About the Author

Alejandro Jodorowsky Prullansky (Spanish: [xoðo'?ofski]; born 17 February 1929) is a Chilean and French avant-garde filmmaker. Best known for his films El Topo (1970), The Holy Mountain (1973) and Santa Sangre (1989), Jodorowsky has been "venerated by cult cinema enthusiasts" for his work which "is filled with violently surreal images and a hybrid blend of mysticism and religious provocation".[1]

Born to Jewish-Ukrainian parents in Chile, Jodorowsky experienced an unhappy and alienated childhood, and so immersed himself in reading and writing poetry. Dropping out of college, he became involved in theater and in particular mime, working as a clown before founding his own theater troupe, the Teatro Mimico, in 1947. Moving to Paris in the early 1950s, Jodorowsky studied traditional mime under Étienne Decroux, and put his miming skills to use in the silent film Les têtes interverties (1957), directed with Saul Gilbert and Ruth Michelly. From 1960 onwards he divided his time between Mexico City and Paris, where he co-founded Panic Movement, a surrealist performance art collective that staged violent and shocking theatrical events. In 1966 he created his first comic strip, Anibal 5, and in 1967 he directed his first feature film, the surrealist Fando y Lis, which caused a huge scandal in Mexico, eventually being banned.

His next film, the acid western El Topo (1970), became a hit on the midnight movie circuit in the United States, considered the first-ever midnight cult film, and garnered high praise from John Lennon, who convinced former Beatles manager Allen Klein to provide Jodorowsky with $1 million to finance his next film. The result was The Holy Mountain (1973), a surrealist exploration of western esotericism. Disagreements with Klein, however, led to both The Holy Mountain and El Topo failing to gain widespread distribution, although both became classics on the underground film circuit.[1] After a cancelled attempt at filming Frank Herbert's 1965 science fiction novel Dune, Jodorowsky produced five more films: the family film Tusk (1980); the surrealist horror Santa Sangre (1989); the failed blockbuster The Rainbow Thief (1990); and the first two films in a planned five-film autobiographical series The Dance of Reality (2013) and Endless Poetry (2016).

Jodorowsky is also a comic book writer, most notably penning the science fiction series The Incal throughout the 1980s, which has been described as having a claim to be "the best comic book" ever written.[2] Other comic books he has written include The Technopriests and Metabarons. Jodorowsky has also extensively written and lectured about his own spiritual system, which he calls "psychomagic" and "psychoshamanism", which borrows from alchemy, the tarot, Zen Buddhism and shamanism.[3] His son Cristóbal has followed his teachings on psychoshamanism; this work is captured in the feature documentary Quantum Men, directed by Carlos Serrano Azcona.[4]

Born in 1956, Julio Martínez Pérez is a Spanish comic artist who works under the pen name Das Pastoras. He published his first professional work in a special 1983 issue of El Víbora and co-founded the fanzine Zero, which published other renowned artists of his generation. In 2007 he was hired to draw Castaka, a new cycle of Alexandro Jodorowsky's Metabarons saga. In addition to the French market, Das Pastoras has been working for US comic books since the late 2000s.

Travis Charest was born in Leduc, a small town in the Canadian province of Alberta. He discovered his first comic book at his grandmother’s house, which inspired him to start drawing. He submitted his work to DC Comics, and based on his early work for them was asked by Jim Lee to come to California and join the Wildstorm Studios, for whom he drew the Wild CATS revamp. He eventually travelled to Paris to collaborate on a one-off graphic novel taking place within the famed universe of The Metabarons, created by Alejandro Jodorowsky. The project also involved Before The Incal and The Technopriests artist Zoran Janjetov and would come to be known as Weapons of the Metabaron. By 2007, Charest had settled in California and developed his own webcomic, Spacegirl, of which a collected book version was self-published in 2008.

Zoran Janjetov is among the most prominent comics creators of former Yugoslavia and has been published worldwide. He is best known as the illustrator of "Before The Incal," also written by Alexandro Jodorowsky.

Jean Henri Gaston Giraud (French: [?i?o]; 8 May 1938 – 10 March 2012) was a French artist, cartoonist, and writer who worked in the Franco-Belgian bandes dessinées (BD) tradition. Giraud garnered worldwide acclaim predominantly under the pseudonym Mœbius (/'mo?bi?s/;[1] French: [møbjys]) for his fantasy/science-fiction work, and to a slightly lesser extent as Gir (French: [?i?]), which he used for the Blueberry series and his other Western-themed work. Esteemed by Federico Fellini, Stan Lee, and Hayao Miyazaki, among others,[2] he has been described as the most influential bande dessinée artist after Hergé.[3]

His most famous body of work as Gir concerns the Blueberry series, created with writer Jean-Michel Charlier, featuring one of the first antiheroes in Western comics, and which is particularly valued in continental Europe. As Mœbius, he achieved worldwide renown (in this case in the English-speaking nations and Japan, as well – where his work as Gir had not done well), by creating a wide range of science-fiction and fantasy comics in a highly imaginative, surreal, almost abstract style. These works include Arzach and the Airtight Garage of Jerry Cornelius. He also collaborated with avant garde filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky for an unproduced adaptation of Dune and the comic-book series The Incal.

Mœbius also contributed storyboards and concept designs to numerous science-fiction and fantasy films, such as Alien, Tron, The Fifth Element, and The Abyss. Blueberry was adapted for the screen in 2004 by French director Jan Kounen

Ladrönn grew up drawing and inking in Mexico while idolizing artists such as Mœbius. Ladronn has drawn for Marvel, DC, and several independent publishing houses. He won an Eisner Award for his work on Hip Flask back in 2006.