Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Pursuit of the Flesh

Not just Clive Barker’s Hellraiser, meaning his intellectual property, but a comic actually written by Clive Barker (and Christopher Monfette). Which I can’t say pays off very much as I didn’t care for the writing. There’s a lot of heavy breathing from the Cenobites that’s all just mumbo-jumbo. If you go back and watch the first movie, Pinhead doesn’t actually talk much. Just a handful of lines. In Pursuit of the Flesh he’s making speeches like this: “It is fruitless to wonder how this came to pass . . . History has no place in hell. We live our deaths within a final, unending chapter. Unraveling, unfolding, forever. And there is no prologue for us but pain.” There’s a lot of this stuff, and while it may sound cool, it means exactly nothing.

As far as I could understand it, the flesh being pursued here was that of poor Kirsty Cotton. Why? I think it has something to do with Pinhead wanting to become human again and he needs to provide her as some kind of blood sacrifice to the demonic powers that be. But I don’t know. And the reason I don’t know is that this book only contains the first four comics in a series and it’s not a complete story arc. It breaks off with a cliffhanger. So I’m not sure what was really going on.

If you want gore, you got it. Those chains with the hooks at the end get a lot of play. Many bodies are torn apart, and the art renders it all quite well. It’s a good looking comic. The story, however, was hard to follow. Something about a team of hell-hunters who each have experience dealing with the Cenobites trying to turn the tables and shut them down. Kirsty seems to be their leader. But it all’s kind of hazy and I didn’t grasp the mythology. The Clockwork Cenobite was a neat addition though.

Not sure I’ll keep going with this series. I’m curious, but not eager. And I watched all the movies!

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Tales from the Crypt Volume 1

Another EC horror comic series, very like The Haunt of Fear and The Vault of Horror. Same editor, same stable of artists and writers, same back story of migration from being part of an earlier title (Crime Patrol, in this case) to being its own series (originally The Crypt of Terror and then Tales from the Crypt).

As with the other EC horror comics there’s a genial host in the form of the Crypt-Keeper, who along with the Vault-Keeper and the Old Witch formed a triumvirate that EC tried, unsuccessfully, to brand as the Three Ghoulunatics. There were also a lot of crossovers between the three titles, and in one case there’s even a reprint of a story. “House of Horror” appeared first in The Haunt of Fear #15 (May-June1950), where it’s credited to “Ivan Klapper.” It runs again here in Tales from the Crypt #21 (December 1950-January 1951) where Al Feldstein is named as the author. I assume Ivan Klapper was a pseudonym Feldstein used but I haven’t been able to find any source for this.

Sticking with writing credits, the flash-fiction short stories interspersed with the comics aren’t attributed to any author. In The Haunt of Fear and the The Vault of Horror writing credit is given to either Feldstein or publisher Bill Gaines. I’d assume that they were responsible here as well, but I thought these stories were really inferior in quality so I can’t say for sure.

The contents are mostly in line with what you’d expect from EC at this time. There are werewolves. A vampire. And lots of digging up corpses and burying the living. The writers also seemed to have a thing for the use of quicksand as a plot device. I wonder what happened to quicksand. You used to see it a lot in the pop culture of the 1950s and 1960s. Not so much today. Same as those mail-order chemistry experiment kits that were advertised for $1. “Safe! Harmless!” they say, but I don’t think they’d pass muster now.

One thing that I thought set these stories slightly apart is that they’re more inclined toward rational explanations for a lot of the seemingly supernatural goings-on. A villain may be trying to drive someone insane by manufacturing spooky happenings, or it may be left up in the air as to whether the horrors were all just being imagined. Also, whenever possible scientific explanations are reached for to make things seem a little less crazy. So reviving the corpse of an executed killer by giving it an electric shock? Sort of Frankenstein-ish, but you can roll with it. And the best story in this volume, “℞ . . . Death” (written by Feldstein, art by Graham Ingels) also has a pseudo-scientific explainer thrown in at the end where the prescription that a fellow has been taking turns out to be digestive enzymes that eats him alive, turning him into a puddle of black tar.

Finally, keeping with “℞ . . . Death” I was also pleased to see that it was voted the readers’ favourite story in the next issue’s Crypt-Keeper’s Corner. This led me to think that maybe they weren’t just making those polls up, which is something I’ve always been suspicious about.

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Simpsons Comics Colossal Compendium: Volume Three

Not a bad collection. Some interesting longer stories, especially a huge three-parter about Krusty’s attempt to revive the flagging fortunes of the Radioactive Man comic. Radioactive Man seems to be a popular figure in these comics, perhaps for all the self-referential humour. They certainly do a number on the overuse of crossover plots here.

There’s also a lot of the usual surrealism, as when Professor Frink’s “Cool Juice” turns all the male inhabitants of Springfield into hipster Rat Packers, or when Milhouse’s dream life interacts with reality in chaotic ways. But there are also the jokes that land closer to home, like Homer telling Bart not to get angry at the news (“The TV can’t hear you, no matter how loud you yell, boy. Believe me, I’ve tried!”) and the way the Springfield Library is saved by becoming a homeless shelter. Also worth noting is the inking by Andrew Pepoy, which goes deep into heavy shadow effects. I liked the way it looked.

I thought the shorter stories were all duds, and to be honest I couldn’t see the point in several of them.

The papercraft Springfield building is the Kwik-E-Mart. It looks like it’s just a box with no add-ons, so not very interesting.

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Alien: Black, White & Blood

This oversized volume is part of Marvel’s Black, White & Blood series, which is distinguished by its use of a mostly black-and-white format with coloured accents in red to show blood (with a bit of green mixed in for Xenomorph blood here). You may think of the sort of thing that was done with colour (and its absence) in Frank Miller’s Sin City comics, and I think that’s a good analogy for both the level of violence on display as well as the noir sensibility. Noir referring both to the heavy and dramatic shadow as well as a lack of traditional good guys in an amoral universe.

The Alien run consisted of four issues, each with a part of a long story, “Utopia,” as well as two short pieces. They all have different writers and artists, but the same letterer (Clayton Cowles), which actually provides a lot more of a sense of continuity than you’d expect. I would have even appreciated cover pages for each of the individual stories because it’s easy to miss where one ends and another is getting started.

The large format makes covers and full-page spreads into poster-size art that you just want to enjoy. I’ve commented before on the cheaper reprints in the Marvel Masterworks and DC compact comics lines and how hard they can be to read, and it’s a real treat to read a big book like this that looks so good throughout. I especially liked the chonky stylized turn that Claire Roe gives her story, with illustrations that look almost like woodcuts.

If you want one word to describe the general sensibility I’d say it’s bleak. And that’s saying something considering these are Alien comics. There are no happy endings, and most of the stories are very unhappy in brutal and ironic ways. Even “Utopia,” about a ship full of socialists looking to colonize a new planet as a worker’s paradise, took a dark turn I found surprising. Mankind is clearly something to be surpassed. The final line in the book is “Any chance to eradicate humanity’s ugliness is beautiful.” That gives you some idea of where you’re going.

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