The simple comic was printed on A5 paper that felt thin and cheap at the time. The printing was blurry, the artwork crude, and each issue barely totaled 30 pages. But all of that only made the comics seem more mysterious, more terrifying, like the rough edges were left that way to match the graphic scenes contained within.

I can vividly remember the first time I saw hell. I was a kid, barely eight years old, when I discovered this tiny comic book filled with some of the most haunting images to ever cross my young eyes. The comic was called "Siksa Neraka" or roughly "Hell Torture," and its vivid depictions of the tortures that awaited sinners in hell still makes me shudder with fear—if only a little bit.

And Ema Wardana illustrated them all. Each page was chock full of crudely drawn naked human bodies suffering some of the worse tortures imaginable. Picture long-haired men stuck on hooks and stabbed with hot iron spikes. Blistered flesh smoking under a giant red-hot iron. The tongues of liars cut out of their mouthes. Limbs hacked off to regenerate and get cut off again.

The plot of "Siksa Neraka" was pretty minimal. The comic was written by MB Rahimsyah AR and illustrated by Ema Wardana—whose darkly twisted imagination was the main reason behind "Siksa Neraka"'s infamy. The comic is basically a Muslim version of Dante's Inferno sketched out in the style of a low-class underground zine. There are seven levels of hell according to Islam, from Jahanam, the hall of light sins, all the way to Hawiyah, the deepest, darkest hell reserved for the worst sinners.

Every sin in the Islamic hell of "Siksa Neraka" had its own uniquely awful torture. And for a select few, the kafir or unbelievers, it was a hell with no escape. One of the most-terrifying scenes was of a sinner being forced to drink from a lake of blood and pus. I mean come on, could anything be worse than that?

"Those comics are basically torture porn," Hikmat Darmawan, a comics expert, told VICE. "They focusing on the gory exploitation of violence, just like EC Comics did in US in the 1950s. Basically, it's about the religious doctrines found in our society. There's a moral message there and the comic acts as an explicit visualization."

Religious themed comics like "Siksa Neraka" started to hit Indonesia sometime in the 1950s, said Hikman, who has sent years studying and collecting these comics. These hell comics arrived on the market at a time when stories about pencak silat masters and prophets were in high demand. It took years for "Siksa Neraka" to find its audience.

"Siksa Neraka" didn't start booming until the 1970s and its popularity lasted until early 1990s," Hikman said. "At a time, when Indonesian comics were about to be taken over by Japanese manga, "Siksa Neraka" actually managed to survive. This means there was a big demand for it outside of the mainstream book stores."