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The New York Daily News
May 15, 1994

Crow' author drew on his own life's miseries for graphic novel

NEW YORK - "It's not that I always expect the worst," says sad-eyed James O'Barr, author of the graphic novel The Crow . "It's just that when it happens, I'm not surprised. " Plenty of nonsurprises have heaped themselves on O'Barr, 34, the most recent being the death of Brandon Lee last year while filming the movie based on O'Barr's comic book.

"Everybody felt guilty in some respect, but for me it got to the point where I wished I'd never even written the book," says the Detroit author, looking like someone who had been slugged in the stomach. He lights a cigarette and continues.

Since Lee's death, O'Barr said, he's become good friends with Lee's fiancee, Eliza Hutton. "They were supposed to be married a week after the film, he was her soul mate and I understood what she was going through. "  Understood all too well.

After a hellish childhood spent in an orphanage till age 6 and then in the care of an adoptive family "that had a lot of spiritual connections to Sybil's," O'Barr left home at age 16. He found a job, an apartment and a girlfriend who was "the complete opposite" of him. "I've always had a dark sense of humor, but she was like pure sunlight. We were soul mates," he says. By 18, they were engaged.

By 19, he was alone. A drunken driver had killed his fiancee.

"I joined the seminary for six weeks," O'Barr recalls. "I wasn't overly religious. I just didn't want to think. I wanted some structure in my life. " When seminary didn't work, he joined the Marines. "I ended up in Berlin, and that's where I started the comic. " "The Crow" tells of a young couple murdered by junkies the night before their wedding. Because their love was so strong, the man returns from the dead to seek vengeance.

"I thought it'd be a catharsis if I could channel all this anger and frustration onto paper," O'Barr says, "and it turned out the exact opposite. I was narrowing my vision to the point where that was all I could concentrate on, and every page became a little death. " Those pages, now hanging at the Bess Cutler Gallery in Manhattan, get literally darker as the book progresses. But through them all runs a mordant sense of humor. For instance, one of his villains sports a smiley-face tattoo.ed his girlfriend got off with a suspended license.

Not that O'Barr still spends every day mourning his dead lover.

In fact, he found a wife, and she "is definitely not a second-place thing," he says. "She has her own special qualities. " They've been married eight years, during which time he has been an auto mechanic and even a medical student for a bit, always drawing comic-book covers on the side. With the success of The Crow , he finally can devote himself to art full-time, so he's working on a new graphic novel, Gothik .