Some seven years after it was first published in France, the concluding volume of The Metabarons -- cult filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky’s brilliantly insane graphic novel series -- is finally getting an English language release next week.  This is something of a big deal for Jodorowsky fans like me who have a poor grasp of French and rely too heavily on Babel Fish.

Here’s a substantially revised and updated version of an article I wrote some years ago about Jodorowsky’s life and work. I’ve embedded some video clips from Jodorowsky’s films ‘El Topo’, ‘The Holy Mountain’ and ‘Santa Sangre’.  If you’re unfamiliar with his films ‘El Topo’, ‘The Holy Mountain’ and ‘Santa Sangre’, then it’s worth pointing out that they are -- as they say -  NSFW (or ‘Not Suitable For Work’) and leave it at that.

These days a visit to the cinema is not complete without someone tripping over a cape.  From superheroes like Iron Man and Kick-Ass to less obvious adaptations like The Losers and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, films based on comic books have been cluttering up the multiplexes at an exponential rate.  As A-list actors and respected filmmakers now embrace this once despised sub-genre, this growing trend has given rise to another:  high profile creators from the glamorous world of film, TV and literature are queuing up to become comic book writers.

Britain’s chat show king Jonathan Ross is only the most recent addition to an illustrious list that includes the novelists Michael Chabon and Ian Rankin, slacker bard Kevin Smith and Joss (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) Whedon.  In Europe, however, this particular media migration path is nothing new.  For decades now, one of the hottest names on the sophisticated French comics scene has been an eightysomething Chilean who also happens to be one of the most outspoken and notorious film-makers in the history of cinema.

Alejandro Jodorowsky -- writer of the critically acclaimed comic series The Metabarons -- has carved out a unique career for himself as the creator of cult, controversial movies and crazed, uncompromising, visually stunning comics. While his Anglophone counterparts are – for the most part, at least -- content with rejuvenating the superhero genre by breathing new life into a bunch of middle-aged DayGlo demigods, Jodorowsky has created a complex fictional universe of interconnected characters, concepts and stories that are uniquely his own.  Fans call it “The Jodoverse” and, in the words of acclaimed comics scribe Warren Ellis, it’s “astonishingly beautiful and totally mad.”

For the uninitiated, The Metabarons is a science-fiction saga that chronicles the rise of the galaxy’s most formidable warrior clan from their humble beginnings as stonecutters on a marble planet.  Try to imagine an interstellar Forsyte Saga with nukes and mutilation -- or One Hundred Years of Solitude set 30,000 years in the future – and even then you’ll still be woefully unprepared for its scope, originality, audacity and relentless insanity.

Published by French comics publishing house Les Humanoïdes Associés -- and featuring sumptuous painted art by the veteran Argentinean illustrator Juan Giminez -- The Metabarons is a multi-generational cosmic epic of heroism, sacrifice, blood and honour that’s brutally violent, emotionally-charged and loaded with symbolism.  In other words, it’s a thoroughly operatic space opera and there’s nothing quite like it in any medium.

In the decade since it made its English language debut, The Metabarons has attracted rave reviews and a word-of-mouth buzz that continues to entice new readers and inflate the cost of its increasingly rare early volumes.  With The Metabarons you never know what demented notion, wild concept or surreal image Jodorowsky and Giminez will smack you over the eyes with next.  It might be a huge fleet of alien vessels hidden within a fake planet, a coven of scheming witches who travel through space on a giant fish or a floating boy who mutilates his feet so he can earn the respect of his warrior dad.  To quote Ellis again, “There is literally a new and mad idea on every page.”

Jodorowsky, it must be said, is no stranger to buggier-than-batshit craziness. He made his name directing cult, avant garde movies like El Topo, The Holy Mountain and Santa Sangre - three of the undisputed Goddamn weirdest films in the history of cinema -- and once claimed that “most directors make films with their eyes; I make films with my testicles.”  Is it any wonder, then, that his comics are so deliriously nuts?

His fiery, feverish imagination permeates and saturates The Metabarons and the rest of his Jodoverse and, unlike the work of most other media migrants, his comics -- with their combination of visceral imagery and esoteric depth -- are thematically inseparable from his movies. Both are the culmination of a lifetime of artistic experimentation, reflecting his passionate obsession with self-transformation, mysticism, religion and violence.

To put it another way, his comics are a continuation of the same artistic alchemy by different means.

‘El Topo’ trailer:

Few comic creators have entered the field via a route quite as colourful and circuitous as that of Jodorowsky. Born in Chile in 1929, he left his home country at the age of 24 with a troupe of travelling puppeteers, eventually settling in Paris.  There he collaborated with the legendary mime artist Marcel Marceau, wrote stage plays for the actor Maurice Chevalier and introduced composer Michel Legrand to Parisian audiences. In Paris Jodorowsky met a group of artists who shared his interest in Modern Art, Eastern mysticism and the occult and together they formed the guerilla art movement The Theatre of Panic.  Seeing themselves as natural heirs to the Surrealists, they embraced many of the things their heroes rejected, including science fiction, rock music and -- quite tellingly -- comic books.

During the 1960s Jodorowsky moved to Mexico, directed stage plays and created a weekly comic strip called Fabulas Panicas for one of country’s leading newspapers. His comics career had to be put on hold, however, once he became involved with the fledgling “Mexperimental Cinema” scene. His first film, 1967s Fando Y Lis, almost resulted in him getting lynched by an outraged crowd for its perceived attack on traditional values. He followed it up with El Topo [1970], a mystical, allegorical, dreamlike Western (or, more accurately, “Eastern”) which made his name internationally. A stylish head-on collision between the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone and the Surrealist cinema of Luis Bunuel -- a ‘Fistful of Dalis’, if you will – El Topo is a brutal film brimming with violent sexual imagery, Taoist philosophy and some of the most blatant phallic symbolism you’re ever likely to see. Upon its release in the US the following year it quickly gained a cult following on the midnight movie circuit and made a fan out of John Lennon, who convinced his notorious manager, Allen Klein, to produce Jodorowsky’s next film, The Holy Mountain [1974].

‘The Holy Mountain’:  One Froggy Conquest

These films contained many of the themes, tropes and obsessions that would later permeate The Metabarons and the other Jodoverse titles.  The spiritual quest, transcendence through pain and personal transformation – leitmotifs that dominates all three films -- would be further explored in his comics, particularly in his groundbreaking series The Incal.  The highly idiosyncratic symbolic language of his films would also spill over into his comics work.  In El Topo, for instance, the hero has to prove himself by killing four master gunslingers, while in The Incal protagonist John DiFool has to confront his four conflicting spiritual elements:  on both occasions, these hostile quartets represent obstacles to the evolution of man.   His 1989 film Santa Sangre, in which the youthful protagonist’s cruel father forces his son to have a bird-shaped tattoo carved on his chest, has a direct parallel in The Metabarons, in which each new generation undergoes a ‘mutilation initiation’ and inherits a bird-shaped birthmark.

‘Santa Sangre’ trailer:

While this illustrates the weird connective tissue of themes and symbols that link Jodorowsky’s films with his comics, it doesn’t explain how The Metabarons and the rest of the Jodoverse came into being.  To do that, we must turn to one of the most influential science-fiction films that was never made.

Jodorowsky’s Dune is one of those legendary unmade films -- like Orson Welles’ Don Quixote or Terry Gilliam’s Watchmen – that cinephiles will speculate about in hushed, reverential tones for years to come. Based (albeit fairly loosely) on the classic science fiction novel by Frank Herbert, the film was going to be a colossal project.  Pink Floyd, at the peak of their creativity, agreed to score the soundtrack while a bizarre cast was assembled that included Salvador Dali, Gloria Swanson and the aforementioned Welles. Jodorowsky also gathered about him an unprecedented cadre of artists to help bring the story to life; the late Dan O’Bannon was hired as special effects supervisor while Swiss artist H.R. Giger, British fantasy illustrator Christopher Foss and French comics legend Jean “Moebius” Giraud designed characters, environments and storyboards for the film.

According to Jodorowsky, he and Moebius formed an instant bond while working on the film; “We worked eight hours a day on that film, for months and months.  We were both in total resonance with each other.  Moebius drew so fast that it was just incredible. His pen almost miraculously created all the travellings, the panning shots, the zooms I wanted. Through three thousand plus drawings he did for Dune, I could feel just as if I had actually shot the picture.  Anyone looking at his work would feel that they had experienced the film as fully as if they had seen it on a screen in a theatre.”

Which was just as well, for after two years of preproduction the film’s financial backers withdrew their support and the project was abandoned.  The significance of Jodorowsky’s Dune, however, was in its failure: it served as a major creative catalyst for his cadre of artists. O’Bannon, Moebius and Giger subsequently collaborated with Ridley Scott to create the classic movie Alien, and Jodorowsky and Moebius started making comics.

Jodorowsky’s Dune (from ‘La Constellation Jodorowsky’ documentary film):

The cult horror story The Eyes of The Cat was their first comics collaboration -- a fine work in its own right, but ultimately overshadowed by the magnum opus that was to follow. Conceived by Jodorowsky in a dream, and originally released in English by Marvel’s Epic imprint in the late 1980s, The Incal contained many of his more idiosyncratic story concepts from the Dune movie.  It also formed the source text for all subsequent forays into the Jodoverse by providing a thematic template and introducing comics fans to characters like The Metabaron.

The Incal tells the story of John DiFool – a grubby Private Eye living in a nightmare subterranean dystopia some 30,000 years in the future -- who finds himself the reluctant protagonist in a surreal sci-fi yarn of breathtaking cosmic proportions. At the heart of the story is the quintessential Jodotheme of transformation; DiFool, according to Jodorowsky, “never stops changing. He metamorphoses, progresses, sometimes regresses.” The series, in fact, gathered together all the elements that characterised his movies and fascinated him throughout his life -- the spiritual quest, violent transcendence, sexual and esoteric symbolism -- then cranked them up to a cosmic scale in a beautiful synthesis of word and image.

The Incal continues to inspire many of today’s top creators – Kick-Ass co-creator Mark Millar calls it “one of most perfect comics ever conceived” -- and it was successful enough to spawn a prequel, a pair of sequels and numerous spin-offs including, of course, The Metabarons.

As movies based on comic books continue to clutter up the multiplexes, it may seem ironic that a new Jodorowsky film won’t be appearing at your local cinema anytime soon.  The film industry, of course, is all about compromise – that eternal balance between art and commerce – and Jodorowsky is a notoriously uncompromising artist.  His last film – 1990s The Rainbow Thief -- was beset with interfering producers, and subsequent attempts to get financial backing for a sequel to El Topo and a “metaphysical western” called King Shot have so far been unsuccessful.

There is, however, a place you can still go to immerse yourself in his fevered imagination.  It’s a place that’s unfettered by budgetary constraints, interfering producers and the competing egos of actors.  It contains high octane set-pieces that make the average Hollywood action extravaganza look as pacy as a PowerPoint presentation and eye-popping alien vistas that make Avatar’s Planet Pandora look as awe-inspiring as a business park in Crawley.  There you’ll witness high drama, staggering originality and regular bouts of relentless insanity.

It’s a comic book and it’s called The Metabarons.

This is an updated and revised version of an article that was previously published in comics magazine Borderline in 2002.

The final volume of The Metabarons is published by Humanoids.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 13th, 2010 at 1:33 am and is filed under Comics, Films. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.