Simon’s Reviews > The Collected Fantasies, Vol. 3: The Airtight Garage > Status Update

Re-reading this it becomes clear to me that Moebius' main background as a comic book artist was in the Western genre, under his birth name Jean Giraud. Both this and his other SF comics like "Arzach" and "Edena's World" are full of picture compositions straight out of a film by John Ford or Sergio Leone.

likewise it is first on this 3rd read or so that I pay attention to the role played in the chaotic and labyrinthine plot by the Bakallites, an enigmatic order of mystics who compete with both Major Grubert and Jerry Cornelius for dominion over the pocket universe hidden within a hollow asteroid where the story takes place

there's a lot of thinly veiled Gnostic subtext here I haven't noticed until now, what with the construction of worlds and universes being a major theme here - I wager the villain-protagonist Major Grubert would then be a Demiurge figure and Jerry Cornelius a Luciferian lightbringer

the story being framed as a espionage thriller also adds a bunch of Cold War era leftist subtext I might not get all nuances of BTW

interesting to see how much more Moebius' solo projects even the longform stories follow the "throw reader head first into complicated strange universe with minimum of exposition" writing style of 60s/70s science-fiction, than his collabs with Alejandro Jodorowsky that have much more infodumping

trying to patch together how the setting works is a lot more fun, even though the trippy art is the main attraction

found out that the Copenhagen libraries have some of Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius novels that this series is a loose adaptation of so I've reserved them and started re-reading "The Hermetic Garage" - I wonder how many allusions to Moorcock's mythology here I'm missing so far