Or to use its full title, going by the cover: Clive Barker’s The Harrowers: Raiders of the Abyss #1. Which is a confusing mouthful of a title.

And that’s characteristic of the comic itself. Six mortals have been granted special abilities to battle against the denizens of Leviathan, which means taking on the Cenobites and rescuing trapped souls from their own personal hells.

Sounds straightforward enough, and it even sounds pretty cool, as an idea, right? But it falls dreadfully flat in execution; even though it has the Epic Comics branding, it’s also co-marked as a Marvel title on the cover, with Comics Code Authority approval present too.

Which means that every edge and transgressive element of the Cenobites, and of the concepts first seen in the Hellraiser series, are completely sanded down and neutered, for a more ‘all ages’ take on the lore.

Which seems bafflingly daft; how on Earth do you tone down the sadomasochists from Hell, the Cenobites, and make them palatable or even make sense to a non-mature audience?

The answer is that, well, you can’t. Even the great Gene Colan’s art suffers from confusing action sequences and the fact that he either doesn’t know what Cenobites are supposed to look like, or he was instructed to come up with less freaky looking antagonists for this story.

Either way, it doesn’t work.

Nor does the team of superheroes with typically Barker-esque, florid names, but ill-defined or just plain generic powers. The writing (which at least Barker had the sense to stay away from, beyond providing the concept and initial story) feels old fashioned even for the 90s, with an absolute ton of exposition and overwrought dialogue.

The ‘personal Hell’ in this particular story seems so incredibly tame too, and it really is such a massive letdown, not feeling anything like the cruel, painful and freakishly sadomasochistic suffering we often see in the Hellraiser mythology.

This series only lasted six issues; though not a surprise after issue #1 fails to land any home runs, its ending does at least act on the promise of the cover, and seems to bring Pinhead into the action. Can issue #2 raise the stakes, and more importantly, the quality? Perhaps we’ll find out at some point…

In the meantime, check out the one element of this comic that really did blow me away: a glow-in-the-dark cover that still works amazingly effectively after more than three decades. At least, with this very 90s cover gimmick, they got something right.