LINKS:

crimepaysinc.com

boneyardpress.net

myspace.com/hartfuckinfisher

Hart D. Fisher just does not fucking give up. In the ‘90s, he rocked the comic industry with stories and illustrations too shocking for your average churchgoing youngsters, and even spent some time running Glenn Danzig's comics outfit. Later, he proved himself worthy behind the sweat-streaked cameras of the porn world. Moving onto another venue, he began his own movie production company, Crime Pays Inc. Now he's turning to music videos, horror movies and primetime TV, hell-bent on proving that he can grab the entertainment industry by the balls and make people pay attention. He wasn’t coined "The Most Dangerous Man in Comics" for no reason, although the title should perhaps be altered now to encompass all of the paths he’s taken since the threadbare beginnings of Boneyard Press.

Hart started reading and drawing comics as a young kid, initially taking interest in Disney goodies like Jughead and Richie Rich. Anyone who's familiar with his work knows that, at some point in time, something inside his mind changed. "The oldest question that a writer gets is, 'Where do you get your ideas?' They always wanna know, 'Where does it come from?' I say real life."

Growing up on the south side of Chicago, it "wasn't always pleasant," he says. He was frequently getting into fights with other kids, usually more than one at a time. "I saw lots of violent things growing up, all around me."
Instead of becoming a miscreant, he turned the negativity he was experiencing around and he harnessed it. He wrote comics in school, many of them fledgling creations of stories he would expand on later in life. He began his own publishing house, Boneyard Press, while still in college. His first book, Dark Angel, was produced through Boneyard and the whole operation was funded in part by Hart's grandfather.

Hart's penchant for working with dark and "taboo" subjects soon started to get him noticed. When Jeffery Dahmer: An Unauthorized Biography Of A Serial Killer was published in 1992, the press went wild. He appeared on numerous talk shows, becoming villified nearly as much as Dahmer had been, by media and victims' families alike. It was then that he truly received the brunt end of artistic freedom. "People telling you they don't like you for your work; it's a weird experience. It's weird being damned."

During the media uproar over the Dahmer comic and at the time he was finishing his first feature film, The Garbage Man, his girlfriend was raped and murdered. "After Michelle had been murdered, I lost my mind--I went insane for a long time. I was writing these things, and I didn't know what they were. This was literally crazy writings on paper; little scraps of paper all over the house." These little scraps were eventually compiled into a poetry book. "Poems for the Dead came about sort of on accident. I didn't know I was a poet. It just kind of bled out of me." Hart's second book of poetry, Still Dead, was released a couple of years later.

By 1995, Hart had moved to Los Angeles to escape some of the demons that hounded him in Illinois. He began running Verotik, Glenn Danzig's line of comics, after getting to know the man in black. "He was into comic books, so I would bump into him at comic conventions every once in a while. When I got into publishing, I was doing journalism for various comic magazines, and one of them thought it would be great stunt casting to have me interview him. We hit it off pretty well."

Hart ran Verotik for six months, in that time releasing one of the most disturbing stories every published through Danzig's company, "A Taste of Cherry." He describes his time with Verotik as "an up and down ride," but he doesn't regret any of it. "I learned a lot working that job," he says.
He began working with porn while in Los Angeles, doing everything from running the camera to cleaning up afterwards. "I like adult. I enjoy the outlaw aspect of it, and hey, it's naked chicks!"

After his work cutting porno flicks for Drew Rose, now the head of production at Hustler, Hart had the idea to start his own production company. "I decided to create this company that was gonna be about making cool, controversial, interesting movies and videos and short films. I wanted to do a lot of what I had done in comics in movies, and I started Crime Pays Inc. to do that, and to make a little money at the same time." Crime Pays Inc. originally started as a post-production company, but they have now moved into production territory as well, recently completing work on a film entitled The Bunker.

In 2007, he helped create "the most controversial adult film in the last ten years," Club Satan: The Witches Sabbath. "It was written and directed by Shane Bugbee," he says, "who's a pretty crazy maniac in his own right. He was the last man made a priest in the Church of Satan by Anton Lavey before he died. This [movie] has a real black mass in it, and Matt plays a role. It's up for Most Outrageous Sex Scene for the AVN Award this year. [Unfortunately, Club Satan was ousted by Ass Blasting Felching Anal Whores at the AVNs. - JM] "It was horrendous. It was an insane project, but the result, it speaks for itself. It's a really good, evil horror porn. It's really grim. It's the only adult film I have ever put my real name on."

The film helps bridge the worlds of extreme music and extreme adult entertainment, featuring a video by black metal masters Dark Funeral, which Hart directed. "I'm really happy with the way that video came out. I did a regular, R-rated cut; I did an X-rated, porno cut; and then there's a third, Satanic cut, that's just...you couldn't show it in America. It's illegal. The only people who have those edits are [porn legend] Rob Black and Dark Funeral. A little black Christmas present I did for the guys."

Continuing his work in music videos, Hart recently shot and cut a music video for death metal legends Obituary. The video was done for "Evil Ways," a cut from the band's 2007 release Xecutioner's Return. "That was an amazing shoot. What's really helter-skelter is that the band, they're not really into music videos; they're into playing the music and doing the shows. The music video is not really their thing, so they really weren't looking forward to this at all. It was like pulling teeth. Once me and my crew got there, and once we got to sit down and talk with the band, it was really great." The video premiered on MTV's Headbangers Ball to rave reviews. From his LiveJournal blog, Hart says, "I'm fucking happy as hell with the video."

So, seemingly content to conquer everything in his path, what has Mr. Fisher got next on his agenda? "The devil's gonna get his fuckin' due now," he says. "I've kind of had what I've done in comics swept under the history books. If you read books written about comics in the '90s, and they talk about what happened in the '90s, there's nothing about what I did. I did books called Kill Image, I got sued by O.J., I was consistently creative. We put out a lot of stuff. The lead singer from My Chemical Romance worked for me when he was 16 years old, but there's no mention of that in his blog or in the history books." [MCR vocalist Gerard (then known as "Garry") Way's first published comic book, On Raven's Wings, was released through Boneyard Press in the '90s, yet the singer mysteriously appears to deny it.]

Hart's most ambitious adventure is soon to come. American Horrors, a television series that will focus on the American horror genre, is already in the works. "The show is set up to be about all things American horror," he relays. "I want to shine a spotlight on independent American filmmakers and examine the nature of horror itself. We're going to be bringing my comic book series, Flowers on the Razorwire, to the screen as an anthology series with our pilot directed by the world's first blind horror director, Joseph M. Monks.

Though his block of programming is currently scheduled for European television, Hart hopes to infiltrate other markets as well. "Hopefully we'll be able to bring this programming back to America. This is the kind of opportunity every horror filmmaker has been waiting for, including me. I've got a group of filmmakers that I'm assembling; it's going to make the horror world fucking shit.

"I'm going to come into horror and music videos and fuck it over the way I did the comics," Hart says. "We're at a really interesting point right now where music videos, technology and the internet are all going to something new, and I really want to be in the middle of all that. Filmmaking, film distribution and music videos are the things that I'm looking to really conquer, and I'm going to do it with a position of fucking fairness. You can be successful without raping everybody in the process. You don't have to rip off every artist that comes near you."