Hellraisers

February 18, 2013
“If you’re going to hear my confession,” actor Richard Harris says to a hospital priest, “prepare to be here for days.” He might well have been blurbing this graphic novel biography of Harris, Richard Burton, Peter O’Toole, and Oliver Reed—not only stars at the crest of 1960s British new-wave cinema, but fast-living, hard-partying icons of the decade. Sellers adapts his own prose celebrity biography of the same name into this graphic novel by enveloping it with the stars’ cautionary Christmas Carol-style visitation to the fictional Martin, a serial drunk and rabble-rouser in the making. It’s the adventures of Burton et al., however, that kick the narrative into bleakly hysterical and over-the-top sagas of extreme debauchery and decadence. Sellers’s script skips from one outrageous incident to another, deftly and fittingly portrayed by JAKe, who eschews photorealistic depiction in favor of bold, heavy-lined caricature. His illustrations are reminiscent of the work of Kyle Baker and Jamie Hewlett; he skillfully sets these instantly recognizable, larger-than-life characters in their hallucinatory whirlwind tours from drink to drunk and from beds to bed-ridden. A savage sock in the jaw to polite, reverential biographical graphic novels, these hilariously bleak shock tales make the modern-day antics of Lindsay Lohan look like Dr. Seuss.