Reading Through 2021 37: Anibal 5, by Alexandro Jodorowsky and Georges Bess

Anibal 5, by Alexandro Jodorowsky and Georges Bess

2015

What if Möebius made Austin Powers?

I have barely read any Humanoids. Mostly Dupuy & Berberian, which aren't the Humanoids brand in English. So I asked a friend who's a fan for a few books to read, one of which is Anibal 5. Reading it took me back to high school Heavy Metal reading days.

Anibal 5 is a "sexy" super spy doing sexy spy missions for European Defense Organization. He's supported remotely by a team of scientists and accountants pulling his strings and guaranteeing his success.

This explains the book, more or less: "over the top"

This book is, to me, sexually charged as opposed to erotic. There's nudity on most pages, and sex is a major plot advancer throughout the book, but it's not really masturbation fodder. There are some artists who produce erotic work which are made with that in mind, and artists who render sexual activities without being all that sensual themselves. Manara has a sensual line, Bess does not. Bess is storytelling in this book.

More sexual than sexy

This is a book with lots of sex in it, and that's no problem. That was the major selling point of Heavy Metal. But there are some weird points which I got hung up on. Right from the start, the head of Anibal 5's (A5) department is a Santa Claus looking guy, Pinky, in a Professor X style floating wheelchair, paired with a highly sexualized character that reads as a pre-pubescent girl (very petite, flat chested). It's sci fi, nothing is explicitly stated, so it's not a big deal, but I don't think any adult reader wouldn't take note. That character, Enanita, is written as highly intelligent and is shown to be mutually caring with Pinky, as well as in more normal clothes in later chapters, so it's more of what the reader wants to make of it rather than anything explicit.

In the first of the four chapters, we see an army of naked buxom redheads that A5 fights through, and I, not having read the back cover, was trying to puzzle over what Jodorowsky was trying to say. Was it a sexual fantasy? Was it a statement that clone technology will be used to make mainly super hot people due to human nature? Then I took a break to finally watch Jodorowsky's Dune, and I realized that Jodorowsky was the writer/director/star of El Topo, a cult Western film from the 70s, and it clicked: he's just throwing a lot of crazy stuff at you, and you can read into it if you want, but it's not all that deep except as a revelation of Jodorowsky's mindscape. With that, I went back to the book in a very different frame of mind from when I first opened it.

It is what it is

When all the women of earth are enthralled with pheromones to attack a ship over the Antarctic, that's what it is. Spectacle the likes of which you haven't seen before and haven't considered. 

There's no doubt this is a male centered fantasy, and there is a place for that in the culture. There always has been, always will, no matter what the seemingly endless culture warriors of the West have been saying the past ten years. Two things jarred me in this book though. For the most part, the story is careful to simply avoid sexual politics. The first woman A5 lays is enraptured by his magnificence and they get it on. That's standard Heavy Metal fare. He later beds androids designed for his pleasure. Again, typical male sci fi fantasy. 

Then this scene comes up:

World beauty pageant winners have been kidnapped and hypnotized to serve him, and afterwards, they'll be sent home and their memory of the events will be wiped. As a 16 year old, I'm all over this fantasy, the "I can have sex!" fantasy. As a 45 year old, I understand that this is basically a Bill Cosby situation, believing it's all good if they have no memory of it. It doesn't break the book for me, it's merely a throwaway idea for Jorodowsky, but I can't not take note of it. I don't think it's a problem as a sexual fantasy either, people can fantasize about what they like, but it's the presentation in the book as being equal to the other fantasies in the book when it's actually a lot more rapey, for lack of a better term. That throws me off; having a pleasure android is a very different fantasy than mind controlling women.

The second thing I could help but notice, especially in light of the kidnapping and the hypnotizing scene, is that the only scene in the whole book which acknowledges sexual politics at all is one where A5 is the female in question. The third chapter is all about A5 taking different female animal forms, and "she" is mounted by a male tiger.

A5 flat out calls the tiger a rapist. It's a lot to unpack, that the only concept of sexual sovereignty is in relation to the male character. If this was a mainstream American work, tons of Internet-people would come out from under their rocks to explain that this is an obvious critique highlighting the unfairness in the system, and that A5 complaining about rape shows the hypocrisy of the character, but there is absolutely no difference between this critique and a the mentality of a boys locker room. I think Jodorowsky just thought it was funny.

This doesn't break the book for me either. Jodorowsky is an artist, and Jodorowsky likes fucking. It's not any different than a lot of other "great" creators. Most creators scale it back in their work for the sake of marketability, but Jodorowsky happily lets his id out to play.

This is the absolute median tone of the book

Bess's art is good, it's not stylistically exciting, but he can create space in his pictures, he can create all manner of freaky technological settings, and place a lot of people in it without it looking weird. He does his own the coloring too, and that makes a huge difference in the readability of it. This is a book where the content is the star, more than the art itself, giving Bess credit for helping realize the content.

I have Jodorowsky and Möebius' The Incal, and I never finished it! I really should go back and get that read. I'm not going to be an obsessive collector of Jodorowsky's work, it's a bunch of crazy stuff that doesn't add up to much to me. But it's enjoyable in its relentless novelty. Every page turn has new crazy stuff to process. This book gave me a lot to think about and I didn't get into most of what happened in the book. I am going to try reading more of it.