Veteran genre actor Lance Henriksen is currently penning To Hell You Ride for Dark Horse Comics.
Henriksen is well known for his roles in sci-fi film and television, especially his roles in the Alien franchise and the X-Files spin-off, Millennium.
Lately his career has consisted mostly of vocal performance for cartoons, video games, and CGI features. He has a current ongoing role as General Tesler, the villain on the animated TRON: Uprising, alongside such performers as Paul Rubens, Bruce Boxlietner, Mandy Moore, and Elijah Wood.
Now, he’s getting his hands into sequential art writing with To Hell You Ride from Dark Horse Horror.
The ongoing comic line follows the story of a small town in Colorado which has been struck with a foul curse in revenge for a long-past deed. Henriksen is co-writing the book alongside Joseph Maddrey, a TV and film writer who also penned Henriksen’s biography, Not Bad for a Human.
Tom Mandrake, who has worked on many titles all over the industry, will pencil the book, and work on the covers, while Cris Peter, a frequent artist for several Marvel titles, will be on color duty.
The official synopsis from Dark Horse is thus:
A deadly curse plagues the small town of Telluride, melting the flesh from its victims—the violent revenge four warriors set in motion when their sacred burial grounds were disturbed for the sake of gold miners’ greed!
They’ve also released this trailer:
In a recent interview with io9, Henriksen discussed his inspiration for the title. “In the late 1960s, I ended up in Telluride, Colorado,” he told the geek culture magazine, “It wasn’t like the country club that it is now. It was very raw. Skiing was there, but snowboarders have now entirely overrun it. Back then, it was late at night, the town was empty, and it was winter. I was in a bar, and I’m sitting there, looking at people, wondering, ‘This is a box canyon at the end of the road. What are they doing here?’ I thought, ‘Well, they must be reincarnated miners and hookers from back in those days.’ At the same moment, a poem from Dylan Thomas hit me. And it was:
“‘I have heard many years of telling,
And many years should see some change.
The ball I threw while playing in the park
Has not yet reached the ground.’
” What it gave to me was that this place had a little bit of a cursed feeling about it. A curse that would [come to] fruition whenever it wanted to, and for whatever reasons it wanted to. You go back to something terrible in the past, and the ramifications are still happening now. It’s like ecology in a way.”
The full interview has a lot more from the veteran actor about his career, his methods, and his inspiration. You can check out the whole thing here.
To Hell You Ride #1 is set to hit shelves in December 2012 from Dark Horse Horror. It can be pre-ordered on their website.
