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Hack/Slash Issue One
Pictures by Emily Stone We all make mistakes, and sometimes they’re big ones. But in my defence, when you’re in a convention hall and you come across a booth that seems to be predominantly occupied by very attractive young women with more tattoos and piercings among them than the original line up of Motley Crue, it’s only natural to assume that it’s the Suicide Girls booth. Luckily, the kind folks from Devil’s Due Publishing didn’t hold it against me. In fact DDP has been great to me since I first contacted them about covering their comics for the site last year, and have provided me with more review copies than any other publisher so far, so it’s with a great deal of thanks to DDP, especially Marketing VP Susan Bishop and Staff Illustrator/Hack/Slash creator Tim Seely that I was able to get my hands of a copy of the first issue of the long awaited Hack/Slash ongoing series before it hits the stands in May. Of course if you’re asking what the hell Hack/Slash- the ongoing adventures of “slasher slasher” Cassie Hack and her irrepressible sidekick Vlad- is, you must be new to Binary Culture as it’s made up about a third of our comics coverage over the last year. When I talked to Tim Seely at the 2006 SDCC after substituting sleep for Red Bull and repeated readings of the first Hack/Slash trade paperback, he described the property as being the kind of idea that everyone wishes they had and probably had on the tip of their tongue, but he got to first. The premise of the comic up until now has been that Cassie Hack is an iteration of the Slasher Movie Survivor, the one (girl) left alive at the end of the rampage of a supernatural killer like Jason Voorhees or Freddy Krueger, only the slasher in this case turned out to be her own mother back from the grave. That experience led her to grow up and take on the mission of tracking down and killing others like her mother, serial killers returned from the grave in gruesome new forms with an agenda as far removed from Bill Cosby’s Ghost Dad as you could get. What’s important about this issue is that it marks the beginning of Hack/Slash as an ongoing series, as up until now it’s been published sporadically as mostly one shots and specials before being collected into trade paperbacks. Despite that, Hack/Slash has never come up lacking in character development, which seemed very curious to me when I began reading the series. When I got back to my hotel room with my copy of the first Hack/Slash trade in hand purchased a couple hours earlier as research material for the interview I had booked with Tim for the next day, I was expecting to come away from it with a handful of questions about his influences and the continuing direction of the comic at best, but I was sorely mistaken. By the time I was finished the comic, I had as wide a range of questions for Tim that I did for (American Virgin creator/writer) Steven T Seagle and the same burning curiosity behind the questions. He and his various and talented collaborators presented a comic that went well beyond being a vehicle for visceral thrills to explore the characters and their situations engagingly and honestly. I came away from that convention, and that summer, with a much clearer understanding and appreciation of horror comics thanks to Ross Campbell’s The Abandoned, Hack/Slash, and Robert Kirman’s The Walking Dead. As Kirkman wrote in the forward to the first Walking Dead trade, real horror goes beyond the immediate situations to give us insight into ourselves as human beings. Thus the more you read of Cassie and the better you get to know her, the more compelling and real she becomes. When I first met the character, I was drawn to the fact that she wears a lot of black and kills things very, very dead with a hell of an attitude, and I’m sure I would have kept reading if that’s all she was, but as I got deeper into the comic I came to appreciate that everything Tim does with the character is very deliberate and is not to be taken for granted or at face value. Key to this is Cassie’s ongoing anxiety about what she does. While she rationalizes to herself and to Vlad that she’s clearly the good guy in the situation and she’s killing these slashers as a service to society and the would be victims, she can’t help but to question her own motives and whether or not she has in fact become a slasher herself, even going so far as to wonder at the possibility of her returning from the dead when she finally does die. But Cassie’s musings aren’t always so metaphysical, probably the most interesting scenario prior to the launching of the ongoing series was Cassie and Vlad infiltrating a resort during spring break to find and stop a slasher praying on the hedonistic college students vacationing there (Girls Gone Dead). At first, as Cassie goes undercover as a maid, she questions why she would want to protect her peers when they seem to have few traces of intelligence or values, but the nature of slasher and her interactions with the students push her in wildly different directions with no clear answer in sight. The story ends without any preaching, whether it be the familiar countercultural condemning of the popular kids or the nauseating Hollywood ugly duckling turns prom queen cliché. Instead it leaves the reader with the sense that we live with the consequences of the lifestyles we choose, and there are just as many drawbacks to our own as there are enticing aspects to the ones we love to hate. So if he can accomplish so much outside of an ongoing series, one might ask if Tim Seely really does need one to do justice to Hack/Slash. Well the first issue answers that question with a resounding yes. Seely settles into the series comfortably and right off the bat radically redefines how he presents Cassie’s “origin” and the story behind her mother. While in many of the previous comics Cassie’s origin was told in a TV like flashback that captured just the basic details, the first issue of the ongoing series takes the first steps towards truly fleshing out the back story by going deeper into Cassandra’s point of view as a child and showing her mother both as the gruesome killer and tragic, overprotective but loving parent to Cassie. He also manages to cram in a brutal interrogation scene, the stark contrast between Cassie’s tough exterior, and her more genuinely emotional self, the makings of a major revelation about her past, and finally a brand new slasher to hunt down, and all in twenty one pages. So in a month’s time I know where I’ll be, at my LCS with a copy of Hack/Slash #1 under my arm. DDP were generous enough to let me read it for free, but everyone involved earned my financial as well as moral support. That and I want that cover in my collection. It’s a damn good one. Hack/Slash #1 will be available May 9th from Devil's Due Publishing. Mark Osborne, Editor in Chief of Binary Culture, is not a motherfucking happy kitten. |
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