Hellraisers
Written by Robert Sellers
Illustrated by JAKe
Lettered by Lizzie Kaye
Self Made Hero
Release Date: January 29, 2013
Cover Price: $22.95

Hellraisers takes the basic framework story of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and twists it on its ear, presenting the story in an non-seasonal manner. This absolutely absorbing and unapologetic graphic novel tells the classic tale in a more gritter milieu by way of intertwining the biographies of four of the most rabble rousing drunken playboy European actors of all time – Richard Burton, Oliver Reed, Richard Harris, and Peter O’Toole – and depicts them as sort of ghosts of decadent past (and in O’Toole’s case, right up to the present day) to help mentor and tutor a young everyman who is headed on the same paths that pretty much destroyed the aforementioned men.

The book, written by Robert Sellers and illustrated vividly and wildly in stark black and white by JAKe, is a tense, turgid, infectious, and hard to put down ride through the four men’s lives, a ride that has the top down, without seatbelts, and going an out-of-control 120 miles per hour.

NOTE: For structural reasons and to ensure that this list is super-duper pretty at all times, we’ll be posting this same intro for all sections of The Decade List. If you’ve already read all of this, you can just head down to the continuation of our list!

Let’s just get it out of the way right off the ol’ bat: yes, we know it’s been month since we left the decade. Most folks undertook this heavy task pre-2010, but we decided that it would be a little bit better to let the new year settle in a bit before hitting you with something of this magnitude.

So here we are, geeks: we’ve officially arrived in FUTURE *cue retro ’50s sci-fi music* and still we have no freakin’ flying cars yet. What’s the deal with that? While it is pretty exciting to be inside of the year 2010 — a year that always seemed unreachable to us mere mortals — we are also exiting another entire decade that leaves us staring at one majorly epic task. That task? To search, dig, locate, retrieve, organize, polish, and present the very best films of the past ten years!

At this point, most of us are aware of Sacha Baron Cohen, the British actor who has portrayed a Kazakhstanian reporter in Borat; a gay Austrian fashion buff in this summer’s Brüno, and a French car racing star in Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby — among many other things. What many of us are not so much aware of is that Sacha has a cousin named Ash, and he’s been here in America and working in movies for much longer than his superstar relative.

In the July issue of Esquire, they did a small story on Ash Baron Cohen, and while he hasn’t made the most well-known films we’ve ever heard of, his story is wonderful and decorated with the praises of cinematic legends. Some of the films he has made are: Bang, which Roger Ebert called one of the best movies of 1997; Pups, which had Mischa Barton and Burt Reynolds; and probably his biggest project was This Girl’s Life, which starred James Woods, Rosario Dawson, Michael Rapaport, and Ioan Gruffudd. He also currently has three movies on the way that are in various states of production.

Most of his projects were directed under the one-name format: Ash. This was because he was initially here illegally. Apparently Oliver Stone loved his movie Bang so much, that he said “We need to get you legal,” and actually wrote the INS to make it happen.

Click over to the other side for one of the best Hollywood stories I’ve ever heard — WITH video! Pre-click warning: this video has some heavy NSFW language from thespian Richard Harris (that’d be Professor Dumbledore from the first two Harry Potter films, for you younger generation folks). Now you’re too curious not to look, aren’t you?