Alex Sarll's Reviews > The Incal, Vol. 1: The Black Incal

I read a couple of volumes of the Metabarons spin-off back when I was on the Warren Ellis Forum – it was one of the books widely extolled there as an alternative to what, with crushing irony revealed by hindsight, the regulars used to call 'pervert suit comics'. I found it every bit as ludicrous as superheroes, just in a European way, which people raised on the American version can easily take for sophistication. Never read the Incal itself, though, and I now own much (maybe all?) of it through the magic of Humble Bundles, so I thought I might as well give it a try. Alas, if Metabarons - the saga of the galaxy's greatest warriors - had a tendency toward the po-faced, then Incal - the story of a lowly PI who finds the galaxy's greatest Macguffin - is even more so, as will tend to happen when you get a self-important writer trying to do a knockabout romp. But dear heavens it's pretty. Its dystopian future world may thus far be a retread of Mega-City One which is somehow both slightly less interesting and much less coherent, but Moebius' depiction of it is very nearly up there with the best Dredd artists.