Origins: Blood and Ink

Beautiful Brutality by Arthur Sudyam

Like many young preadolescent boys, I fell into a torrid love affair with comic books. I was only vaguely familiar with the Aliens, The Terminator and Predator at the time by way of the movies (I'll get to that more next article though) and mostly by friends or my older cousin who had more lenient parents that let him watch a lot of the gems of the time period.
I had gone to a hobby shop with my dad and granddad so they could look at toy trains. Suffice to say, unless it involved a giant monster thrashing through it I could've cared less about trains.
So I meandered through the store. I wandered through sports cards, plastic model kits, and remote control cars until I came to the comic book section. At this early point in my life I was already fairly familiar with the notion of the superhero comic, Superman, Batman, Spiderman, the X-Men... the usual suspects by Marvel or DC comics... that was until I came to a section of comics that I was NOT familiar with in the slightest...it's logo intrigued me, beckoned to me... like the box calling to Pandora to explore all therein. once I did there was no going back.

At one time a very Dark Horse, indeed

The holy trinity I mentioned earlier Terminator, Predator and Aliens lined the shelves, and a little further down the rack was the even darker stuff. Evil Ernie, adaptations of Child's Play, Jason Goes To Hell and even some Hellraiser comics... I had crossed clear on over to the darkside... the stuff on those pages stuck to me like shit on velcro at that age

Wake the dead *shudder* nightmare inducer #1

And one helluva entrance,
the axe removal was something beyond my wildest nightmares

Great googly moogly silver devil of a Terminator,
nightmare inducer #2

Once more I was hooked... but there was absolutely no way in Hell my Christian god-fearing (and everything fearing) man he was would let those cross his doorstep. My stepdad and mom though could've cared less I would later find out. So I could recon with my dad and then pick them up later with my mom. The early Dark Horse comics were especially prized since they were the closest thing at the time period to an expanded universe beyond the movies (which I would watch incessantly... again I'll get to the classics soon enough). We got to see Terminators that weren't Arnold, we got to meet Dutch's brother and another image that stuck with me, an Alien civil war.

Aliens also allowed for more of what I wanted out of the series, more Aliens. But how raw the images were at the time stuck with me. This was a rare age of comics, I'm not quite sure if it was the age itself or merely my young perception of it. They were definitely cornerstones of my adult collection of trade paperbacks.

My literal reading horrors didn't end there... they extended even to my school library and produced some of the most vivid nightmares to date