Alexandro Jodorowsky

Alejandro Jodorowsky Prullansky was born on 17 February 1929 in Chile, and went on to become one of the most distinctive and restless creative minds working across film, theater, and comics. After dropping out of college, he threw himself into mime and clown work, eventually founding his own troupe, the Teatro Mímico, in 1947. He relocated to Paris in the early 1950s to study traditional mime under Étienne Decroux, and co-directed the silent film *Les têtes interverties* in 1957. Through the 1960s he divided his time between Paris and Mexico City, co-founding the Panic Movement, a surrealist performance collective known for violent and confrontational theatrical events.

His 1970 acid western *El Topo* made him a cult figure on the American midnight movie circuit — widely credited as the first film of that phenomenon — drawing admiration from John Lennon and funding for the follow-up *The Holy Mountain* (1973). *Santa Sangre* (1989) further cemented his reputation for viscerally surreal filmmaking.

In comics, Jodorowsky found an equally fertile home. Credited as writer on 164 issues across a career spanning 1981 to 2024, he is best known for the science fiction series *The Incal*, with related works including *The Metabarons* and *The Technopriests*. His spiritual philosophy of "psychomagic" and "psychoshamanism" threads through much of his creative output, making him a singular, hard-to-categorize figure whose influence extends well beyond any single medium.