Review by Win Wiacek

Many of the world’s greatest comics exponents are cruelly neglected these days. It’s not because they are out of vogue or forgotten, it’s simply that so much of their greatest material lies out of print. This little gem is one of them

Chilean filmmaker, playwright, actor, author, world traveller, and philosopher Alejandro Jodorowsky is most widely regarded for his violently surreal avant-garde films, but he also writes comics. For Eyes of the Cat he teams with Jean Giraud under his Moebius alias. To separate his creative twins, Giraud works inks with a brush whilst the futurist Moebius rendered with pens.

As explained in Jodorowsky’s foreword, this magnificently macabre minimalist monument to imagination came about as brief tale in a free, promotional premium of Métal Hurlant. It was their very first collaboration – outside the creative furnace that was the pre-production phase of doomed and aborted movie Dune, where they first met.

Les Yeux du chat was realised between 1977 and 1979. It’s a dark fable that is sheer beauty and pure nightmare rendered in stark monochrome and florid expansive grey-tones. Text is spartan and understated: more poetic goad than descriptive excess or expositional in-filling.

There’s a city, a boy at a window, an eagle and a cat. When their lives intersect, shock and horror are the inescapable result. Humanoids first issued a standard black and white volume, then a couple of years later reissued The Eyes of the Cat on yellow pages. In any format this is a visual masterpiece no connoisseur of comics can afford to miss.