Comics

World Without End

Saint Sinner (1993): Max Douglas Tom Defalco (chief editor) Christie Scheele (colors) Malcolm Smith (consulting editor) Marc McLaurin (editor) Carl Potts (executive editor) Clive Barker (idea) Elaine Lee (story)

Vol. 1, No. 1, October 1993.
Saint Sinner is perhaps the most challenging (not say the strangest) of the first four Razorline projects: a comic that will hopefully stray where few mainstream titles have gone before. It is not a traditional super hero title, though its protagonists in most of its antagonists in this-will possess extraordinary powers of some kind of another, but then neither is it intended as a horror or a fantasy title. Perhaps we're best thinking of it as a book, of shaman's tales: journeys into the darkest and brightest regions of the imagination that will touch on folklore, and urban legend, religious mythology and pop culture in equal measure.
Personifying this stew of influences is the eponymous hero - Philip Fetter, Saint Sinner - a man containing both a very worst and the very best " moral possibilities, and to is constantly striving to maintain a balance between the two. His associates - the infantile giant Bull Baby, the collage woman Mishmash, and Kento Canto, the inter-dimensional acrobat - are occasionally fellow adventures (and constant residents of the Saint's mansion in the the Vertresque), but Fetter's journey, like the agony of paradox which is his very life, is finally an experience he must share only with a few thousand readers....
It begins at midnight, with. Philip Fetter, an innocent man who has been driven to commit arbitrary murders by a psychotic spirit called by the Runesmith, an invisible enemy who constantly whispers in Fetter's ear.
Fetter almost murders his own father and mother but resists in the nick of time, and throws himself into a river to put an end to is miserable life. But he's dragged out by a strange woman called Regina. The Runesmith still resides in his head however, and it in his confused state Philip doesn't have the will to resist the malicious spirit's orders. He murders Regina, whose body blazes white as he does so. Her essence-or rather its essence, for Philip has murdered an angel - enters him, trapping the Runesmith in Phillip's soul.
Philip learns to draw on the powers in him, discovering that the presence of the two contradictory spirits has awakened extraordinary talents. He can advance or regress any living form, speeding up its evolution massively or returning it to its primal state. This is a dangerous skill, however. For one, he has yet has no control over the power. For another, the evolved or regressed form may be more dangerous than the form he touched in the first place.
He finds that his old life is untenable, exchanging it for a new life as Saint Sinner, a kind of patron saint of lost souls. He has, he realizes, a chance to change lives for the better, but if he misuses his gifts he could readily do more harm than good, so he has to tread carefully when he answers calls for help. There is a dark side to him - a side hungry for evil - and it must be controlled, or else tricked into submission. And it, in its turn, will prove manipulative as the months go by, time and time again attempting to blur the lines between good deeds and bad as tales of Saint Sinner's power spread throughout the Barkerverse.
St. Sinner's legend even reaches the earth, in the slums of Rio and Bangkok, in secret chapels at Lourdes, a new name has been added to the list of saviors. He appears surrounded by creatures in the process of being transformed; he has a halo and a forked tail and he is known by many names but most frequently perhaps as the Man Who Walks Between. Whether this will prove to be a blessed or a cursed condition only time, and our tales, will tell.