INSIDE MOEBIUS - MOEBIUS

Moebius is great. I found out about in in high school via an infatuation with Jorodowsky and then tried, not too hard, to follow up with some of his other stuff. It’s hard to beat that weirdo European comic stuff, and I, someone who knows very little about the subject, consider Moebius the best. His best stuff is so grand and bizarre you wish there was a drug that transported you into these strange worlds, if only briefly. Actually, drugs are the somewhat subject of this book. The hook is that the book is a sort of visual diary of Moebius, as an old man, as he attempts to give up smoking weed. Obviously, I can’t endorse this. However, he renders this sober ordeal as a vast desert “Desert B” where a drawn version of Gir wonders around and complains about how sober his is, or tries to write inside of a large stone. Eventually, characters from his past, like Bluebeard, come to interact with him and try to get him to smoke and learn/accept (to varying degrees) that they’re fictional characters in a comic. Then this shit goes completely off the rails. We learn that the comic is taking place (and being written/drawn, since the creation of the piece is the subject) shortly after September 11th. Eventually Osama Bin Laden shows up and talks with Moebius and smokes weed in front of him and gets to ranting. Part of me admires it for being so bold, another part of me admires how French it is (in both how Moebius argument against him is based on sex and love as well as how racist the drawing seemed). However, it definitely misses the mark. Geronimo, the actual Apache leader, shows up and agrees with Bin Laden and they talk about how they are both desert warriors who, “know either shame, nor guilt, nor fear.” Yikes. An alien gives Bin Laden a woman’s body. It’s all over the place. And the fundamentally featureless nature of the desert deprives us of major splash panels and illustrative brilliance; though it is astoundingly beautiful, it never kicks into a super high gear. Also, I feel that I missed a lot of in-jokes and subtlety since I’m not super familiar with Moebius’ body of work, there were many characters I didn’t recognize that were clearly meant to be familiar to most. 420 featureless deserts.