED HEART - Serio Comics 10
THE INCAL and MADWOMAN OF THE SACRED HEART, written by Alejandro Jodorowsky & drawn by Mœbius, published by Humanoids
Alejandro Jodorowsky has been a patron saint to me over the past few years ever since I wrote THIS BOOK IS THE LONGEST SENTENCE EVER WRITTEN AND THEN PUBLISHED, which helped me come to terms with the fact that my ambitions to make a film out of an imaginative and controversial story might never come to pass
Even with his breakthrough films of the early 70s El Topo and The Holy Mountain, Jodorowsky struggled to finance and then distribute these from Mexico, until apocryphally late-night screenings when theaters had availability found a supporter in John Lennon
Most infamously, as depicted in the documentary by Frank Pavich, was Jodorowsky’s failed adaptation of the science-fiction novel by Frank Herbert, Dune, where he set up a pre-production unit in Paris of artists Jean Giraud, Chris Foss, and H. R. Giger
They drew storyboards, fashioned costumes, and created artwork so imaginative they forever influenced science fiction films such as Star Wars, Alien, and The Fifth Element but controversially it was so too much that it became ‘the best movie never produced’
Jodorowsky pivoted after that experience though to employ an art form from the same family as storyboarding, i.e. comics and graphic novels, to adapt his own imaginative and controversial stories with a collaborator from Dune, Jean Giraud a.k.a. Mœbius
THE INCAL, originally published in installments between 1981 and 1988 in French for Les Humanoïdes Associés as Une Aventure De John DiFool, has been called ‘a space opera of fantastical intergalactic voyages that blends science, technology, political intrigues, conspiracy, messianism, mysticism, poetry, debauchery, love stories, and satire that is a contender for the best comic book in the medium's history.’
THE INCAL became so successful that it spawned a ‘Jodoverse’ of comic book prequels, after works, and side stories
When I attended The Los Angeles Times Book Festival at USC in April I surprised the Humanoids table
When I mentioned that I had only read MADWOMAN OF THE SACRED HEART
This was a later collaboration with Mœbius from 1993 outside of THE INCAL characters & world, and could perhaps be described best by the old French word obscur
And while Seriocomics is a forum for enthusiasm
Not criticism
I can’t help but compare and contrast a bit
Because, in a way, as the Humanoids-publishers-I-mets’ body language seemed to imply
I did indeed read the two disparate masterpieces out of order
The debut THE INCAL is first and foremost a work of science fiction
With spirituality as a subtext
But that dimension grows in content
And then form
Where the cartoonishly heightened escalations of the episodic saga structure itself
Won’t stop challenging its characters to repeatedly take the Joseph Campbell-esque call to adventure, what you might call the in call or inward call, i.e. The Incal
The Incal itself is sort of a mystical artifact and force like an opposite version of The Monkey’s Paw, which was a 1902 horror short story about the unintended consequences of acquiring an all-powerful object that provides you wishes
Instead, the characters have no control over what The Incal wishes them to do and yet while these consequences ostensibly seem negative it’s always actually quite positive
It functions as an external MacGuffin that drives the plot into such repetitive save-the-world episodes that the readers & characters become self-aware of its artifice
Not just simply to satirize the myth of the Hero’s Journey
But to show how useful it is for our Everyday Lives
There is no resting place, no completion, in our more banal existences either
Yet the protagonist, John DiFool, never really grows out of his desire to not heed the call to adventure
Which is true for us often too
But there is always an ‘in call’ ready to be listened to
Even if it is just saying: “Go talk to that person”
or “Trust your gut about picking up the kids now”
or “That animal over there doing that means this”
or a million other manifestations
The ending of THE INCAL is one of the best I’ve ever read in this medium or any other
What co-screenwriter of Aladdin, Shrek, and The Pirates of The Caribbean, Terry Rossio would call: decisive, set-up, and inevitable -- but nonetheless unexpected.
I won’t ruin it with an image or any more comment
But I will say that the LA-based Humanoids publishers were happy to inform me that Taiki Waititi, the director of some of my favorite films, The Hunt for the Wilderpeople, What We Do In The Shadows, and JoJo Rabbit, is adapting the comic into a film
Perhaps if it’s successful
And my own graphic novel is somewhat too
And I get to adapt mine
Maybe Humanoids will give me a shot at MADWOMAN OF THE SACRED HEART ;)
Which, if you have read it or the synopsis…
And some of my other Substack, Shuffle Synchronicities, or the long sentence book mentioned above, you might gather for personal reasons like this
Why my particular ego is an even bigger fan of it than THE INCAL
MADWOMAN OF THE SACRED HEART largely does away with the trappings of a traditional plot rooted in genre conventions for more mainstream audiences
In favor of a story that is more textually about mystical and psychological esoterica
As well as sensual and psychosexual erotica
That’s not to say Jodorowsky and Mœbius don’t throw in all sorts of action and crime and war genre pyrotechnics
But it is to say that their work shows to me at least
Beyond Jodorowsky’s infinite imagination and Mœbius’s exceptional execution
The value of a pivot to comics & graphic novels
Instead of using hundreds or thousands of people
And millions or tens of millions of dollars
You can tell visual stories
Which would lose something essential as simply prose
That are perhaps relatively niche
And quite uncompromising
Successfully and perhaps even more appropriately
With many fewer people
and many fewer dollars
In a new medium for you
If you’re “Foolish” enough to believe you can ;0
And if even that becomes too much
There’s always memes ;)
THE INCAL and MADWOMAN OF THE SACRED HEART, written by Alejandro Jodorowsky & drawn by Mœbius, are perhaps best available directly from their publisher Humanoids, who seem like quite a fun bunch :)
OK, that’s the tenth Seriocomics!