"In MY Version, The Duke Leto... he is a castrato --- castrated.
[ from Bull-Fighting, having been gored by The Beast of The Labyrinth of The King Minos. ]
And Then --
HOW He Will Do, A Son?
And Then, His Wife...
a MARVELOUS Woman,
a WISE Woman...
and The Guy have A Love, A Cosmic Love when He see This Woman.
And how He will make A Child?
And she take a drop of His Blood...
and She CHANGE The Blood into Semen...
and then we see The Drop of Blood going inside The Vagina, The Uterus...
and we will follow The Blood...
The Blood coming and go inside The Ovum and explodes there.
She get pregnant with
A Drop of Blood.
That's What I Did.
What will have if You are NOT The Son of a Sexual Pleasure, but of A SPIRITUAL Pleasure?
And from This Spiritual Love,
He Will create PAUL.
Paul was A Young Boy...
but is not
A NORMAL Boy.
Was A Mutant.
With A Big Soul and Strength.
Where I will find That Boy....?
My Son.
El Topo :
"Today You are 7 Years Old --
Now You are A Man :
Bury Your First Toy
and Your Mother's Picture."
I work with him in El Topo,
now he have 12 year old.
I say, "You Will make Paul,
but You need to prepare as A Warrior."
Brontis Jodorowsky :
"So he said one day, we're going to make Dune, and you're going to play The Part of Paul, and....
You're Going to Have to Prepare."
I prepare My Son, to do The Role exactly as The Duke Leto prepare His Son.
Brontis Jodorowsky :
So here, he is going to have to learn Karate, and make acrobatics, and....
Your Mind has to develop, a LOT --
You know, he wanted me to
BE The Character.
I find A Teacher for Him.
I have A Very STRONG person...
Jean-Pierre Vignau.
Jean-Pierre :
"When We started, He was 12.
There I trained Him in Karate, Karate Jujitsu, Japanese style.
That's all the fist-foot techniques, joint locks, floor pins, standing pins,
a combination of Karate, Judo, Aikido and Atemi-Jitsu."
He learn How to Fight with :
His Hands; with Knife;
with Swords --
He learn ALL that.
And he was READY to do Paul
as A Real "Paul."
"I trained Brontis six hours a day, seven days a week for two years. "
Brontis Jodorowsky :
That was PAINFUL,
and Jean-Pierre, he has No Mercy.
No, really -- we worked to get ahead, no mercy.
And all the person say to me,
"But What You Did?
But WHY You are Trying
to Change The Mind of [A] Child and to make
A Superior Person?"
I say, "No, I was only awakening The Creativity."
I open His Mind.
That's What I Was Doing.
I don't know if I change His Life.....
NOW, I am Thinking,
"Why I DID That? Sacrifice My Son."
But in that time, I say, "If I Need to Cut My Arms [off] in order to make That Picture, I Will Cut My Arms -- I Will DO It.”
I was believing that to make A Picture, who will Give A Mutation to The Young Minds... was Sacred.
You NEED to Sacrifice Yourself.
I was even ready to die doing that.
“ Gerard Way, the lead singer of the band My Chemical Romance, was a very different kind of entertainer, a New Jersey art-punk rocker who’d been an intern at Vertigo back in the days of The Invisibles and a fan of my Doom Patrol run, although we’d never crossed paths.
In mid-2006, with Final Crisis on my mind, I caught the video for his band’s song “Welcome to the Black Parade,” a searing slice of punk psychedelia I was primed to like anyway. What really made me sit up were the outfits the band was wearing.
Dressed in black-and-white marching band uniforms as they led a procession of sexy walking dead through a bombed-out city, My Chemical Romance looked like a glamorous postmortem Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. They had fused the images of two opposites — the tough soldier and the frail emo kid — to create an image of what was to come. Nor was the sound morbid or dark; it was triumphal, chiming, imperial rock. The new psychedelia would learn to make friends with Darkness. It would come from the Goth and alternative frontiers of the last twenty years into the mainstream, laughing at cancer as it put a beat to the Dance of the Dead and began to have fun again, however dark that fun might seem to grown-ups.
That fall, I listened to The Black Parade over and over and over again, to inspire cosmic mortuary scenes for Final Crisis and Batman’s mental breakdown. MCR had shown me a picture of the new superhero, posttraumatic, postwar, the hero with nothing left to believe in. The supersoldier was home from the front, jumping every time a car backfired, staring at his hands.
Neil Gaiman put me in touch with Gerard, and we met in Glasgow before a gig, forming an instant connection. He led a new young generation of musicians who had grown up with superhero comics and had no qualms about saying so. He walked the walk too, with Umbrella Academy, his own award-winning re-creation of the superhero formula with artist Gabriel Ba. It was a kaleidoscopic tour de force. There was no shaky start, no cramming of balloons with words (a common tyro error), and none of the familiar missteps that dogged so many other celebrity-fan forays into the comics biz. Umbrella Academy was the end result of years of reading and thinking about superheroes and science fiction: Funny, scary, cerebral, arty, and violent all at the same time, it harvested all the fruits of Gerard’s own “iconography tree.” The heroes of Umbrella Academy were a group of outsider kids who grew up to be the world’s greatest superheroes. It was the story of his band. It was my story too. It was a premonition of where we were all headed.
These days, it’s no longer enough to be a star or even a superstar. Today even the most slender and ephemeral talents are routinely described as “legends.” There’s no need to slay ten-story sea beasts, endure complex and life-threatening quests or epic military campaigns: Simply release a couple of dodgy records or do some stand-up, and you too will be elevated to the ranks of the mythical King Arthur, heroic Lemminkainen, or mighty Odysseus. You too will become legend.
With our superlatives and honorifics devalued so that star, legend, and genius will suffice as descriptors for any old cod with half a good idea he stole from someone else, what lies next on the upward trajectory of human self-regard from star to superstar to legend?
Once upon a time, a star was an individual of exceptional sporting, musical, or acting talent.
Then it became every child who could grip a crayon and scrawl a daisy for Mother’s Day.
When we all became stars, stars became superstars to keep things straight, but they were swimming against the tide. In a time of Facebook and Twitter, where everyone has a fan page, when the concept of “genius” has been extended to include anyone who can produce a half-competent piece of art or writing, where is there left to go but all the way?
We may as well crown ourselves kings of creation. Why not become superheroes? Supergods, in fact. Isn’t it what we’ve always known we’d have to do in the end? Nobody was ever going to come from the sky to save us. No Justice League; Just Us League.
Back in 1940, Ma Hunkel, the Red Tornado, was the first attempt to depict a “real-life” superhero in comics. Not a spaceman from Krypton, not a billionaire playboy with a grudge, Ma had no powers except for her formidable washerwoman build. She wore a homemade costume to dish out local justice in the stairwells and alleyways of the Lower East Side in some aboriginal memory of the early DC universe.
She was joined by characters like Wildcat, the Black Canary, the Mighty Atom, the Sandman, and other tough but good-hearted vigilante crime fighters who took to the mean streets in nothing but their underwear. They had no special powers, just fists, and an attitude — at best, a gun that shot darts or gas or bees.
Seventy years after Ma Hunkel, sixteen-year-old Dave Lizewski, the hero of Mark Millar and John Romita Jr.’s Kick-Ass, asked the question “WHY DOES EVERYONE WANT TO BE PARIS HILTON BUT NOBODY WANTS TO BE A SUPERHERO?” Leaving aside the cynical response that nobody in their right minds wanted to be Paris Hilton, Dave’s question had already been answered by a handful of brave souls, real people in the real world who dress up in capes and masks to patrol the streets and keep people safe. You can read all about them online if you type “real world superheroes” into a search engine. They even have their own registry, like Civil War veterans who fought on Iron Man’s side.
The TV and film hopefuls, the half-baked actors, are easy to spot. But to the others, fierce behind homemade masks and hoods and helmets, the superhero’s calling is as important as religion, or at least as important as the youth cult demographic you conformed to at school. They are The Future.
