The second volume in the Moebius Library from Dark Horse is The Art of Edena. And it is gorgeous.
This new edition is prefaced with commentary from Isabelle Giraud, Moebius’ widow, and words from “Moebius Production”.
In a sense of explanation, The World of Edena was a French-language comic book, about two characters, Stel and Atan. They were interstellar travelers who land on Edena, the mystical paradise planet. On Edena, topics like gender roles, man’s reliance on technology, along with environmental issues and even “lucid dreaming” are explored.
All fine and dandy, but what is this book? Well, it’s artwork from the project. Drawings, sketches, enlarged thumbnails, notes, character drawings all serve a purpose here, to show excerpts from his work The World of Edena. There are four short stories to admire and marvel at, accompanied by notes from Moebius.
All in all, this is an art book. It’s a little puzzling to flip through unless you are familiar with Edena as a whole, but the volume does present the artwork in a well explained, logical fashion. But Moebius’ creation is such a labyrinthian accomplishment, with so many facets and ways of being examined and analyzed that the reader is left to simply flip the pages, read the stories and be astonished.
And that’s perhaps what this art book does best: lift the hood off the ‘motor’ and show us the inner workings of the creation.
Dark Horse, Moebius Library, The Art of Edena, 8″ x 10″ hardcover, $34.99 for 214 pages of content, Rated age 16+
Newsdesk