Full disclosure: I am so ridiculously new to the Hellraiser universe as I had not seen anything of it until recently. When I had told a friend of mine being @neonsunrise on twitter about my lack of Hellraiser knowledge she popped over and filled me in on the universe. I’ve so far only seen the second movie of it and that used bits of the first movie too. Like I said if I gloss over anything just know I’m extremely new to this one. This first issue is quite interesting in the fact of me being a new fan to this universe it gives you a decent bit of information to get into it. It’s not totally new fan friendly but at the same time it is still one good story in the making from what I saw of this first issue. For the biggest thing about this issue is this is only the third time that he’s touched Hellraiser being the novella and the first movie. So this is quite a big deal in the scheme of things. He also has a co-writer on this piece being Christopher Monfette.
The biggest part of this story as it leads up to it is you get an intro to first the puzzle box and a girl solving it then the oh crap moment of Pinhead and two fellow Cenobites appearing on the scene. The scene itself is brilliantly dark and genuinely scary if you want the truth. Leonardo Manco does an excellent job of illustrating this throughout the book. This sequence alone hits you straight for the gut and you’re not going to put this down easily after the initial sequence. The neat part that also sets this book that much stronger is the fact that they got an amazing artist in Leonardo Manco. He’s been a veteran of comics and has done a bit of everything and this knocks it up a few million notches having him illustrating this series. I can honestly think that’s what caught my eye initially.
His illustrations in the sequences of hell and how that looks are absolutely impressive. Just this shy of freak you all out to sin and then and the part I don’t want to ruin for you too much when you see this serene field. He gets to play around with a bit of everything in building this book up. Oh and yes he does draw one wickedly impressive Pinhead.
Now in the story itself it’s hard to get into this too much without going spoiler heavy on the book itself but this is where I got curious in how this is going to play out. For he has this conversation with from what it seems is a former Cenobite going into the fascinating beginnings into what this will lead up to for the series. There’s also another thing for fans in here being that Kristy Cotton is going to play a huge role in the book and it looks like for the first time she’s starting to get her life back together again. Like I said I haven’t seen a lot of Hellraiser but the second movie filled in a good chunk of gaps in my knowledge base of it. That’s really not a big spoiler since I do believe it has been mentioned in interviews on the book. Now the other fun thing with this issue is it gives you a 16 page look into the Hellraiser Masterworks series and fun fact that Larry Wachowski being one of the Wachowski Brothers of the Matrix Trilogy is the writer of that. Yes kids back in the day the Wachowski brothers wrote a decent bit of comics.
To close this out Clive Barker and Christopher Monfette did an impressive job with this book. It’s new fan friendly enough to the degree that you can read it and not be lost in what’s going on for sure. For the established fan it’s pure and simple liquid gold. For when my friend who introduced me to the series told me about this book she was absolutely pleased with it. I say it passes the hardcore fan test with flying colors. Even with me as a new fan I get a feeling I’m going to be in with this series for the long haul. For I can’t help but want to see where this is going to end up leading into. Your mileage may vary but for me I’m willing to see where the puzzle box is going to take me.
