Tag Archives for Alexandro Jodorowsky

"Fabulas Panicas (Panic Fables)": comics written and drawn by Alexandro Jodorowsky ('67-'68)

fabulaspanicas01g

On his return to Mexico in the late-’60s, Jodorowsky started writing and drawing a subversive weekly comic strip (”Panic 
Fables”) in the right-wing newspaper The Herald.

“For four or five years every Sunday I drew a comics page, a complete story,” he told me in 2003. “But it was very basic. When I saw [cartoonist and future Jodorowsky collaborator] Moebius making the drawings, I stopped. And I never make any more.”

Here are some sample pages via http://fabulaspanicas.blogspot.com/—go there to see larger jpgs…

fabula1

fabula5

fabula8

fabula11

fabula19

fabula26

fabula38

fabula52

"In the center of the horror, 
of the civilization, there is the happiness to be alive." —Jodorowsky (1999)

alejandro_jodorowsky

“YOUR BRAIN IS A CRAZY GUY”
Visionary Poly-Artist ALEXANDRO JODOROWSKY talks with Jay Babcock about 
psychomagic, shamanism, video games and Marilyn Manson—as well as his 
spirit-bending films and comics.

originally published in Mean Magazine #6 (Dec ’99-Jan ’00)

A man holds all the universe within him; and art is his view of it. But in 
the work of some artists spiral  vast galaxies of meaning and imagination 
that dwarf by many magnitudes the plebian earthbound work of others. 
Seventy-year-old Alexandro Jodorowsky—post-Surrealist filmmaker, author, 
puppeteer, Tarot expert, post-Jungian psychological theorist, playwright, 
novelist—is one such artist.

Screen Jodorowsky’s El Topo or The Holy Mountain, read The Incal or Metabarons comics, or listen to one of his interviews or lectures, and you 
encounter a one-man spiritual multiculture at play: the anthropological 
erudition and enthusiasm of Joseph Campbell roughhousing with an outrageous 
artistic sensibility that begins at Bunuel, Beckett and Breton and ends in 
some psychedelic sci-fi super-space: the kind of man who can screenwrite 
”He lifts up the robe and draws a pistol” and then comment Talmud-style in 
the margins, “I don’t know if he draws it from a gunbelt or from his 
unconscious.”

Unfortunately, for all but the most clued-in and hooked up in the 
English-sqawking world, most of Jodorowsky’s artistic and philosophical 
output of the last 30 years has been tantalizingly unavailable: films have 
gone unissued on video, comics and other written work have gone 
untranslated or dropped out of print. But, finally, at the turn of the 
century, the situation is changing.

Jodorowsky’s “lost” 1967 film Fando & Lis has been reissued on DVD by San 
Francisco-based Fantoma Films (who have generously included a director’s 
commentary track by Jodorowsky and the excellent, full-length ’95 French 
documentary La Constellation Jodorowsky), The Holy Mountain has been released for the first time (legally) on video, and, perhaps most 
significantly, the U.S. branch of Humanoides Associes has begun an 
ambitious program of printing English-language editions of Jodorowsky’s 
prodigious graphic novel output.
So the time seemed right to give the endlessly aphoristic, giddily 
profound Mr. Jodorowsky the kind of forum in American publications he 
enjoyed in the early ’70s when El Topo and The Holy Mountain were consecutive 
midnight movie successes and the Chilean-born director was regarded by many 
surviving counter-culture types (John Lennon, Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper 
among them) and journalists as The Guy Who Just May Have the Answer.

We 
rang Alexandro in Paris at midnight recently to find out what he’s up to, 
what he’s thinking and get him to reflect a bit on his long and storied 
career, even if he once said, “As soon as I define myself, I am dead.”

That said, let us attempt a synopsis for the new initiates.

Continue reading →

Forthcoming from Starfire: two previously unpublished grimoires by Austin Osman Spare

Wikipedia: Austin Osman Spare

Just spotted this announcement in the “Forthcoming” section in the Autumn/Winter 2009 catalog from Starfire Publishing (available as a PDF from here):

Two Grimoires by Austin Osman Spare — set for publication in Spring/Summer 2010

The early years of the 20th Century were a time of great creative ferment for Spare, and amongst the items which survive from these early years are two intriguing and sumptuous grimoires, each of which is a notebook consisting of fine pen and ink and watercolour drawings. These notebooks were unfortunately not completed by
Spare. There are a number of full-page and half-page paintings and drawings; other pages have embellishments, with spaces for text which clearly was to have been inserted later. From the addition of his bookplate, it is clear that both notebooks were at one time the property of Spare’s patron Pickford Waller.

AmenAOS

The first of these grimoires, entitled The Focus of Life & The Papyrus of Amen-AOS, is dated 1905-6. Much of the lettering remains in pencil, some of it giving clues to the underlying meaning of the imagery. An important element of this grimoire is that it features an early form of the ‘exteriorisation of sensation’ which Spare subsequently developed into the Sacred Alphabet which is a feature of The Book of Pleasure.

AOSRampant

The second, slightly later notebook is The Arcana of AOS & the Consciousness of Kia-Ra, dated 1906. This is in some ways the more finished of the two notebooks, and picks up some of the imagery from the earlier notebook as well as integrating some new elements.

These two grimoires by Spare are at once enigmatic and full of haunting beauty. The paintings and drawings from each notebook are here reproduced in full colour. With analytical essays by Michael Staley, Stephen Pochin and William Wallace, and an introduction by Robert Ansell, this publication adds to our understanding of Spare’s early years as an artist, mystic and philosopher, and sheds light on the early development of his sigilisation techniques.