Son of the Gun is the demented tale of a baby with a tail who is dumped in a bin, suckled on a pistol by a transvestite dwarf prostitute and then grows up to be a cartel hit-man, all round Oedipal monster and finally crypto-saint who brings rain to his people via his self-crucifixion. My own tastes however tend towards Jodorowsky’s non-SF work, and there are three series in particular that provide me with endless delight. The Incal spawned a horde of spin-offs, the most successful of which is The Metabarons, a saga about a cosmic warrior clan, an early member of which gets castrated early on. As he once put it: ‘’I am asking for more, I am asking more…” More, the possibility of such a narrative disaster is evident early on – part of the thrill even, for creatively Jodorowsky is completely uninhibited and reckless. You won’t be surprised to hear that the narrative spirals completely out of control at the end before crash landing in a swamp of impenetrable, New Age blather.įortunately the brilliance of Jodorowsky’s imagination and the fantastic line art by Moebius overwhelm the magic crystal ending. Toss in a berserk overload of sex and violence, dissolving bodies, symbols, archetypes, metaphysics and a heavy influence from the tarot and you may have a vague inkling of what goes on in The Incal. It begins as a profane collision of hardboiled SF noir and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, before mutating into a cosmic quest/spiritual voyage as the reluctant hero John DiFool ventures across the universe copulating with aliens, doing battle with “technopopes”, persuading the entire universe to take a nice nap, and finally meeting a godlike being called ORH.

Long before I saw any Jodorowsky movies I read The Incal. Working with Moebius he started pouring concepts from the aborted film into a six-volume, 10-years-in-the-making SF- metaphysical saga called The Incal. Jodorowsky got into comics following the collapse of his Dune movie adaptation, which was to feature the talents of French comics artist Jean “Moebius” Giraud, Alien designer HR Giger, Pink Floyd, Salvador Dali and many others.

Los Borgia by Alejandro Jodorowsky