Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Collected Best, Vol. 2

The second anthology of comics short stories set in Barker's incredibly popular horror film milieu. The book collects 10 Hellraiser-themed offerings in full-color, from as all-star lineup of comics writers and illustrators, including Marry Wachowski (The Matrix), John Bolton, and many others.

The stories in this uneven anthology come from the Epic comics series of a decade ago, which was inspired by a continuing series of horror movies, all of which originated in Barker's novella The Hellbound Heart. Though the stories are set in different times and countries, they all show human encounters with the Lament Configuration. People who succumb to temptation and manage to solve the puzzle enter the domain of the Cenobites, hideously deformed creatures who inflict eternal suffering on anyone handy. So the fundamental subject throughout each tale is mutilation and pain, not simply death. Superficially, some of the stories resemble the gruesome 1950s horror comics that EC Comics produced with disturbing excellence. A few try to do more by exploring the attraction of s&m themes for a mass audience of Cenobite wannabes. Unfortunately, most of the contributors veer toward gross-out techniques. There is some good art here, as well as some interesting scripts, but they're seldom in the same story. The most successfully unified pieces are "Pleasures of Deception" (script by Phil Nutman; art by Bill Koeb), in which an artist is inspired by the Cenobites to discover a wonderfully new way of seeing reality; and "Cenobite!" (script by Nicholas Vince; art by John Van Fleet), which shows episodes in the life of the kind of man who'd be a willing recruit for this squad of master torturers. Those also, not coincidentally, are among the collection's least clinically graphic. They give readers a chance to reflect on what's going on, not just flinch.
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Among the many spin-offs from horror jack-of-all-trades Barker's first hit movie was a comic book that enjoyed a five-year run, 1989-94. This second best-of collection of stories from the periodical is, like Collected Best (2002), better looking than reading. That isn't damning with faint praise. Comics stories ought to work visually as much or more than verbally, and horror stories usually cry out for visual pyrotechnics, which is what they got in the Hellraiser comics. Bill Koeb in "The Pleasures of Deception," John Van Fleet in "Cenobite," and Steven Johnson in "Old Wives' Tale" revel in technique as they advance a story, betraying such things as the torn edges of collaged paper, paint splatters, scratches, and some frames' origination as photographs. Adopting more conventional comics-like styles, John Bolton achieves a glowing effect suitable to the medieval setting of "The Canons of Pain" by letting the texture of the medium he paints and draws on show through, and Gil Ashby exploits the etiolated look of thin watercolor washes appropriately in the AIDS parable "Fury." Ray Olson
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