WARNING: The following contains SPOILERS.
Dynamite Comics recently published a title that adds onto
the Army of Darkness mythos with panache, humor and well-written violence, that
improves upon the characters’ relationships and creates rip-roaring adventures
for Ash that does justice to his source canon.
That title is Ash and the Army of Darkness. But today, we’re talking about Army of
Darkness vs Hack/Slash.
The problems with this crossover are numerous. I’ll start with how the series treats Cassie
Hack, one of our protagonists. Coming
into the comic blind, I really liked her, and I actually went and backread some
of her storylines to prepare myself for what I might be in store for. Cassie’s a “serial killer killer”, the
daughter of the infamous Lunch Lady, an undead serial killer herself who
murdered her daughter’s bullies in Cassie’s name. Dedicating herself to protecting innocents
from Serial Killers (sort of undead/demonic former murderers who stalk the
world), Cassie and her partner Vlad roam the earth killing the killers.
By the end of the series, with Vlad killed due to an error
on her part, Cassie settles down with Georgia to raise their daughter. This picture of domestic bliss is instantly ruined
when Ash stumbles into their house, engages in a battle with Cassie, and tells
her that he needs her to help him track down missing pages from the
Necronomicon.
Ash and Cassie’s union should have been a match made in
heaven. They’re both half-mad,
gore-loving, one-liner spouting badasses with tough backstories who deep down
inside are good people who want to be loved.
There are two extremely fatal flaws in this stew that ruins
the entire banquet.
The first is that Tim Seeley can’t write Ash Williams for
beans. Know how you can relate to Ash’s
goofy tough guy attitude, root for him because he’s human but also kinda
dorky? Well, Seeley chooses to play up
the dorky portion of Ash’s personality to ridiculous levels, turning him into a
fool who’s afraid of dogs, throws tantrums when he can’t get into closed
western theme parks, and has protracted conversations with his wang. He has no qualms being attracted to Cassie
even though he knows she has a family back home – in fact, he makes
unfortunately racist jokes about “making an oreo” with Georgia and Cassie (did
you guess Georgia’s a POC?). Watching
him flail around is cringeworthy, and he rarely, if ever, exudes the right tone
of silly machismo that’s vital to the character.
The other is the issue’s hyperfocus on the inevitable
Ash/Cassie hookup. We’re told how much
Georgia means to Cassie, but the narrative starts to pull away from that,
telling us how vital slaying is to Cassie, how she and Ash make such a good
team and how much she’s secretly felt choked by the domesticity of it all. They lay on the promise of a sexual hookup
between the two so thickly, to the point of having mini Ashes and Cassies mate
upon the dirt floor of a saloon after a battle.
All of the how-de-hoo about this distracts from the whole
protect-humanity-from-the-necronomicon plot.
It reduces Cassie to a fetish model for Ash’s desperate longing – a sexual
longing so desperate that it subsumes every other prime directive before the
character for the majority of its run.
One yearns for him to rediscover the pleasure of masturbation.
Naturally, Ash isn’t allowed such relief; he and Cassie hook
up just before they find the final pages of the book – and once Cassie has
those Seeley hits us with another plot twist that makes little to no sense.
Cassie, you see, during the course of the final two missions
realizes that she misses Vlad, and that it’s her guilt that’s holding her back
from a happy future with Georgia. How
she magically comes to this conclusion makes absolutely no sense, as its’ given
absolutely no foreshadowing whatsoever, but she takes the pages and opens a
time porthole back to the day of Vlad’s death and tries to prevent it. This leads to Ash tracking Cassie down and
pleading with her not to change the past, because he’s tried it and it hasn’t
worked for him. This is a nice scene,
and it’s followed up by the most bizarre scene ever.
For we learn that not only has Cassie avoided telling
Georgia about how she cheated on her with Ash, she’s also let Ash babysit their
child. And he does so, as if any
feelings he had brewing for her have suddenly evaporated into nothingness. Ash offers one more time to make an ‘oreo’
with the two women before happily heading on his way. The end.
These aren’t people, these are stick figures.
The infidelity issue really sticks in my teeth. That Cassie wouldn’t tell the woman who’s
basically her wife that she cheated on her might be understandable; to see her
dismiss the sexual encounter she had with Ash with a simple shrug is pretty
gross and deplorable, making this violation to her relationship with Georgia
just one of those things that happened to reach for an objective that she never
even accomplished makes the series feel like a total waste of time. All of this happens and there’s absolutely
zero impact; interpretable as an awesome thing from a shipper standpoint but it
leaves the reader feeling as if they’ve embarked on a pointless excursion. The Ash of this series is a pretty emotionally
devolved character (even less so than his movie canon counterpart), but come on
– he thought Cassie was starting to fall for him. Ash isn’t emotionally mature enough of a guy
to simply sit there and babysit her child after all of that, even after an
understandable betrayal. Seeley trying
to shove a happy ending feels like trying to cram an elephant through a
keyhole; it doesn’t fit.
It’s a shame that Seeley failed to understand the root of Ash’s
character. I’d love to read a
Hack/Slash vs AOD issue written by the writer behind Ash and the AOD. THAT would be something to behold.
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