Ever get that feeling where you don’t know what’s real anymore? In the misty haze of the late ‘70s, two great fantasy storytellers, Frenchman Jean Giraud known better as the artist Moebius and Chilean-French writer Alejandro Jodorowsky, banded together to create some of the most fabulous and intensely realized fantasy/sci-fi comics ever imagined, collectively known as The Incal. Glib, philosophical and trippily dreamlike, these stories capture the wistful yet often sardonic tone of the age in biting yet often opaque analysis. And now, in the lead-up to the re-release of The Incal later this fall, the publisher Humanoids is making one of their legendary stories, In the Heart of the Impregnable Metabunker (or just The Metabunker), available for download.
Jodorowsky and Moebius initially conceived of many of the designs in The Incal while preparing for production of a film treatment of Frank Herbert’s Dune which was ultimately scrapped due to running over budget. The two continued collaborating, and eventually began releasing installments of the sprawling story in 1980, finally ending the original run in 1988. The story followed the search for the Light Incal, a mystical artifact of great power in the midst of an intergalactic war.
According to 13th Dimension, Humanoids is making the short story tie-in available for download on Kindle and comiXology for 99 cents. First published in France in 1989 in the book Les Mystères de l’Incal, and later translated and published by Heavy Metal Magazine in American in 1990, The Metabunker is a short story that explains the Spartan-esque origins of the Metabaron, a stoic action hero and supporting character in The Incal. Later stories written by Jodorowsky spinning off from this character revolve around the ancestors of the Metabaron in the series predictably called The Metabarons.
The story revolves around an incident in which the Metabaron is confronted in the midst of a dystopian hellscape one day by the mysterious Aminah, who gives him her son Solune to raise as his own. The story is told from the perspective of the Metabaron’s robot Tonto as a bedtime story to his fellow robot in the Metabunker, home to the Metabarons. According to Tonto, the Metabaron left a long time ago to go get a bottle of milk and hasn’t returned since. His story continues in The Incal which features his epic journey alongside Solune.
Lovers of classic sci-fi or simply good ol’ fashioned trippy storytelling should give this one a read. In the Heart of the Impregnable Metabunker is on sale now at comiXology and on Kindle.
Source: 13th Dimension