It’s a good time to be a Hellraiser fan. After years of inertia following David Bruckner’s 2022 remake, the franchise returns anew with a videogame sequel and five-issue comic book series. Brushing poor Jamie Clayton’s Hell Priest under the rug, the iconic Doug Bradley is back as the pin-pricked face of the series in both. What a time to be alive!
With Saber Interactive’s Hellraiser: Revival descending into The Labyrinth for an epic tale of doomed lovers, Boom! Studios has taken a more compartmentalised approach. That’s five one-shot comics, each setting up the launch of a new ongoing series later this year. And what sights do they have to show us, pray tell?
This anthology kicks off with Mike Costa and Paco Camallonga’s NEW WOUNDS #1, which sees the gates of hell re-opened thanks to podcaster Mark Condon’s investigation into a certain puzzle box. With a trap set into motion for everyone’s favourite Hell Priest, Condon and his mystery employer get more than they bargained for when the dreaded cube is opened. Something emerges from beyond – but is it what (or who) they had bargained for? Hell indeed raised, four further issues beckon, headlined by one of the core four Cenobites. That’s a whole lot of Hellraiser. But then, as eleven movies (!) will attest, the franchise never was worried about spreading itself too thinly.
Where Revival feels distinctly like a Hellraiser movie of the ‘90s, RESURRECTIONS brings the Cenobites into a world of incels, Looksmaxxing and modern terrors not even Clive Barker could have conceived of. It’s a bumpy landing, and one which Zac Thompson and Gavin Mitchell’s Chatterer-centric THE ONANISTIC RITUAL largely sticks. It’s perhaps more befitting a modern Tales From the Crypt comic than Hellraiser proper, but it’s an engaging tale, with the best art of the series and a thoroughly detestable villain in online creep Mark Gussett.
By stark contrast, THE DEEP GOSPEL is a haunting descent into the depths of hell, written by Tini Howard and queasily illustrated by Jenna Cha. Here, The Female Cenobite (so called, like Smurfette, because she’s the girl one) takes centre stage. Rejecting the Engineer’s plans for her reconstruction, she’s cast even further down into a realm known as the Nidus, inhabited by the baby Cenobites therein. It’s the most visually striking of the five books, featuring some genuinely disturbing gore work and horrific creature design. Like the others, it also sets up a new (ish) status quo, resetting its lead Cenobite ahead of the main event next year.
Next up, HELL’S COUNCIL follows the resurrection of Butterball. Francesca Ciregia’s minimalistic artwork doesn’t always do justice to the world or its characters – which also includes the return of Julia Cotton, sans pesky skin. Like THE ONANISTIC RITUAL, there’s an influencer involved (in this case, a woman shilling vitamin supplements online), but Nero Villagallos O’Reilly keeps the focus on Julia and her Butterball, setting up the anthology’s final issue.
Talking of which: THE RETURN OF THE PRIEST, reinstates the Hell Priest to his standing as the (pin) head of the Cenobites. Going back to a well tapped in Hellraiser II and III, it depicts Pinhead in his human form – Captain Elliot Spencer – and brought to life by artist Alessio Avallone. Its story follows Spencer’s rise back to power, gathering his flock after having spent too long devoid of power and sensation. This won’t make much sense to anyone but the Hellraiser faithful, and the books make few concessions to those not clued-up on their lore. That said, everything after, say, the third film is wisely jettisoned – meaning that you don’t have to suffer through Revelations or Hellseeker to know what’s going on.
As with most anthology collections, RESURRECTIONS is a slightly muddled bag. As the eleven (count ‘em) Hellraiser movies will attest, there’s no limits to where the series can go… including space itself. With that in mind, these first five issues keep the scale relatively small, concentrating on nailing its Cenobites before getting too weird or cosmic. It’s a delicate line – what the Hellraiser movies will also attest is that quantity rarely wins out over quality. Still, It’s a promising start. What RESURRECTIONS does well is configuring its main players ahead of a full series.
More so than any other horror franchise out there, Barker’s creation lends itself to comicsdom, so it’s good to have Hellraiser back, even if it feels relatively slight for the moment. The real question, as it happens, isn’t what sights Boom! Studios is going to show us… it’s whether they’re worth seeing at all.
Based on the first five issues, we’re cautiously hooked. Watch this space.
