Page 45 Review by Stephen
Gorgeous hardcover repacking the otherwise flimsy softcover component parts that just lolled around on your shelves like flaccid fish caught in a far from jovial net. Or something. I hand you over instead to Professor David Hart, ex of Oxford with a BA Hons in English Literature, and 1st, as it happens:
Castration, mutilation, military prosthetics, whore-priestesses, vast space battles and barely suppressed Oedipal relationships: it's fair to say that the defining motif for THE METABARONS is 'excess'. Starting with former pirate Othon Von Salza, THE METABARONS tells the story of a line of technologically supercharged and murderous fucks with relationship problems, each page super-pumped full of more ideas than most comics use in a year, the hysteria dial well and truly turned up to eleven.
Any attempt to summarize the plot is going to make it sound bonkers; which it is, but that's not the point. While the future medieval setting is as familiar as the space opera genre, what sets this apart is that the opera is very much of the Wagnerian variety. The sets, the gestures, the plots, the characters, all strain their sinews towards the epic. This is opera where the high notes shatter glass and where the fat lady is a psychic ninja cyborg who turns out to be a reincarnation of your mum.
Giminez' painted art, meanwhile, is a superb match for Jodorowsky's grandiose vision, grounding even the most outré of events in a human reality. He combines draughtsmanship with a dynamic sense of scale and storytelling, able to move in a flicker from Olympian-scale space battles to the smirk on a father's face as he pulps his son's feet in a macabre initiation ceremony. Ignore the two robots who narrate the book and whose sub-C3P0 witterings litter the text ("What happens next! Do tell before I burst another diode!" Blah and, indeed, blegh). Instead sit back and watch the speed and variety of invention, as bigger and bigger ideas flash across the stage. This first volume ends with Othon and his freshly mutilated son setting off for a new land; it's worth noting that it's after this that things start to get really weird...
