Deep From The Vaults #02: Coenobium Magazine

Hello Friends:

Are you a Hellraiser fan? Remember COENOBIUM? If you do, great – you have some cool issues, but if you don’t, you missed out on a big part of the Hellraiser fandom that went on for 9+ years in the Hellraiser community!..

COENOBIUM came to life as an idea about 2 weeks into Hellraiser‘s original theatrical run in the US; there was an issue #0 that was mainly created by Diane Keating, but here we will talk about the proper issue run co-edited by Diane and Ed Martinez that most people know about, which ran for 17 issues (the last issue was numbered #15 but there were some extra issues like #3.5 and #7.5). Diane and Ed Martinez were acquaintances at the time, sharing not only a common friend but a passion for this movie, and Ed was one of the people she showed issue #0 to. That led to a collaboration that would go on for years, contacting dozens of people in the Hellraiser fan community,  taking multiple car trips to conventions over the years, interviews with actors, writers and people directly connected to Hellraiser products and movies.

Then, unfortunately it came to an end and people moved on. By that time it had carved an undeniable and influential niche in the collective fan community that rings to this day.

I’ve been chatting on the phone a lot with Ed Martinez over the last few weeks, and we’ve know each other since the early days of the old Hellbound Web forum created back in October of 1995 by Captain +ripps (read that as Tripps), a Michigan student whose real name was Matt Rexer. Some day I’ll write a Deep From The Vaults about that website. It was thanks to Ed that a lot of the rare stuff in that website was made available to the fans, like Pete Atkins’ Songs of Metal and Flesh comic book script, Dan Chichester’s Marvel Hellraiser comics Bible (AKA Concepts & Guidelines for a  Hellraiser Horror Anthology Series), Hellraiser III’s Pillar of Souls design concept art and storyboards and last but not least, the original high resolution files of the Lament Configuration panels, that came directly from Bob Keen, depicting the work of Simon Sayce at Image Animation – these would prove invaluable for all the box makers out there, I imagine. These were all added to the website with the proper authorization from the creators, Ed made sure of that. He visited Hellraiser sets, talked to people from Image over the years, Clive Barker, Pete Atkins, Doug Bradley and loads of other people, as he had a career in the FX industry himself (Galaxis, The Dead Pit, The G-String Horror). All that juicy meat in the archives that made up the Hellbound Web, were what made fans like me come back to that website time and time again.

My conversations with Ed have also been punctuated by emails with his wife Nina, who Ed met during one of these conventions and who’s shared his love of Hellraiser over the years, she quickly became a very important contributor to Coenobium’s bullpen as well. Here are a few photos of Nina with her homemade cenobite makeup “Pin-elope”, standing next to Doug Bradley in Chicago, on Halloween ’92, during that year’s Fangoria Weekend of Horrors.

Back to Coenobium, the first few issues were very artisanal, and the contributors were few, as you can see the reviews and editorials mainly come from Ed Martinez and Diane, but there were other contributors that became more numerous as the fanzine progressed. According to Diane’s editorial on issue #3, Issues #1 and #2 were made on Serendipity’s IBM clone running Xerox Ventura Publisher. The following issues were done on a Mac IIcx running Aldus Pagemaker 4.0, LetraSet Color and Image Studios, with a RasterOps video board installed in the Mac. Ed told me that he had a more oldschool hands-on approach about the way he composed his pages, often using an x-acto knife and glue to compose them. Great job, guys!

There’s a charm and a nostalgia about old fanzines; if you grew up in the 70’s or 80’s, and you belonged to some sort of fandom or just liked off-beat underground stuff, you know what I’m talking about. Mimeographed paper has a distinct smell to it for example, that for some of us reminds us of school. Some may have been stapled xeroxed pages with the occasional color paper cover, but those pages kept us entertained and fascinated with all the information about what was going on, from people who really devoted themselves to keeping a community alive and closely knit. Pen pal clubs were a thing back then too. Coenobium was no different! Usually it opened with a “Configurative Lamentations” editorial by Diane, usually punctuated with drawings of her own furry persona, a horned deer-like creature with a SF Giants shirt. She was listed as the Publisher/”Œditor” in Chief, with Ed Martinez being the Art Director, interviewer and reviewer along with Diane and other contributors, of all the movies, toys and comics coming out they could get their hands on. A handful of issues were lucky enough to get one-of-a-kind covers drawn by Clive Barker himself, which according to Ed came directly from Clive when they met at conventions and they’d show him the latest issues of Coenobium:

“Hi Clive, would you like to contribute with a sketch for a cover?” they’d ask, to which Clive would flip out his sketch pad and pull out a few original sketches, handing them over saying “Sure! Here you go, pick what you want!” To this day, Ed still has these originals, and they appeared in covers and inside illustrations for issues like #5, #7 or #8.

There are two sides to the Coenobium content though, that sometimes you can distinguish between: the Diane content and the rest. Diane was very prolific when it came to adding her own ideas and fanfiction into the melting pot, and it shows throughout these issues. You can read articles when she expounds on the “Deities of Cenob”, or encyclopedic entries that describe Pinhead as “a brother to Osiris, Zeus Odin, Midra, Mephistopheles, LeSorcier and Marduk. His element is the cold immutable earth; in this light he is also a god of virility“. Her undeniable enthusiasm however, shines through in her desire to fill any mythology not covered by the novella or the films, and in her fan fiction stories that gave more body to these issues, as well as the drawings she contributed for many pages to illustrate these articles. Sometimes scratchy, sometimes cartoony, they are throwbacks to drawings every Hellraiser fan doodled in their redaction books at some time or another when bored.

The rest of the content had more structure, and was more rooted in interviews, homemade FX you could try out in your garage, gossip about what was coming for the Hellraiser universe and reviews of products, comics and soundtracks. That was the more informative part of Coenobium. Interviews with people like Danny Fay, co-owner of Screamin’ Models, Clive Barker, Pete Atkins, Nicholas Vince, who was brought to the US by an infatuated Diane who admired not only her favorite cenobite Chatterer, but also the actor behind the mask! Nicko’s “Look, See…” story was re-published in the pages of those early issues of Coenobium too (issue #5): The story of a dashing 28 year old New York comedian from the 30s, that after becoming a smash hit telling all sort of dirty jokes— so successful that audiences would fight over a ticket for his movies— discovers a new plateau of sensation to overcome his boredom with success, changed and tortured into a mockery of his comedian nickname, the Chatterer. He’s since revisited the origin of that character in the written page, offering us a different version in the second volume of the Hellraiser Anthology published by Seraphim.

Another section that catered to the hard core fan was “Johnson and Bieri’s Creative Minds“: where you could try your hand at doing special FX, using alginate to make molds, and carve cenobite suits out of materials like Burman TC-257/274 or Skin-Flex II, gluing pieces with Krayton Adhesive AC-77s. Got it? Yeah, me neither. These guys operated on a whole other level, and I wonder if they went on to join the special FX industry, because their articles displayed some serious talent.

The talented artists who contributed to the fanzine also put a lot of creativity into their depictions of imaginary cenobites and hellish landscapes: artists like Steve Goodrich, Nina Arlene, Guy Conrad (whose art often featured on some of Coenobium’s covers), David C. Smith, Randy Bowen (of Bowen Designs – he also worked in Product Development for Dark Horse), and Tom K. Hill among many others. Keep in mind I really only have about a handful of issues to go by for this article, I never managed to get a full set of Coenobium so I’m sure there will be people I didn’t mention just because I never got to see their work in those issues. I’ll get there someday.

Shall we begin?

There were also some seriously cool centerfold issues like issues 9 and 12, and fortunately Nina was able to scan some to add to this article. Colin Christian created these truly groundbreaking hellscapes; they’re sexy and feature a Goth Punk aesthetic that Hellraiser could have pursued with the “no holds-barred” unapologetic style  of the first film, instead of the bland visuals that the sequels gave us. Check them out!

Coenobium was a spontaneous crystallization of Hellraiser fandom that arrived at the right time and defined and united a community. Others came and went, like Hellbreed, or the Clive Barker Appreciation Society, Lost Souls, or Dread, but Coenobium was one of the longer lasting magazines. Sadly, their best looking issue ended up being their last: a stapled, full color cover magazine that happened because one of the contributing artists for the latter issues, Colin Christian had access to a printing house. His wife Sas is featured in that last issue cover and they are currently very successful artists, having been part of Juxtapoz Magazine, and he’s currently working on sculpted art inspired by “old sci-fi movies, pinup girl/supermodels, anime, ambient electronic music and H.P. Lovecraft.”

The end of Coenobium came about because of financial problems, as well as the eventual cooling interest in a franchise plagued by diminishing quality sequels and slower output. Unfortunately, the main backing for the magazine came from Diane and the sales of issues were never enough to make it self-sufficient. So when people moved on to other interests the backing wasn’t there to continue publishing Coenobium, as a network of advertisers or backers was never put in place to support it – keep in mind this was years before the crowdfunding system was created online. At the time, the best a magazine could hope for was subscriptions. If something like Coenobium came about today, it would certainly have a longer life and feature an online presence or even an app. But it’s undeniable that a physical magazine has a lot more value that a digital format that can be taken away from you, stop working or become obsolete. Paper isn’t eternal, but it doesn’t require a battery to read or an expensive device with an internet connection.

Finally, for the collectors out there, the bibliography of Coenobium: If you’re a completist, this might confirm your full set or may send you looking for elusive half-issues. But apart from issue #0 and its official 15-issue run, there were at least 2 half-number issues, issues #3.5 and #7.5. These were made because sometimes there were interviews from conventions that happened in between issues and it would take too long to wait for the next season’s issue to post it, or in order to attend a convention they wanted to bring a new issue but they didn’t have enough contributions to actually make a full issue, so they made those half issues to sell fans at the convention. A visual gallery of Coenobium covers follows below:

Ed Martinez is currently active on Facebook with the help of his wife Nina, but has struggled with health issues due to diabetes and lost his eyesight. You can contact him via email at edwardamartinez@sbcglobal.net. Massive thanks to Nina and Ed, we hope to have you guys on our podcast soon!

Previously on #DeepFromTheVaults: #1 Dangerous World Poster & Doug Recollections