This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection.
Julio Santo Domingo collected books across many forms; among them is the graphic novel. Pictured here is one of the great collaborations in French comics: L’Incal, written by Alejandro Jodorowsky, the Chilean-born French filmmaker, actor, and author, and illustrated by artist Jean Giraud under his celebrated pseudonym Moebius. Jodorowsky will be familiar to film enthusiasts as the writer and director of the acid Western El Topo and the spiritual-psychedelic The Holy Mountain, among other features. Moebius, in addition to his seminal work in science-fiction and fantasy comics, contributed designs and storyboards to films including Alien and The Fifth Element. From 1981 to 1989, the two produced the six-volume Incal, a story which introduces Jodorowsky’s science-fiction “Jodoverse” and centers on the tribulations of John DiFool, a shabby private detective caught up in an interplanetary struggle for possession of the titular Incal, an alien artifact.
L’Incal incorporates the metaphysical, the psychedelic, the comic, and the absurd into a grand space opera. DiFool, a base and reluctant hero, represents the tarot Fool; other characters assume the roles of other cards. The story introduces factions such as the Technopriests and the Metabarons, each further detailed in its own later series; L’Incal itself received a prequel in another six volumes, Après l’Incal, published from 1988-1995. The volume featured here is a compendium of the six original Incal volumes, published in 1995 by Les Humanoïdes Associés.
L’Incal. Paris: Humanoïdes Asssociés, 1995. PN6747.J63 I5313 1995x
Thanks to rare book cataloger Ryan Wheeler for contributing this post.