Saturday, May 17, 2014

The Grating Game: Ash vs Hack/Slash: A Review

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.


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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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