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Checker Publishing – Tapping the Vein
Welcome to the largest, most expensive book that anybody ever sent me for free! That being said, you probably think I’m going to be biased towards it, right? Well, as this is my dime and I get to ramble, let me tell you a little about me and Clive Barker. I discovered his writings when I was probably about 15 or so, loved it and got as many books as I could. I devoured all of them, then went off to college and forgot about them. I read all the Hellraiser comics again recently and thought them mostly silly, although there were quite a few that were great. That being said, I’ve brought his books with me through a few moves, meaning to pick them up again and see what my opinion is now, but never seem to get around it. So, there you are, that leads up to when I got this book a week ago. I thought I’d go into it with an open mind and see what happened, and what do you know, I liked it. All the stories seem to end brutally and you can start to see the ending coming after reading the first few, but they were still incredibly imaginative (In the Hills, The Cities being one that springs immediately to mind with its giants composed of living humans). I couldn’t find fault with the art on any of the stories either, and John Bolton has long been one of my favorite comic painters. For those who are curious about which stories are adapted here, they’re all from his Books of Blood series, his earliest collections of short stories. If you’re a fan of horror comics, get this collection. If you’re squeamish or not a fan of Clive Barker, you’ll probably hate it. If you just don’t know, give it a chance, there’s plenty to convince skeptics in here.
Checker Publishing – Hellraiser Collected Best Volume 1
Hellraiser Collected Best Volume 1
OK, I liked Hellraiser a lot back when I first started reading comics, and obviously a “collected best” collection is going to have a lot to live up to. I should also mention that Amazon listed a Volume 2 coming out, and if I remember correctly there might even be more coming, so this one doesn’t have to be THE book to represent the series. So let’s just take it as a collection and see if I can slow down my rambling long enough to tell you what I thought. There are all kinds of big names in this. Neil Gaiman, Mike Mignola, Clive Barker, Marc Hempel, Alex Ross, Dave McKean. The problem with that is that Clive Barker’s stories were the weakest of the bunch. He has a two part story about the origin of what is essentially a superhero team that fights the Cenobites. I didn’t like it back then and I don’t like it now: if I wanted a superhero comic I would read one of the hundreds that are available. It was filled with cliched comic book dialogue too, with exclamation points at the end of every sentence! Man, I hate that. Luckily the slack is more than made up by the rest of the stories in here. They’re at their best, to me, when exploring the psychology of just why people would want to open that damned puzzle box in the first place, and that’s represented well here. “Like Flies to Wanton Boys” is probably the most haunting of the bunch; it’s a tale about a man who gets trapped in his own house, entering a room and finding each successive door a little bit further away. Marc Hempel has a very cartoony, loopy style (those aren’t technical terms), but he did some amazing work in Sandman and also has a great story in here about a pedophile. This is graphic, at times brutal stuff, but it’s more than that. These stories, when they were at their best, went way beyond the concepts of Clive Barker in the movies and turned into something much more interesting. This is a good, solid collection if you haven’t read any of these. It isn’t the best from the whole series, as I have plenty of stories that I remember from the series that aren’t here, but that’s why there’s going to be a Volume 2, right? It’s $17.56 on Amazon right now, if you were curious…
