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In a hallucinatory scene from Moebius' classic The World of Edena, a naked man battles a dragon inside a giant blue cube, gets stabbed through the chest by a tentacle and is hurled into space, where he drifts and bleeds among the stars. It's an astounding sequence—which makes it doubly hard to believe the work began in 1983 as a promotion for the French car company Citroën.
Now more than 30 years old, Moebius' legendary psychedelic alien saga hasn't lost its fevered power to entertain, alarm and inspire awe. The French comic-book writer and artist's famous fans include Spirited Away's Hayao Miyazaki, who has attested to Moebius' "great impact on me," especially on the early Miyazaki film Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. Moebius, who died in 2012, also helped envision the spacesuits in Alien and the benevolent underwater creature in The Abyss.
But until now, the complete Edena has never been available in English.
Portland-area publisher Dark Horse Comics is offering the first full English translation of the 1985 graphic novel (Dark Horse Books, 344 pages, $49.99) after partnering with Moebius Production in France, a team-up that stems from the late 1980s, when Dark Horse founder Mike Richardson acquired publication rights to Moebius' The Horny Goof. In 1990, Richardson brought Moebius to Portland for a signing and later formed a friendship with Moebius' wife, Isabelle Giraud, which led to Dark Horse being allowed to work on The World of Edena.
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Edena makes it easy to understand why Moebius remains a subject of passionate veneration. The graphic novel defies the conventions of the sci-fi genre—especially when the story's protagonists, Stel and Atan, journey to a Garden of Eden-like planet populated by fascists wearing elephant masks, an image eerily relevant to contemporary American politics. Increasingly bizarre escapades follow, though Moebius miraculously manages to distill the story's weirdness into a politically resonant fable about totalitarianism, environmental preservation and sex, most pointedly in a jarring scene that features an attempted rape.
When Miyazaki and Moebius spoke in 2005, Miyazaki noted that "the 21st century is a tricky time," saying artists "need to re-examine many things we've taken for granted." Seen in that light, The World of Edena looks downright prophetic.
The World of Edena was published in October 2016 by Milwaukie's Dark Horse Books.