It has been a good week to be a man with nails in his head. Clive Barker has just collected a Life Achievement award at the World Fantasy Awards, Hellraiser: Revival has given gamers a fresh reason to stop fiddling with puzzle boxes, and now BOOM! Studios has announced that it is collecting the 1990s Pinhead comic for the first time since it first came out in 1993. The news first appeared as a Bloody Disgusting exclusive, which is the right venue for it.
Hellraiser Legacy: Pinhead collects all six issues of the original series, which was the Hell Priest’s first solo title. It is written by D.G. Chichester and Erik Saltzgaber, with art by Dario Carrasco and others, and credited, as ever, as created by Clive Barker. The set-up is a sort of Cenobite crisis meeting. Hell is under attack from a force called the Aggregate, the Cenobites who keep order down there have been ambushed, and Pinhead is the only one left with the power to stop it. Anyone who has seen the later films will recognise the problem: you build a franchise on a mysterious, nearly silent figure of terrible elegance, and sooner or later somebody wants to know what he does on his day off.
The book runs to 192 pages, priced at $19.99 in the US, and is due on 12th January 2027, so it just misses being a Christmas present for the goth in your life. UK pricing has still to be confirmed.
The early-1990s Hellraiser comics have a good reputation among Barker collectors and a bad one among people trying to find copies. Marvel’s Epic imprint ran the anthology series Clive Barker’s Hellraiser from 1989, and much of that era’s work has been hard to find for years. A proper collection is overdue, and we would happily see BOOM! go back for the rest. The one small irony is the name. Barker’s original 1986 novella The Hellbound Heart never called its lead Cenobite Pinhead, the nickname came from the film crew, and Barker has long preferred the Hell Priest. Three decades on, the lettering on the cover suggests the crew won.
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