Review by Ian Keogh

This sixth hefty hardcover collecting Alejandro Jodorowsky’s comics supplies two stories presenting his more whimsical side, yet they’re very different, and each is drawn by one of his two most frequent artistic collaborators.

First up is the three volumes of Madwoman of the Sacred Heart, which is credited to Moebius and produced during the 1990s, but the drawing style more resembles the disciplined storytelling produced as Jean Giraud in the 1960s and early 1970s. Despite a succession of incredible occurrences, that some might call miracles, the story is rooted in reality supplied via fully defined and populated locations and very distinctive looking people. It’s great art until the final volume when it becomes extraordinarily cramped, as if Moebius was running short of paper, so had to cram the entire story into his remaining stock.

Faith is central to Alan Mangel, who’s a respected professor of philosophy, an elusive man prone to quoting philosophical statements in conversation, so smug and aloof, but his life begins to disintegrate with astonishing rapidity. Two separate women are convinced he’s fathered a prophet and the new messiah respectively, and his life turns upside down as he accompanies them and another companion, all the time applying rationality to the inexplicable. It’s very funny in places, not as funny in others, and runs out of steam by the third volume, while the sexual scenes may transmit as fantasy rather than any realistic depiction of women.

Rather than being a traditional comics collaboration, Twisted Tales combines wildly imaginative text stories, some as short as two lines, with a series of magnificent illustrations from François Boucq. There’s no context about whether Boucq’s art inspired Jodorowsky’s stories or vice versa, but the results are comically harmonious, and what makes it so successful is Boucq’s impeccable compositions convincing the illustrations are based on some sort of reality.

For his part, Jodorowsky is mercurial, covering a whole range of emotions and allusions in the very brief stories. They’re all creative, and all a joy to read, a proper literary chocolate box. Lack of insight is a common theme, with lack of sight occurring enough to also merit mention.

Also supplied is ‘The Debt’, drawn by Carlos Meglia and previously found in Screaming Planet, a collection of Jodorowksy’s short SF stories. The inclusion is puzzling as there’s little humour about a bleak settling of one debt while incurring another, and while Meglia’s art is imaginative, it’s also stylistically a poor fit with Boucq and Moebius.

Jodorowsky is always an interesting creator who’s intelligence and imagination conceives unique scenarios, but unless you’re determined to have a series of these hardcovers, that’s best represented in Twisted Tales alone.