Clive Barker's Hellraiser: The Dark Watch (2013), Volume 2

August 11, 2003
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.

July 19, 2004
Who'd have suspected that Clive Barker's novella The Hellbound Heart
would spawn the feature film Hellraiser
(helmed by the author himself), a gaggle of uneven sequels and a following that craved even more tales of twisted individuals and demonic Cenobites? At 342 pages, this third collection of the Hellraiser-
inspired comics
might look like a cornucopia of kinky chills, gore and fetishism. Yet while there is occasionally some impressive art, the overall content is extremely disappointing, pretentious and, above all, repetitive. Most of the stories follow the by-the-numbers scenario of a disaffected malcontent figuring out the solution to a puzzle box that opens a doorway into the nightmare world of the Cenobites, thereby dooming himself to eternal sadomasochistic torment. That formula is wearying after one or two run-throughs, and more than that—the 15 stories read like they came from an assembly line—is an exercise in tedium. There's also a gallery of some 100 one-page illustrations, mostly mediocre, that serves as filler. Matrix
completists may be interested in the adaptations by the nonprolific director Larry Wachowski. Clive Barker's brand name notwithstanding, few will find this book worth the price.