The Incal (2011)

Moebius drew Alejandro Jodorowsky's space opera for the French magazine Métal Hurlant through the 1980s, and his clean, confident line makes the strangest ideas look solid. The opening, a seedy detective plunging down the shaft of a vast, many-leveled city toward an acid lake, shows his gift for scale in a few panels. Later chapters fill pages with crystalline machines, cathedral-sized ships and crowds of alien faces. Jodorowsky's mystical plotting gets wilder as it goes, and readers who want tight storytelling may lose patience. The pages earn their place regardless. This is Humanoids' 2011 hardcover, which restored the original coloring after an early-2000s edition recolored it, so check which version you buy.