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.

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.