I Really Should Read This 23: Metabarons, by Jodrowsky and Gimenez

Metabarons, by Jodrowsky and Gimenez

1992-2003, collected in 2017

This is a big one. 

I read through a ton of comics and rarely would I ever attach the word "staggering" to anything I read. Chris Ware might get that word, probably Charles Burns' Black Hole. And Metabarons is staggering. I'm not even sure how much I liked it, but it is not something I will ever forget.

There's not so much to relate to on a human level

I read a minor Jodorowsky book in February, and it was enjoyable, but I had a feeling with that one that it was a pretty shallow book. Jodorowsky works with very potent iconography. When characters are fucking and dying, it can feel like something, but how effective that iconography is will depend on the reader. If you're looking for a nuanced portrayal of people, this is not the book for you.

The beautiful are beautiful, and the ugly are grotesque

The male leads of Metabarons, the Metaborons themselves, are the strongest, most powerful men you will ever see. They marry the most voluptuous women you will ever see. They care not for the lives of ordinary folk. They live on a scale we couldn't handle. 

They suffer as well

Metabarons covers roughly four generations of the Metabarons, as they disrupt the balance of the galaxy depending on which path they decide to take.

As I read the book, I was trying to figure out what exactly it's comparable to. At first, I was thinking that Metabarons was to Star Wars as Game of Thrones is to Lord of the Rings.  It's not an unfair comparison. Metabarons allows for an idea of sex and death far beyond what traditional Hollywood fare does and is firmly in the realm of science-fantasy. There is no attempt at scientific realism. Technology exists for whatever the story calls for. 

Perpetually dividing yourself is a good technique for overwhelming the enemy

As I got a few books in, I started to see the book as clearly in the tradition of ancient mythology, where stories of very human emotions are thrust against the impossible. Think of the sirens of odysseus or narcissus staring at himself in a pool until he died. Or Oedipus fatefully, impossibly killing his father before blinding himself. Metabarons is telling stories like that, stories you are meant to relate to on a metaphoric level more than on a personal one.

When the first mother of the Metabarons is shot with an anti-gravity injection at the moment she gives birth, the baby is born without weight. After seven years being raised in a cave without love or kindness, his legs are destroyed and weighted boots are attached so he can be a warrior.  That's an actual story in the book. 

When the genitals of a Metabaron are destroyed, he attaches the steering handle for his phallic spaceship in the empty slot to pilot it. It's stated as a normal thing.

Baby Metabarons are no joke

Basically, the book takes a very old way of storytelling and thrusts it into science fiction, with a fascinating result. It's decidedly unmodern in the story it's telling, and that makes it refreshing. It's a kind of escapism very different from the kind of escapism that overwhelms mainstream comics. 

Which one of those two would you suspect is the clone?

What's great about what Jodorowsky and Gimenez did with this book is that they aren't telling sci-fi versions of classic mythology. They're actually building up new relationships and dynamics with the weight of classical mythology using science fiction. There is genuine inventiveness in the major events of the book.

That's a pretty good picture!

The art by Juan Gimenez is astounding. He's tasked with drawing battle after battle on a massive scale, either with figures or vehicles, and he cuts no corners. Very occasionally, some images get muddy as dark creatures spurt blood or something, but it's such a minor thing to even mention and it occurs less and less as the series goes on. He illustrated this over roughly ten years, and he must have put in an uncountable number of hours.

As someone who hasn't read a lot of Humanoids or Euro comics, I wasn't familiar with Gimenez, and I was sad to learn he died of COVID complications in 2020 at the age of 76. I'm sure he was proud of his work on this book.

There's a lot of stuff like this: Tecnopapal Temple on the Techno-Techno Central Planet

If I have a criticism, and it's a minor one, like complaining about the garnish on a five star meal, it's the robot narrators and the use of vocabulary. 

The story is told by two robots with enthusiasm and respect for their legendary Metabaron master, and repeatedly they envy human biology. At one point, one is so enthralled with the story it pines for a bladder so that it could piss itself with excitement. 

I can't tell if it is humor, or a statement about the magic of human emotion and biology that AI will envy our experience of life. I suspect it's a bit of both, but it was relentless. 

The vocabulary is full of prefixes which started to become like a parody of science fiction. Things that were rooted in Earth were prefixed palio, tons of stuff was prefixed techno and cyborg, and there was other stuff as well. I just didn't get it. I don't understand why a future human society would tell people to go to paleo-Hell. So much of the book I got with after a while, but I didn't get with that. It's a choice, and I don't have to love every one.

*meca-gulp*

But this was a book that demanded a lot from me as a reader and gave a lot in return. There is a lot of stuff in the "Jodorverse", and I'm going to look into some other series, specifically Technopriests and the sequel to this. It might be good, it might not, but I doubt it'll be boring.