Useless Fact of the day: Larry Wachowski, of the Wachowski brothers, was one of the writers on Epic Comics’ anthology series Clive Barker’s Hellraiser.

Hellraiser was originally a movie, and I had heard of it, and of Barker, for the first time in the letter pages of Swamp Thing. ( This is one reason why I prefer the original comics to the collected editions. The kind of information and references the Letter-column provides is stupendous. I also liked the goofy responses of some of the editors, especially in The Hell You Say, which was the letters-page for DC’s Demon and the earlier Blue Devil ) Karen Berger was the editor of Swamp Thing then, and she was saying something about herself and Steve Bissette ( the artist ) going to see a show of Hellraiser, and herself being horrified by the goriness of the enterprise, and Bissette cackling merrily beside her.

Interesting, I thought back then. I was in that stage of life when the mind demands to be scared, and is not numbed by everyday realities to the extent that fictional horror fails to affect it. So I was on the lookout for names like Stephen King, Anne Rice and now Clive Barker. Guwahati (as I keep reiterating in my posts) was a good place to find Hardy Boys books and second-hand Tarzan novels and tonnes of Sidney Sheldon. But Clive Barker was tough to come by. Anything remotely horrorific was tough to come by, for that matter. I tried looking for The Exorcist at a local video store at about that time, and the store-guy gave me something that read Exorcerer, and the very first scene was an orgy in a church. It wasn’t just shit that hit the fan…..

Then one day I was reading an Epic comic, something pretty obscure, and I saw this ad towards the back, of this Hellraiser comic which had a scary-looking man on the cover, his face covered with protruding needles everywhere, his eyes staring at the reader. I was fascinated, and that night, I had a very bad dream about being pursued by a needle-faced man who wanted to poke his needles into my eyes.

I never found that comic anywhere. Though I found horror comics aplenty, and saw numerous horror movies , and read almost all of Stephen King and Anne Rice and Clive Barker. ( and tried out a host of others, including Peter Straub and James Herbert and Robert McCammon and William Peter Blatty ) To me, the pinnacle of being scared was shivering on a train while reading The Shining. The urge to make sure that the windows were shut in the middle of watching Evil Dead. Looking back, I think I over-reacted. I desperately wanted to be scared, to make sure that I was frightened hard enough to squeeze my eyes shut and scream “Mommy!”. Nothing came that close ( No, really! ) Most of the movies were gross-out stuff, which helped me get a strong stomach, or just wave-a-tit-at-a-ghost-pray-it-will-go-away types. Most books weren’t descriptive enough ( I wanted to read a book that has very graphic violence, something like that book-within-a-book in Stephen King’s Dark Half ), and as for the comics….

*sigh*

To tell you the truth, I never thought anyone could produce a horror comic. For one thing, you have drawings of terrifying situations, and the characters that are drawn take away part of the terror you expect. ( “Oh, the girl is Not Real. It’s just a pen-and-ink drawing” ) Maybe because what you imagine is far scarier than what you see on the page. Tough to produce a horror comic, really.

And yesterday I got these high-quality scans of ALL the Hellraiser comics that were printed, 20 issues and loads of Special issues. I spent three hours reading whatever I could before I could read no more (I was seeing colours everywhere I turned). Man oh man oh man! High quality painted artwork. A Plethora of guaranteed-to-scare-you-shitless plots. A very detailed attention to buildup. Dark. A little more attention to the sexual aspect than is necessary, but very Dark.

Like I said, the books are collections of short-stories. The “Clive Barker’s” tag is used because the Epic people wanted to tie in to the concept of Cenobites that was laid down in Barker’s work, and movies. So a lot of storylines are about hell and damnation and cheery things like that.

AND IT HAS JOHN BOLTON ART!!!! So there.

When I slept last night, I dreamt of the man again. The man with the needles in his face. I know now his name is Pinhead. And he is still trying to poke his needles into my face.