place. He’s going to be a very different demon at the end of these eight issues, and Kirsty is going to be a very different heroine.” Any fears that Pinhead has gone soft, though,
were hopefully allayed when BOOM! released an eight-page preview of the new series. Though tech- nically unrelated to the story that began in Hellraiser #1, the preview marked a return to form for the property and its most recognizable character. Set in a soon-to-be-abandoned penitentiary, the preview looses Pinhead on a priest who has just presided over the execution of an innocent man. The demon toys with the priest, ripping off his face and pontif- icating on the nature of heaven and hell before flay- ing the man alive from head to toe. “Angels in heaven hear my cry!” begs the dying priest. “I’m listening,” answers Pin- head. Yep, Hellraiser all the way. While Barker is certainly a guiding force
Panels Of Pain: An interior page and the cover of BOOM! Studios’ new Hellraiser comic.
to make it younger, but they also want to appeal to the older fans – they don’t know what to do. With BOOM!, we have an opportunity to take all the artistic risks that we want, and tell a story that we want to tell to people who want to read it, in a way that is unencumbered by the $30 million it would cost to make the movie.” Rather than pretend the intervening years – and sub-
par sequels – never happened, Barker and Monfette have considered the toll they might have taken on Pinhead, both as a character and as a horror icon, in the new se- ries, simply titled Hellraiser. “We needed to use the time that Pinhead as a char-
acter has been sort of restless and tired, and the years that as an icon he hasn’t been done any justice, and we needed to weave that into the story in some way,” says Monfette. The result is a Pinhead who has grown dissatisfied
with his station. He has solved the mystery of the flesh, and wonders what else lies in store for him. Monfette describes him as “the creature in hell look-
ing up at the stars, wondering if there’s more.” Naturally, there is. In the first eight-issue story arc of
what the writers hope will become an ongoing series, Pinhead isn’t just restless, he’s upwardly mobile. Weary of his role as leader of the Cenobites, he strikes, quite lit- erally, a deal with the Devil. Now he may try for redemp- tion – something no Cenobite has done before – provided he finds a replacement. He has a very specific someone in mind: Kirsty Cotton, heroine of Hellraiser and Hell- bound. “Kirsty’s story always felt unfinished,” says Monfette.
“When she and Tiffany walked away in the second film – even though she appears in the fifth or sixth film, which we’re not considering canon with regard to this comic – her story never felt complete. It always felt like she had one more encounter with Pinhead waiting for her. This is that encounter. What’s going to happen in this series will have lasting repercussions for the vision and aesthetics of hell, and it’s going to leave Pinhead in a very different
on this latest journey into the Hellraiser mythos, a large portion of the scripting du- ties fall to Monfette, who has adapted two of Barker’s short stories (“Down Satan!” and “Son of Celluloid”) for the screen and collaborated with him on a 3-D horror comic for IDW in 2009. The two writers, who first met when a ten-question inter- view session at Barker’s home (Monfette was a journalist at the time) turned into an animated two-day conversation about the
art and craft of storytelling, have fallen into a com- fortable working relationship. “Clive is providing his notes and input as the
scripts come in,” says Monfette. “He’s certainly the godfather of the project. This isn’t being handed off or shopped out. This is Clive’s world, and we are serving Clive’s vision.” “I think it’ll be different from week to week,
month to month,” Barker says of his level of involve- ment. “So far it’s been quite extensive – very thor- ough. I’ve had opinions on practically everything. You know, this mythology has been very kind to me over the years. And I want to be kind to it, and more importantly to the people who are enthusiastic about it.” The pair clearly has ambitious plans for the char-
acters that inhabit the Hellraiser universe, but an- other challenge lies in store for them. The concept Cont’d on p.28
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