Dying Star (The Incal)

Watters (Limbo) and Davis-Hunt (Clean Room) deliver a grim yet thrilling entry in the Incal/Metabarons space opera series, which was originally created by Alejandro Jodorowsky and Moebius in 1980. In a distant future ruled by the powerful, sociopathic cyborg Metabarons, space pirate Commander Kaimann, a former “aristo” (aristocrat) himself, cuts a swath of destruction across the galaxy with his crew of holographic ghosts. A mutation is causing Kaimann to degenerate into a reptilian monster (“He was born looking on the outside as [the Metabarons] all look within,” the sardonic narration notes), but he’s briefly distracted from his angst when the music of a space-age violin summons Aurora, a priestess of entropy from even further in the future who has been reading about Kaimann’s adventures in a book. That’s as much sense as any plot scripted from the Metabarons universe typically makes, and its scaffolding provides the structure for lavish worldbuilding: Davis-Hunt fills pages with exotic planets, bizarre aliens and cyborgs, space battles, and brutal violence, all rendered in elegant clear-line art that evokes Moebius’s original visions without overtly mimicking. One of the stronger installments in this inexhaustible saga, it will leave readers eager for more. (May)