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This is the Great Comic Book Detectives, where readers send in requests for the names of comic books that they remember reading years ago, and I try to find them for them! Send any future requests to brianc@cbr.com! Today, we look for a comic book that appeared in a sequence in the cult classic film, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.
A number of readers get a kick out of seeing when comic books show up in old movies and TV shows, and it becomes a whole “thing” about trying to figure out WHICH comic book was being used in the movie and/or TV show. Sometimes this can be simple enough when the cover of the comic is clearly shown, like when Radar O’Reilly reads a bunch of Avengers comics in an episode of M*A*S*H (even though, of course, The Avengers didn’t exist until a decade AFTER the Korean War was over).
Other times, it can be VERY difficult, like the Captain Marvel comic book that was featured in an episode of The Donna Reed Show that I could not place for the life of me, until the always informative P.C. Hamerlinck, the editor for the Fawcett Collectors of America at Alter Ego Magazine explained to me that the comic book was a special prop used for a 1950 movie (in which a Captain Marvel fan club was a key plot point), and it must have just been laying around for a few years before being used in the Donna Reed episode.
So, let’s see how difficult it was to find the answer to which comic book was used in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer? It was asked on Facebook by Steven Thompson, who wrote:
Can anyone make out what comic book that fella’s perusing? Looks like an ’80s Marvel to me, possibly a Hulk but maybe not. From HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER with future GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY co-star Michael Rooker. Be funny if it was an issue of GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY but I think not.
Alex Bernstein then tagged me in to see if I could solve it, and I could, so let’s dig in!
How an Unauthorized Batman Comic Book Once Caused Problems for the Dark Knight
Readers write in with comics they remember from their childhood and CSBG finds the comic, like this one about an unauthorized Batman comic
What was Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer?
John McNaughton was hired by Malik B. Ali and Waleed B. Ali to do a low-budget documentary about gangsters in Chicago in the 1930s. The resulting film, Dealers in Death, did well enough that the brothers decided to have McNaughton do another documentary about wrestling in Chicago in the 1950s. However, after the film was about to go into production in 1985, it all fell apart (a man who was going to sell them a large amount of classic footage of wrestling reneged on the deal), so the brothers had $110,000 to fund a documentary, and no documentary to make, so they asked McNaughton to do a horror film with that budget.
He agreed, but instead of a traditional horror movie, he instead decided to do a fictionalized version of the crimes of a REAL serial killer, Henry Lee Lucas. A young Michael Rooker starred in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer as Henry, who was a serial killer who moved in with an old prison buddy, Otis (Tom Towles) and Otis’ sister, Becky (Tracy Arnold), who clearly had a bit of a thing for Henry. I won’t spoil the movie for you, but suffice it to say that lots of people suffer gruesome deaths. It’s a DISTURBING movie, but a well-told one. The problem for the movie was that the MPAA gave it an X rating, and noted that there was no possible way it could even be edited into an R-rated movie, so it took years before the movie was finally released in 1989. The film was shown at festivals to help get a buzz about it, and eventually that worked. It was released unrated. Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert gave it two thumbs up.
What was the comic book connection to Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer?
The movie itself wasn’t the only thing that was controversial about the film. The original movie poster was done by artist Joe Coleman, an underground comix artist who became an acclaimed painter (he wasn’t yet THAT famous in 1986, when the movie was initially meant to come out). His movie poster was determined to be far too explicit, and so a new version of the poster was produced. Coleman’s poster is brilliantly haunting, though.
Heck, I’M not even sure if I can get away with showing the whole thing here, so I cropped it out a bit. Just go search “Joe Coleman Henry Portrait of a Serial Killer poster” online and you’ll find the original.
What Do You Do When Your Own Fingers Try to Kill You?
Readers write in with comics they remember from their childhood and CSBG finds the comic, like this one about a man killed by his own fingers!
Which comic book is used in the scene from Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer?
So, the first thing I did, naturally, was to zoom in on the photo. It really didn’t help a lot, so I watched the movie itself, and I noticed that Otis actually shows us the comic book cover briefly…
And, as luck would have it, I both A. noticed that it was clearly a DC comic book due to the logo placement in the top lefthand corner of the comic, but more importantly, B. I recognized the series’ logo.
So I went to go check, and sure enough, it is the first issue of 1982’s The Night Force by Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan…
A tricky bit is that the second page shown is an advertisement, which is also why it was hard to identify. Here are the two pages shown in the film…
So there ya go, Steven! Thanks for the request, Alex!
Okay, that’s it for this installment of the Great Comic Book Detectives! If anyone else has a comic that they’d like me to track down, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com!
“}]] Readers write in with comics from the past and CSBG finds the comic, like the DC comic book featured in the film, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer Read More