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.

October 5, 2009
Show business biographer Sellers (The Battle for Bond
) chronicles the booze-soaked lives of four of the stage and screen’s most bombastic performers. Welsh Burton (1925–1984), Irish-born Harris (1930–2002), Irish-born and English-raised O’Toole (born 1932) and English Reed (1937–1999) gave some of the 20th century’s most memorable performances, but were equally famous for their offscreen antics. Except for Reed, their careers began on the British stage, before all four were lured to Hollywood, starring in such classics as Lawrence of Arabia
(O’Toole), Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
(Burton), Camelot
(Harris) and The Three Musketeers
(Reed). Consuming staggering amounts of alcohol on a daily basis, all were forces to be reckoned with on the set, often turning up too drunk to perform. Burton’s tempestuous affair with Elizabeth Taylor—which led to two marriages and two divorces—often eclipsed his talent, while O’Toole, Harris and Reed saw their careers slump in the late 1970s and ’80s, only to be revived by roles in such successful films as Troy
(O’Toole), the Harry Potter franchise (Harris) and Gladiator
(Reed). Though Sellers often muddles the chronology by switching too often between the four’s liquored-up antics, his glimpse into Hollywood’s culture of excess is more than enough to satisfy.