Final Incal is a reworking and completion of After the Incal, the twenty-first century sequel to Jodorowsky's mystical space opera bandes dessinées published in the 1980s. While After the Incal had featured art from the original Incal artist Moebius, Final Incal is illustrated by Ladrönn, who credits Moebius' Incal for inspiring him to pursue a career in comics art in the first place. I like Ladrönn's art very well; it has its own style, but the spirit of the characters and places from Moebius is preserved, and there is obvious influence in the compositions.

The central conflict in this story has a malefic intelligence (how do you pronounce "Benthacodon"?) attempt to exterminate all organic life on Earth 2014, "cloning" humans into metal androids, while a lethal virus destroys their old bodies. In typical comic book fashion, the stakes quickly escalate from city-shaft to planet to universe to multiverse. Setting aside the metaphysical backdrop, the villains here reminded me of Doctor Who's Cybermen.

The divine Incal itself is largely concerned to perform matchmaking between John DiFool and Luz de Garra as a way of somehow producing an antidote to the evil plague. For most of the story, Luz is cold to John, which is understandable, since he mostly just whines around her. In his initial quest for her, DiFool is amusingly multiplied with variants from other universes, so that he is analyzed into four characters of base fool, adonis, swami, and angel (92). Jodo's allegory was less than transparent here, and I don't know whether he was referencing cabalistic parts of the soul, Maslow's hierarchy of needs, or something else.

The Final title is misleading, inasmuch as Jodorowsky explicitly said he intended to write further in the Incal setting, and in fact later materials have appeared by him and other other authors. Nor is the narrative particularly closed with the resolution of this book's plot. But it is a good complementary bookend to Before the Incal, building out from the core of the original work.

Jodorowsky keeps on coming back to the Incal. This is hardly a surprise as it’s been his most successful title – although Incal spin-off the Metabarons has probably appeared in more media incarnations. In Final Incal, the multiverse is in danger when an evil machine intelligence creates a plague and the only defence is to convert everyone into a robot… Three iterations of John DiFool all meet up between universes, in the hunt for their lover, Luz, and the means to save the multiverse from destruction. But only one of them can complete the task. The artwork, by Ladrönn, is very good indeed. Apparently, Moebius did start work on the project, but only completed the first part, so Jodorowsky had Ladrönn redo it from the start. The story is the usual Jodorowsky weirdness, although it’s starting to feel a little recycled by now. This was an astonishing piece of sf in its day, and it continues to make for good reading decades later. But I have to wonder whether these returns and extensions to it are doing it any favours. I guess I’ll find out when I get around to reading Deconstructing the Incal… ( )