When we received an advance copy of The Fireboy of Tocopilla from the printer a few days ago, I felt something probably close to what the Humanoids team must have felt in March 1978, when the first copies of the original French edition of The Eyes of the Cat arrived. The work was singular, the object itself surprising because of its very limitations, and the whole thing absolutely fascinating.
That is exactly how I still feel when I hold this strange little book in my hands. Even some of its manufacturing imperfections contribute to its very particular personality.
Consider this: the entire edition consists of just 600 copies: 199 copies signed by Alejandro Jodorowsky and Gabriel Rodríguez and individually numbered, 29 signed hors commerce copies, and 372 standard copies. At that scale, parts of the production process were actually done by hand.
When the box from the printer arrived, containing advance copies of a few projects, we were, as always, excited. But Caroline, a designer in our Los Angeles office, was so anxious about this particular book that she couldn’t bear it and literally fled the room. The reason is that the brevity of the story, just 20 pages of sequential art, had pushed us toward some fairly bold technical and creative choices. How the book would look as a finished object had become an almost unbearable suspense.
It started with the decision to use the same format as the original edition of The Eyes of the Cat (6.30 × 8.94 inches / 16 × 22.7 cm), but it went well beyond that. Among other things, we decided to use 5 mm board for the hardcover.
That particular choice appears to have caused an unintended defect, which I now see as a strange coincidence. Our hardcover books are usually made with 3 mm greyboard, and quite late in the process we decided to go bolder and move to 5 mm, so that the book would feel more compact, almost like a block. But the printer missed the updated file for the dust jacket, and the image on the cover ended up being off by about 4 mm.
We were all upset until we realized that a remarkably similar error had happened with The Eyes of the Cat forty-eight years ago.
I haven’t shown the book to Alejandro yet, but I will in a few days, when I travel to Paris. I bet he will tell me that this is an example of synchronicity that good old Carl Jung would recognize.
This book exists because, somewhere along the way, it seemed almost inevitable that the greatest Chilean creator, who also happened to have written comic books, would one day work on a project with Chile’s greatest living comics artist. And because our beloved backers supported the idea through a Kickstarter campaign.
This very personal story by Jodorowsky has its roots in his childhood in Tocopilla, Chile, and Gabriel Rodríguez found the right tone, narratively and visually, to give it the treatment that makes it so unique. The pages use a yellow background reminiscent of The Eyes of the Cat, enhanced with white highlights defined by that same Caroline.
The story doesn’t say whether she finally had the guts to look at the result. She should have. As I wrote above, even some of its manufacturing imperfections contribute to its very particular personality.
Two singular books, published 48 years apart.