By Moebius & Jodorowsky (Humanoids)
ISBN: 978-1-59465-032-1 Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â 978-1594650420 (Yellow Edition)
Some of the world’s greatest comics exponents are cruelly neglected these days. It’s not because they are out of vogue or forgotten, it’s simply that so much of their greatest material lies temporarily out of print. This little gem is one of the few exceptions…
Born in Tocopilla, Chile in 1929, Alejandro Jodorowsky Prullansky is a filmmaker, playwright, actor, author, world traveller, philosopher, spiritual guru and comics writer.
The modern polymath is most widely known for such films as Fando y Lis, El Topo, The Holy Mountain, Sante Sangre, The Rainbow Thief, The Dance of Reality and others, plus a vast and influential comics output, including Anibal 5 (created whilst living in Mexico), Le Lama blanc, Aliot, The Meta-Barons, Borgia, Madwoman of the Sacred Heart and so many more, created with some of South America and Europe’s greatest artists.
His decade-long collaboration with Moebius on the Tarot-inspired adventure The Incal (1981-1989) completely redefined and reinvented what comics could aspire to and achieve.
Most widely regarded for his violently surreal avant-garde films, loaded with highly-charged, inspired imagery – blending mysticism and what he terms “religious provocation†– and his spiritually-informed fantasy and science fiction comics tales, Jodorowsky is also fascinated by humanity’s inner realms and has devised his own doctrine of therapeutic healing: Psychomagic, Psychogenealogy and Initiatic massage.
He still remains fully engaged and active in all these creative areas to this day.
He has never stopped creating and most of his lifelong themes and obsessions are seamlessly wedded together in this glorious re-release of his first comics collaboration with the creator most inextricably associated with him.
Jean Henri Gaston Giraud was born in the suburbs of Paris on May 8th 1938 and raised by his grandparents after his mother and father divorced in 1941.
In 1955, he attended the Institut des Arts Appliqués where he became friends with Jean-Claude Mézières who, at 17, was already selling strips and illustrations to magazines such as Coeurs Valliants, Fripounet et Marisette and Spirou. Giraud apparently spent most of his college time drawing cowboy comics and left after a year.
In 1956 he travelled to Mexico, staying with his mother for eight months, before returning to France and a full-time career drawing comics, mostly westerns such as Frank et Jeremie for Far West and King of the Buffalo, A Giant with the Hurons and others for Coeurs Valliants in a style based on French comics legend Joseph Gillain AKA “Jijéâ€.
Giraud spent his National Service in Algeria in 1959-1960, where he worked on military service magazine 5/5 Forces Françaises and on returning to civilian life became Jijé’s assistant in 1961, working on the master’s long-running (1954-1977) Western epic Jerry Spring.
A year later, Giraud and Belgian writer Jean-Michel Charlier launched the serial Fort Navajo in Pilote #210, and soon its disreputable, anti-hero lead character Lieutenant Blueberry became one of the most popular European strips of modern times. In 1963-1964, Giraud produced a number of strips for satire periodical Hara-Kiri and, keen to distinguish and separate the material from his serious day job, first coined his pen-name “Moebiusâ€.
He didn’t use it again until 1975 when he joined Bernard Farkas, Jean-Pierre Dionnet and Philippe Druillet – all inspired science fiction fans – as the founders of a revolution in narrative graphic arts created by “Les Humanoides Associesâ€. Their groundbreaking adult fantasy magazine Métal Hurlant utterly enraptured the comics-buying public and Giraud again wanted to utilise a discreet creative persona for the lyrical, experimental, soul-searching material he was increasingly driven to produce: series such as The Airtight Garage, The Incal and the mystical, dreamy flights of sheer fantasy contained in Arzach…
To further separate his creative twins, Giraud worked inks with a brush whilst the futurist Moebius rendered with pens…
After a truly stellar career which saw him become a household name, both Giraud and Moebius passed away in March 2012.
As explained in Jodorowsky’s Foreword, this magnificently macabre minimalist monument to imagination came about as brief tale in a free, promotional premium “Mistral Edition†of Métal Hurlant constituted their very first collaboration – outside the creative furnace that was the pre-production phase of the aborted movie Dune where they first met (also included in that imaginative dream-team was Dan O’Bannon, Douglas Trumbull, H.R. Giger and Chris Foss) and secrets of that time are also shared here).
Les Yeux du chat was realised between 1977 and 1979: a dark fable that is sheer beauty and pure nightmare, rendered in stark monochrome and florid expansive grey-tones. Text is spartan and understated: more poetic goad than descriptive excess or expositional in-filling.
There’s a city, a boy at a window, an eagle and a cat. When their lives intersect, shock and horror are the result…
Available in a number of formats since 2011, this is a visual masterpiece no connoisseur of comics can afford to miss.
© 2013 Humanoids, Inc. All rights reserved.