I love Hellraiser. And I am open to new stories. Hell, I enjoyed the Judgement movie! And think the 2020 was a great addition, even if the story idea made a follow up impossible. But this is about the new Boom comic series? Event? Set of specials?

There are 5 of them coming out weekly. Going to do them as individuals, since that is how I read them. Also, they are stand alone stories.

The first one, New Wounds, is written by Mike Costa and illustrated by Paco Camallonga. Neither of them is a name I am familiar with, but that doesn’t mean they can’t tell a great story!

It starts out with a setting in the shadow of the Redeemer statue. Ok, so we are set in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil. Got it. The idea of an underground sort of bar where anything goes. Seems like a setting for some Cenobite action!

Then we move to a reporter, Barrow, who is looking to interview someone in the UK. Someone who might have seen Pinhead. An old man, a survivor from the Channard Institute. The reporter has drawings of Pinhead and the box. The man seems both keen on talking and wants nothing to do with dredging up the old memories. When he finally tells the reporter to leave, he instead pulls out a gun and shoots the old man and the niece who let him in for the interview. When he discovers a baby is upstairs, his response is basically “well, guess now I need to burn down the building so that problem goes away.” 

So the guy isn’t really a reporter, he has been hired by someone to … Find out about the cenobites. It’s a little unclear. But after killing the old man, he returns to his employer with a box in hand. Where did he get that from? It wasn’t seen with the old man. If he had it before then, why was he showing a drawing of it? And the man he delivers it to (on a yacht out in the ocean) intends to open the box and trap Pinhead. The man he is delivering it to tries to coerce him into opening it, but Barrow claims “I’ve seen what it does, and won’t open it.” Paraphrased a bit. But it left me thinking. He hasn’t seen it. He has talked to some people who have seen it. And those people are very damaged. Well, they were damaged, then apparently Barrow killed them.

Anyway, the box is opened. But we don’t see Pinhead. Instead we have a being who looks to be made of magma. Fire surrounding him. He torches Barrow. Then the other guy and sets the boat on fire.

And there ends the story.

Blah blah blah.

Pinhead is on the cover but not in the story. I’m not enthused about that. Bait and switch is the technical term for it. Promising me Pinhead and giving me some random entity unrelated to him is a great way to get me to dip the stars below 5.

The opening of the story is not followed up on. The Channard old man interview isn’t really explained. Having the box isn’t explained. The dude on the boat who hired him isn’t really explained. The being who responds to the box isn’t explained. 

Nothing in this comic is explained. This 20 page comic needed to be more like 48 pages to tell the story. It felt like watching a 3 hour movie and dozing off every 20 minutes, then watching like 5 minutes and dozing off again. You get unrelated snippets. Progression happened, but it was not seen. I find myself wondering if the people in the story will show up in the next stand alone installment. Part of me hopes for more explanation, but a bigger part of me is saying that these better all be stand alone. Each has a different writer, so most likely they will be stand alone. Which is good, because if they were all one connected story, I would be irritated even more!

I have been incredibly excited for this comic. To find myself so massively underwhelmed by it is depressing. I hope the following issues do better, but in what world do you start something like this and not put out a strong first issue. I ordered online, so I got them all at one time. Had I picked up New Wounds and read it, I might have been inclined to avoid the other 4. Nah, who am I kidding. I own all Hellraiser material, I couldn’t skip this. At $5 each though, hopefully some parts of it will justify me spending $25 to read it all. 

I’m going with a 3 star rating here. And one of those is absolutely because of the Pinhead cover. Kinda wished I had gotten the variant cover seen above. I love that cover, and might have given it an extra star bump!