Europe
Alejandro Jodorowsky
Alejandro Jodorowsky · born 1929
- Classification
- Writer, film-maker, tarot reader. Chilean-French. The mystic who took over French science fiction comics.
- Habitat
- Les Humanoïdes Associés, from The Incal (1980) to the whole "Jodoverse" of spin-offs; before that, cinema
- Distinguishing marks
- Messiahs, cursed dynasties, spiritual awakenings through extreme physical suffering, and the tarot. Characters are born, mutilated and enlightened, often in that order
- Often seen with
- Moebius, Juan Giménez, Zoran Janjetov, François Boucq
- Conservation status
- Thriving. Humanoids keeps the Incal books and their spin-offs in print.
Field-guide card
Jodorowsky was born in Chile to Ukrainian-Jewish parents, worked in mime and theatre in Paris and Mexico, and became a cult film-maker with El Topo (1970) and The Holy Mountain (1973). In the mid-1970s he tried to film Dune, with Moebius, H.R. Giger and Chris Foss on designs and Pink Floyd on the soundtrack. The money ran out. So he took the ideas to comics, starting with The Incal, drawn by Moebius, and spent the next four decades building a whole universe of books around it.
You've seen his work in the 2013 documentary Jodorowsky's Dune, which argues, persuasively, that his unmade film influenced a good deal of the science fiction cinema that followed. His publisher sued the makers of The Fifth Element, claiming it borrowed from The Incal, and lost, which was not helped by the fact that Moebius had worked on the film.
The gateway drug is The Incal, where it all began. The deep end is The Metabarons, a family saga of such operatic cruelty that it makes Dune look like The Archers. The curio is The Technopriests, drawn by Zoran Janjetov, about a boy who wants to make video games in a galaxy run by an order of priests.
The Crowsnest verdict: the greatest science fiction film never made became some of the greatest science fiction comics ever made. Not a bad consolation prize.