Technopriests, volume 1: Initiation.

Alejandro Jodorowsky is a madman. You may never have heard of him, but he is rather, erm, infamous we shall say, for his bizarre films such as El Topo and the Holy Mountain. I have seen both and they are quite…unique, to say the least. The movies are rife with weird dialogue, filled with symbolism, a bizarre sense of humor, and things that are not for the squeamish.

Imagine my surprise then, when I find out that Jodorowsky left filmmaking to enter the comic book industry as a writer. Whereas film is a rather limited medium, you can do pretty much anything in comics, and Jodorowsky is more than aware of this. Technopriests is merely one of many comics series that the man has written, but this first volume of it is the first I’ve ever seen of anything he’s done and I could not resist it. And, as I was expecting, it was certainly quite weird. Weirder than his movies, actually.

Technopriests is about the life of Albino, an old, um, albino, Technopriest who is recording his life’s story as he travels through space to start a new, utopian society. This first volume details his life up until his teenage years, and all the weird trials and tribulations he went through. It’s pure, unfiltered, mad science fiction, and nearly every page has something new and wholly bizarre to look at, regardless of whether it’s very important to the plot or just some grotesque creature standing in the background. It’s a testament to Jodorowsky’s imagination, the things he comes up with, and credit must go to the two artists Zoran Janjetov and Fred Baltran for actually being able to successfully illustrate whatever Jodorowsky told them to. Every panel of the comic is rich with detail, and Beltran’s computer coloring and effects are exquisitely done. It looks very much like something out of a crazy issue of Heavy Metal Magazine, which really isn’t too far from the truth I’d imagine.

The story is sort of a bizarre epic, like a sci fi comic version of the Odyssey or some such, with Albino being the middle of three children, the other two being his older, grey-skinned brother Almagro and his younger, red-skinned, four-armed sister Onyx. Their mother was a virgin destined to become the oracle of a temple on the Sacred Asteroid, until a space pirate named Ulritch the Red and his gang of pirates showed up, destroyed the place, and raped her. So each kid is from a different father, despite all being born around the same time. No, science does NOT work that way, but it makes for one hell of an interesting mythology, does it not?

And trust me, it just gets weirder and more interesting from there. Albino travels from one school to the next, meeting all sorts of weird people in his quest to become the greatest Technopriest ever, and he also goes back and talks about what was happening to his mother and siblings around the same time. The dialogue and narration are far from realistic, written in a kind of heavy-handed and very dramatic style just like an old myth would be written, and there are some great, bizarre lines such as “please Tinigrifi, lift me out of this Plasma Labyrinth! I just want to get to the beacon that signals octagonal reality!” That one’s my favorite, yes.



My one real complaint about the book is the lettering. The word bubbles are boxes, with the font sometimes being VERY small, and it can be kind of hard to tell who is saying what. It’s rather obvious that they weren’t made with the same care as the art and writing themselves, but I wonder if it’s because of the fact that it’s translated from another language (I have no idea which language that would be, Jodorowsky is multi-lingual after all, but at a guess I’d say perhaps French) or something else.

That one complaint aside, I highly recommend Technopriests if you’re into strange, dramatic science fiction comics. I got lucky in finding this volume, you can check out some random pages from different volumes on Scans Daily, and Amazon brings up a few books, but it seems the best bet would be on Humanoid Publishing’s website.

[Brett]