The Incal
November 17, 2021 10:31 AM   Subscribe

Apparently a movie will be made of Jodorowsy's graphic novel, The Incal. The original comics were written in the aftermath of the cancellation of Jodorowsky's Dune, and was a major inspiration for The Fifth Element. Per Jodorowsky, the director they've chosen is exactly the right person for the project.
posted by kaibutsu (72 comments total) 38 users marked this as a favorite
 
Curious.
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 10:39 AM on November 17, 2021 [1 favorite]


If you want a copy of that Jodorowsy/Moebius Dune book, it could be yours for a mere US$30-40K (est)
posted by gwint at 10:40 AM on November 17, 2021 [11 favorites]


Soooo excited! Thanks for the news.
posted by No Robots at 10:42 AM on November 17, 2021 [4 favorites]


HOLY WHAT I DIDN’T SEE THAT TWIST COMING.

I will watch this, but I also really don’t know he’d be who I’d pick for the film.

Also, more mundanely,I find it kind of curious that the interview with Jodorowsky was in French.
posted by Going To Maine at 10:44 AM on November 17, 2021 [3 favorites]


Cool Chris Foss machines at https://www.chrisfossart.com/category/portfolio/dune/ also appear in that rather pricey book.
posted by mdoar at 10:49 AM on November 17, 2021


Yep. That's Cool.
posted by Liquidwolf at 10:59 AM on November 17, 2021 [1 favorite]


I love that Waititi probably has his pick of literally any screenplay right now and he reached straight for Moebius. This should be quite mad.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 10:59 AM on November 17, 2021 [40 favorites]


Seems to me like just the right time for all of these Jodorowsky / Moebius ghosts to finally substantiate in the mainstream culture, I look forward to this.
posted by Meatbomb at 11:03 AM on November 17, 2021 [7 favorites]


It’s just such a 1970’s book. I hope the adaptation is quite loose or we’re gonna get a Zardoz.
posted by Going To Maine at 11:06 AM on November 17, 2021 [3 favorites]


You say that like it's a bad thing.
posted by Meatbomb at 11:10 AM on November 17, 2021 [51 favorites]


It’s just such a 1970’s book. I hope the adaptation is quite loose or we’re gonna get a Zardoz.

Oh no, a Taika Waititi Zardoz
posted by billjings at 11:22 AM on November 17, 2021 [74 favorites]


You say that like it's a bad thing.

Seriously: I'm more worried it's going to be forced through the Hollywood Screenwriting 101 machine:

"This John DiFool character needs to be more likable if we're going to cast Chris. Also add a phoney-baloney moral dilemma for the Necroprez, he's too cartoonish. You know, like how we did for Thanos?"

I trust Waititi to avoid those though.
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 11:25 AM on November 17, 2021 [4 favorites]


It’s just such a 1970’s book. I hope the adaptation is quite loose or we’re gonna get a Zardoz.

Look, you shouldn't disparage fellow MeFiers like that.
posted by deadaluspark at 11:28 AM on November 17, 2021 [4 favorites]


Neat. I didn’t know this Pascal Blaise fan trailer existed. I can’t see it being worth doing unless it's an Into the Spiderverse sort of animated thing. The visuals were always the heart of it for me.
posted by brachiopod at 11:31 AM on November 17, 2021 [3 favorites]


I certainly could have imagined Guillermo del Toro doing this, but considering how willing Waititi has been to go full Kirby with the Thor movies, this is also very exciting!
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 11:46 AM on November 17, 2021 [3 favorites]


I see various problems...

* Doing justice to Moebius's art. Maybe doable these days.
* Being as weird as Jodorowsky.
* Making it less than six hours.
* Americans generally don't get BDs... people didn't know what to make of Fifth Element. We like our sf either totally grimdark or earnest-with-wisecracks, not psychedelic and over-the-top satirical.

Will John still go for android prostitutes? He was supposed to be kind of a horrible person.
posted by zompist at 11:51 AM on November 17, 2021


Jodorowsky and Moebius' graphic novel, The Incal. The writer is not the sole creator/author of a work of sequential art. The work does not exist without the artist's contribution. And I say this as a writer of sequential art.
posted by jordantwodelta at 11:56 AM on November 17, 2021 [21 favorites]


With The Incal, I think the art has probably aged better than the plot.

Oh no, a Taika Waititi Zardoz

I realize I’m threatening you with a good time, but I want to be threatening me with a good time.
posted by Going To Maine at 12:07 PM on November 17, 2021 [14 favorites]


When the new director came on screen, walking away from the camera, I thought, "Is that Taika Waititi? It'd better be Taika Waititi because I honestly can't imagine another person at this time able to do justice to something as weird as The Incal who has the juice in Hollywood to get it done."

And it was Waititi, so I'm suddenly quite optimistic that, like Jodorowsky's and Moebius's other work, whether it's good or bad, it will undoubtedly be interestingly good or bad.
posted by tclark at 12:18 PM on November 17, 2021 [4 favorites]


I honestly can't imagine another person at this time able to do justice to something as weird as The Incal who has the juice in Hollywood to get it done

Darren Aronofsky?
posted by Going To Maine at 12:28 PM on November 17, 2021 [2 favorites]


Weirdly enough, Moebius both provided concept artwork for The Fifth Element and later sued the producers for incorporating parts of The Incal.

Honestly, I think the visuals of The Incal will be easy to nail down. Nailing the often-breakneck tonal shifts will be another thing entirely.
posted by Eikonaut at 12:29 PM on November 17, 2021 [2 favorites]


I hope the adaptation is quite loose or we’re gonna get a Zardoz.

I like the thought that all sci-fi films have a tendency to become a Zardoz unless carefully nurtured by the right director.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 12:31 PM on November 17, 2021 [13 favorites]


As a fellow Chilean, not really a fan of Jodorowsky's whole thing (waves hands vaguely at psychomagic), but the first half of the Incal or so is great fun. And Moebius has a lot of room to work in, which is always amazing.
posted by signal at 12:35 PM on November 17, 2021 [3 favorites]


I wish I could like The Incal et al. books more than I do—I'm entranced by the sheer weirdness of it all and the art is always stunning, but I can't get past the way that sexual violence or the threat of violence so frequently functions as atmosphere or plot point in many of these books. (Technopriests starts with a gang rape.) I guess I'm curious about what Waititi comes up with and maybe he can excise the worst of the leering dirty old man-ness of it.
posted by a Rrose by any other name at 12:41 PM on November 17, 2021 [15 favorites]


Doing justice to Moebius's art. Maybe doable these days.

I felt like the game Sable did a really good job on kind of pulling off an Incal type of vibe. Honestly, me and my friends felt strongly that they ripped the whole vibe of the game entirely from The Incal.

Anyway, if a game can do it, I'm sure a full-fledged animation studio could do it real justice.

(Side note, one of my favorite things about Sable is the slightly reduced number of frames in character animation sequences, making it have an almost zoetrope-animation like effect. It makes it weirdly feel more like classic hand-drawn animation to me for some reason.)
posted by deadaluspark at 12:42 PM on November 17, 2021 [6 favorites]


I guess I'm curious about what Waititi comes up with and maybe he can excise the worst of the leering dirty old man-ness of it.

One of Waititi's greatest strengths currently happens to be his ability to be completely wholesome and focusing on loving human relationships. I would say he mostly errs on wholesome. Hunt for the Wilderpeople was mostly wholesome, and any allusions dirty old man-ness was obviously treated as a net negative.

I think he's definitely capable of handling difficult subjects with an ear to considerations for other people's sensibilities.
posted by deadaluspark at 12:45 PM on November 17, 2021 [1 favorite]


Well, this just made the possibility of a Metabarons adaptation much more likely than I previously would have assumed. Per above, there's a lot of sex-nuns & auto-incest & "what if we put a man's brain... in a woman's body?" there, and I have no idea how that'll get adapted.
posted by CrystalDave at 12:47 PM on November 17, 2021 [4 favorites]


We like our sf either totally grimdark or earnest-with-wisecracks, not psychedelic and over-the-top satirical.

I don't know, Thor: Ragnarok was pretty psychedelic and satirical, but also definitely a lot of earnest-with-wisecracks.
posted by loquacious at 12:48 PM on November 17, 2021 [1 favorite]


I find it kind of curious that the interview with Jodorowsky was in French

He holds French citizenship, along with Chilean.
posted by opsin at 12:49 PM on November 17, 2021 [3 favorites]


Americans generally don't get BDs

What is BDs?
posted by kittensofthenight at 12:50 PM on November 17, 2021 [8 favorites]


bande dessinée, I assume.
posted by fimbulvetr at 12:53 PM on November 17, 2021 [2 favorites]


I assume BDs is referring to bande dessinée
posted by deadaluspark at 12:54 PM on November 17, 2021 [5 favorites]


(Love it, thanks!)

I can't WAIT to share this with my Jodorowsky loving partner!
posted by kittensofthenight at 12:56 PM on November 17, 2021 [1 favorite]


Americans generally don't get BDs... people didn't know what to make of Fifth Element.

I think that Americans get bandes dessinées just fine, if you're using TFE as an example; even though most of that film's receipts came from overseas, it did quite well here for a film that no one in America seemed able to describe except to say that it had Bruce Willis in it. I think that some of that may have had to do with TFE being written as a film, rather than as an adaptation of a BD (contrast with, for example, Immortal or Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, which bombed; maybe that has something to do with what Alan Moore said about Watchmen (after initially agreeing to a film adaptation and even meeting with Terry Gilliam about an early and eventually-abandoned version) that, if a comic is really good, and works well as a comic, then it won't work as a movie if it's too faithful to the source material, which is certainly true of Zack Snyder's adaptation.)

I haven't read The Incal, and will take a stab at reading through at least the first volume.
posted by Halloween Jack at 1:28 PM on November 17, 2021 [2 favorites]


Going To Maine: "I find it kind of curious that the interview with Jodorowsky was in French."

In the documentary Jodorowsky's Dune, he drifts between French, Spanish, and English pretty much at random.
posted by adamrice at 1:45 PM on November 17, 2021 [6 favorites]


This John DiFool character needs to be more likable if we're going to cast Chris.

Which Chris? (Or does it matter?)
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 1:53 PM on November 17, 2021 [3 favorites]


I've been meaning to find the best way to read these comics. Does anyone have a suggestion?
posted by rebent at 1:57 PM on November 17, 2021


Well I was happy to see that face appear!
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 1:59 PM on November 17, 2021 [1 favorite]


At first glance I read this as "The Incel" and was greatly relieved to see I was wrong. This sounds like it could be good.
posted by SoberHighland at 2:00 PM on November 17, 2021 [9 favorites]


Honestly, me and my friends felt strongly that [Sable] ripped the whole vibe of the game entirely from The Incal.

I haven't played it, and I know it's not at all a traditional shooter of any kind, but I got a strong "What if Destiny 2, but Moebius" vibe from all the footage I saw.
posted by The Bellman at 2:02 PM on November 17, 2021


the expanse between my anticipation for Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, and my experience of the film, was.. you know, pretty huge. What a let-down

and by what Chris I'm gonna guess Pratt? that would be a terrible choice, if so
posted by elkevelvet at 2:18 PM on November 17, 2021


"What if Destiny 2, but Moebius" vibe from all the footage I saw.

Gameplay is closer to Breath of the Wild type platformer/RPG-lite with lots of climbing. No enemies or any way to really "die" easily. Mostly exploration and story-driven.
posted by deadaluspark at 2:19 PM on November 17, 2021 [1 favorite]


and by what Chris I'm gonna guess Pratt? that would be a terrible choice, if so

Well they sure as shit don't mean Plummer since he passed recently. I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that most of the Chrises that this could be in reference to are... just awful.

See: Chris Hemsworth's new show on "life extension" that makes me want to gag and hope he gets hit by a truck so all his attempts to live forever are pointless.
posted by deadaluspark at 2:26 PM on November 17, 2021 [1 favorite]


It's been a loooong time since I read the Incal, and he's old for the part, but I see Steve Buscemi as John DiFool.
posted by adamrice at 2:49 PM on November 17, 2021 [9 favorites]


Well, fine & good that Jodo anointed Waititi, but this thing's going to need to be well funded to get off the ground. That should be interesting. (Oh, and BTW: having some constraints put in place by money people might not be an intrinsically bad thing. Someone mentioned Valerian, which I recall Luc Besson managed to fund w/o any creative constraints and look how that turned out.)
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 2:49 PM on November 17, 2021 [1 favorite]


If you want a copy of that Jodorowsy/Moebius Dune book, it could be yours for a mere US$30-40K (est)

drool

I actually wonder who's copy that was. I recall only a handful being made and most being given out as part of pitching the project to various studios.
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 3:00 PM on November 17, 2021 [3 favorites]


I'm reading Incal and like it, but I think more for Moebius than Jodorowsky. I couldn't get through Holy Mountain; was grossed out by his use of live animals, sexually exploitative imagery and general pretension.
posted by dantheclamman at 3:19 PM on November 17, 2021 [4 favorites]


🤞🏼🤞🏼🤞🏼🤞🏼🤞🏼🤞🏼🤞🏼🤞🏼🤞🏼🤞🏼🤞🏼
As I was watching the wind up I said “please let it be ____, please let it be ___” and it was.
Hopeful with the choice of director, but the producer and the studio and most of all funding are just as key. I’m not holding my breath.
posted by Conrad-Casserole at 3:22 PM on November 17, 2021 [1 favorite]


I'm boycotting this thing, unless Mick Jagger is in it, and Pink Floyd writes the score!
posted by epimorph at 3:36 PM on November 17, 2021 [3 favorites]


I read The Incal after I read Aama, and I know which I prefer. Aama seems to have more humanity than The Incal, but The Incal is incredible to look at and 'for it's time' ground breaking.
I look forward to seeing the movie on one hand, but on the other I would prefer movies were made to be movies, rather than adaptations from other media. I am fairly confident there are people who are good at writing movies who are being overlooked in favour of some established intellectual property from some other media.
posted by asok at 3:37 PM on November 17, 2021 [2 favorites]


Taika Waititi is quite a choice. The visuals of Thor:Ragnarok really do look splendidly 1970s-comics. And he's got the wild and fast tonal shifts, as we saw in JoJo and Wilderpeople.
posted by doctornemo at 4:32 PM on November 17, 2021 [1 favorite]


The game Sable is new to me, but the visuals cry out that it's doing Moebius.
posted by doctornemo at 4:33 PM on November 17, 2021 [1 favorite]


HOLY WHAT I DIDN’T SEE THAT TWIST COMING.

I saw this comment, then watched the video, and Jodorowski said the director was God. So I figured that was the twist. But I’m glad its Waititi because he has a more even temperament.
posted by condour75 at 4:39 PM on November 17, 2021 [4 favorites]


“Jodorowsky's Dune Inspired Masterpiece ‘The Incal’ is Finally Being Adapted!”—Quinn's Ideas, 05 November 2021
posted by ob1quixote at 4:53 PM on November 17, 2021


and by what Chris I'm gonna guess Pratt? that would be a terrible choice, if so

There's a definite Chris hierarchy, and it saddens me that we live in the world that's made Pratt seemingly the default Chris.

That hierarchy is clearly:
1. Evans
2. Pine
3. Hemsworth
4. Ugh
5. Really?
6. O'Donnell
7. Gah.
8. Fine...
9. Pratt

posted by Ghidorah at 6:51 PM on November 17, 2021 [10 favorites]


So, I'm assuming that this is just paving the way for a live-action version of Le Garage Hermétique, with Benidorm Campervan playing Major Grubert.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 8:27 PM on November 17, 2021 [2 favorites]


I like The Incal, but it's no The Metabarons. You can do a reasonably good Incal movie that won't freak out Middle America too bad. Metabarons? Ha!
posted by kittens for breakfast at 9:39 PM on November 17, 2021 [1 favorite]


There's a definite Chris hierarchy, and it saddens me that we live in the world that's made Pratt seemingly the default Chris.

The Hollywood Chris Power Rankings have been a thing for a while, and Pratt is widely acknowledged to be on the bottom of it. This hasn't stopped Pratt from being cast as both Mario and Garfield for some reason, which is why people are darkly joking that Hollywood is going to shove him down our throats again.

So I sought out a (pirate) copy of The Incal, and, uh... I don't know if I'm feeling it? The beginning is really ugly, and I flipped through to some random pages in the middle and it seemed like it was just a bunch of stuff happening (but then, I did flip into the middle).
posted by Merus at 2:32 AM on November 18, 2021


Don’t forget, he’s also the nominal star of the Jurassic World franchise, and will be appearing in the third Guardians of the Galaxy film. Sure, he might be picking up all sorts of voice acting credits, but the doesn’t mean he’s not winning.
posted by Ghidorah at 7:04 AM on November 18, 2021


Chris Pratt seems to be the lead in a lot of animated movies, ever since The Lego Movie. It’s impressive dominance, but it also feels like we’re getting one type of animated protagonist.
posted by Going To Maine at 9:26 AM on November 18, 2021


I picked up the Incal hardcover a couple of years back because it was a classic so I felt I should. The art is very nice but I didn't care for the story and have forgotten most of it. Maybe I'll give it a reread, it's just sitting on the shelf anyway.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 9:43 AM on November 18, 2021


When it comes to The Incal I'm very much about the look of the work. Highly recommend the Moebius and Stan Lee Silver Surfer (now that would be a fine adaptation project..). Such a great treatment of a Marvel staple.
posted by elkevelvet at 9:56 AM on November 18, 2021


Just to jump back in: yes, I meant any one of the endless army of "safe choice" Chrises, with Pratt being the most anodyne. Sorry, feel like I derailed things a bit.
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 9:57 AM on November 18, 2021


As a decades-long Jean Giraud aka Moebius fan this is good news. He's one of the greatest comic book artists of all times, and he was unlucky with the movies. This is particularly unfair, given the influence of The Long Tomorrow (written in 1976 by Alien's Dan O'Bannon). TLT was sort of adapted (but not credited) as Harry Canyon in the Heavy Metal animated movie (1981) but its legacy lives on in many sci-fi movies and shows, from Blade Runner to The Expanse. The Incal itself begins like TLT. The often cited Fifth Element draws inspiration from Giraud's work, but it was mainly Besson's attempt at making a Valérian movie without Valérian. Otherwise, only bits of Giraud's work have been used in movies, Tron being the most known, and other filmmakers have cited him, like Hayao Miyazaki in Nausicäa. Giraud had several movie projects in the 1980-1990s but nothing was ever made.

The Incal is a good fit for Waititi. I hope that he will be able to keep the colourful craziness of the story like he did in Thor: Ragnarok, inject some humanity in it as he always does, and tone down the... terrible New Age stuff, a little bit like Verhoeven did when he adapted Starship Troopers without Heinlein's political rants. In the early 1980s, after he had started on the Incal, Giraud joined the Iso-Zen cult led by Jean-Paul Appel-Guéry, and moved with his family to Tahiti, a magical place where the cult was waiting for extra-terrestrials. Since ET did not bother showing up, the cult members spent time in sex orgies (far-right "thinker" and Holocaust revisionist Alain Soral claimed recently to have joined the cult only for the sex orgies). What exactly happened there is not known. Giraud told in an interview in 2010 that he quit before he "crossed the limits of human dignity", saying that the cult "put in practice all transgressions, all taboos" though he still praised its guru as a "quite extraordinary guy". As can be expected, Appel-Guéry has been accused of being a sexual predator by former cult members but he's still walking free.

In any case, Giraud's newfound spirituality led him to alter dramatically his drawing style, abandoning his masterful hatching method and the gritty world of the beginning for an extra-pure ligne claire and stuff involving crystals, shiny stars, and other pseudo-mystical orientalist blah (some of it written by Jodorowski of course). Frankly, that period, which started with the book 3 of the Incal, was the least interesting of Giraud's career (Claudine, his wife at the time, agreed in 2012 that Giraud's plunge into esoterism "devitalized his artistic creation" for a while). And he had a film project at the time, Internal Transfert, penned by Appel-Guéry and helmed by Arnie Wong, an illustrator who had worked on Tron and Heavy Metal. There's a trailer on YouTube and in the comments Wong claims that he and Giraud pitched it unsuccessfully to Disney. I can't say I'm impressed. A least Giraud quit the cult mid-1980s and the later Incal books have a better art.
posted by elgilito at 10:02 AM on November 18, 2021 [10 favorites]


I'm still pissed off that Lady Gaga wasn't in Dune. Until they fix that with a special edition or something, I'm not watching shit!
posted by Naberius at 10:52 AM on November 18, 2021


We haven't seen Feyd-Rautha yet.
posted by cmfletcher at 1:26 PM on November 18, 2021 [2 favorites]


Thanks, elgilito, I really appreciate the background on Jean Giraud.

I am surprised that there's been no traction for a Hollywood film adaptation of 'Blueberry' (though not a fan of it myself).
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 3:05 PM on November 18, 2021


Well Euro comics are not exactly popular in Hollywood unless they're called The Smurfs. It took almost 30 years for Spielberg to make a Tintin movie and it did less money that year in the US than The Green Lantern (I remember Americans mistaking Tintin for Rin Tin Tin). A shroom-inspired Blueberry movie was made in 2004 and flopped in France (it was straight-to-DVD in the US) so I don't see this IP going anywhere. Valérian, we know what happened with it. At least Corto Maltese was namechecked in The Suicide Squad. If The Incal has a fighting chance, it's not because of the IP but because it's Waititi doing it and big sci-fi fantasy is popular these days.
posted by elgilito at 10:46 PM on November 18, 2021


The Corto Maltese referenced by Suicide Squad is the nation Frank Miller created for Dark Knight Returns in the 80s, not the '60s Italian comic book. Miller was paying homage to the book when he chose the name, but the 'nation' itself has a long history of being interwoven into DC comics properties from the 90s-onward.
posted by jordantwodelta at 6:24 AM on November 19, 2021


I'm holding out for the adaptation of Imbattable, le seul véritable super-héros de bande dessinée.
posted by bfields at 6:46 PM on November 19, 2021


The US is obviously historically important as a comics inspiration for a lot of countries but France and Japan just have way better comics than us imo.
posted by grobstein at 11:08 AM on November 20, 2021 [1 favorite]


If you want a copy of that Jodorowsy/Moebius Dune book, it could be yours for a mere US$30-40K (est)

Or...uhhh...3 million dollars.
posted by Literaryhero at 3:43 AM on November 23, 2021


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