[.ca] Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Collected Best Volume 1 (ISBN 0971024928)

pretty good:
It's actually pretty good (I had read another collection of Barker comics that wasn't so good, so I had my doubts). A couple of the stories seem to make little or no sense, but as a whole, they are well written stories. Most of the art is pretty good too. All in all, the collection is, well, pretty good-- and Gaiman is here too.

Series description & new review, a different opinion:
Hey readers out there, don't be dismayed by the last 2 reviewers. They were looking for somethng different. Their opinions are valid, but if you want another point of view, read on. The comics never meant to be a direct followup to the movies. The writing in the movies was pretty lame. The writing in the comics is MUCH much better. The goal of these comic stories IS NOT just to reach an ending but to portray HOW these people got to where they ended up. To only look for the ending is a very narrow field of vision. That would be like saying sex is to just reach a climax - if that's so, why taken an hour to do what can be accomplished in 5 minutes? Get it? Yes, the ending is always the same (cenobites, hell, death), but you always knew that anyway didn't you? So, what can we change here? All the stuff that happened BEFORE they ended up in hell, of course. The comics focus strongly on DESIRE, and how it controls people to lead them to their doom. The comics are a GREAT study in human behavior and weakness. It was never about the Cenobites.

Really not all that terribly good:
The Hellraiser series of movies have been uneven, although I think 2 was the best. These stories don't have much to do with the mythology of the movies, instead re-creating the horror without the depth. I used to read the series of graphics occassionally. Like with Heavy Metal, the stories hit sharp just often enough that I'd revisit every once in awhile. This collection couldn't keep me interested long enough to finish. Just really not terribly good.

I've seen the movies and read the comics:
Clive Barker is one of the more amazing writers that have come out of the 20th century, and into the 21st century. His imagination is dark and fertile, something to be admired even if you dont personally read every one of his novels. Hellraiser is an intriguing mythos, something darker in a more sexual sense than a mythos say by H. P. Lovecraft or Stephn King. The first movie was a new version of the old haunted house routine. The second one, however, was amazing, a new cosmos of hell. The movies after that were watchable, but I think they did not do justice by excluding the universe of hell itself instead of having Pinhead come around the corner every so often and tearing some poor fool apart. The stories of the Hellraiser comics were fascinating at first, dont get me wrong. But, but the main problem is this. What was so at heart about the movies is the reaction of the humans to the inhuman, the heroes male and female toward the damnation around them. This was not so in the comic book series. You see the Centobites are important to the hellraizer universe, but they are a part of the "sentence" not the "punch line" if you get my drift. Salvation for characters like Cirsty is what is important, at least for me, from the original two movies. The Centobites in these comics, though well drawn and having personalities which yes is a good point, they come in, say some "relavent" concept toward damnation, then kill the poor sods. Again. And Again. And Again. It does grow tiresome. There is now in my eyes a throw toward the other side, you see hell so much it does not become shocking anymore. It doesn't have the punch as it did when you first saw Laviathin in Hellraiser 2. I want to see the human heart succeeding or failing against the growing odds. Yes I dont think every story should have a happy ending, but if you read the same ending...after awhile...it just grows tiresome. So that is why I stopped reading the Hellraiser comics. Now yes there are some very good short comic book stories in this collection, if you really enjoy the artwork which is VERY good, then yes by all means get the book. Just dont read it in one sitting or you will grow ... in my opinion ... bored.

I Forgot How Bad The Original Series Could Be!!!:
The Hellraiser comic series is like going to the greatest comedy club ever. All of the greats are there to perform for you: Jerry Seinfeld, George Carlin, Jay Leno, Robin Williams, Garry Shandling, etc. Jerry Seinfeld starts: "Why did the Chicken cross the road..? To get to the other side!" Robin Williams is next: "How many Blondes does it take to screw in a light bulb? To get to the other side!" Pretty soon you realize that no matter what the set-up may be, the punchline is always going to be "To get to the other side". That pretty much sums up Hellraiser in a nutshell. Different creative teams telling different stories that all have the same ending: A bad person gets his comeuppance from The Lament Configuration and The Cenobites. Wow. I had collected the Hellraiser series when it was initially released, and was never really impressed by it. I always kept being lured back to the next issue by the stellar creative teams, and kept feeling let down. Stupid me, I actually ordered the Limited-Edition Leatherbound Hardcover of "Collected Best", thinking that maybe I just didn't "Get" the stories as a teen-ager. No, they really DID stink.... There ARE a few good ones, don't get me wrong. Dead Man's Hand and Like Flies To Wanton Boys break from the standard Hellraiser mold, Dear Diary and Wordsworth hew close to that selfsame mold, but are well-told nonetheless. For My Son starts strong, but falls into the "Same Punchline" trap outlined above. It doesn't so much end as just STOP; I think there might be a page missing from the end of the story because, for a Fifty Dollar Limited Edition, the book is riddled with production errors. The final, crucial, dialogue panel of Mazes of the Mind is blank, thereby rendering the whole story pointless, and the final story, Losing Herself In The Part, has the majority of it's pages printed out of order. Not that the sloppy story is any better when read the right way. The two-parter "The Harrowing" was NOT written by Clive Barker, as widely advertised. He came up with the plot, and three other so-called "Writers" did the wooden dialogue. The Harrower stories were some of the WORST Helraiser stories EVER, and I really have to question their inclusion here. (One of the heroes is a little blue Cherub that kills Cenobites by FARTING on them, another is an escaped Death-Row Inmate who has lethal SPIT! Pure, unadulterated \ostuff\c.) I'd advise any but the most hard-core fans to avoid this at all costs. A few good stories, but they're FAR outweighed by the awful ones.