The INCEPTION Prequel Comic To Revisit With TENET’s Delay

With the release of Christopher Nolan’s  Tenet officially pushed back, now is the perfect time to revisit Inception‘s prequel comic for any fans starving for another mind-bending sci-fi tale from the mind of the consistently confounding filmmaker.

Initially published online for free to help market the film, The Cobol Job first introduces readers to many of the characters from the film, as well as Cobb’s (Leonardo DiCaprio)  fan theory-inspiring spinning totem top. There’s also appearances from the haunting presence of Cobb’s deceased wife Mal (Marion Cotillard ), his right-hand man Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), unreliable dream “architect” Nash (Lukas Haas) and even hints of Professor Stephen Miles (Michael Cain).

The book follows Cobb and Arthur as they’re on a job to retrieve a file regarding some sort of expansion plan in the works for a company called Proclus, which happens to be headed by the film’s Mr. Saito (Ken Wantanabe). Their heist, the readers will learn, is taking place inside the dream of Proclus’ chief engineer, Mr. Kaneda.

After a series of action sequences that include a diversionary jewelry store heist, a ticking time bomb and police shoot outs, the dream begins to collapse as Cobb learns that not even Kaneda has access to the file he’s after. Only Saito himself does. When the bomb explodes, Cobb finds himself back in a cot, connected to the movie’s dream-sharing machine and frantically spins his top to assure himself he’s actually awake.

A man named Woodruff, the head of Cobol Engineering and rival of Saito, is disappointed that Cobb and his team were unable to complete the task for which they were hired. After reminding him that he’s a wanted man, a seemingly frustrated Cobb reluctantly agrees to enter Saito’s dreams directly for the information. the final panel sees him telling the team they’re headed to Tokyo to infiltrate Saito’s mind, which is where we find them in Inception’s opening scenes.

And if the comic isn’t enough, fans have more options. Inception is getting a July 17 re-release (with a sneak peek of Tenet), taking over the planned release date for Nolan’s latest work, which Warner Bros. pushed back over COVID-19 concerns. Tenet is now scheduled to premiere July 31.

So while Nolan fans may have to wait a little bit longer for his next mind-bending work of science fiction, The Cobol Job may be a nice way to scratch that head-spinning itch. The book can be hard to come by online, considering it was released as part of a marketing campaign ten years ago and the site is no longer live, but nothing on the internet ever disappears and it can still be found in PDF form for any fans looking to seek it out. And for any true Nolan diehards wanting to check it out, there’s always the option of doing it Memento style and re-watching the movie before reading the prequel.

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