Army of Darkness vs Hack/Slash #6

This series was wrought with delays, employed immature tropes and the last issue annoyed me to no end. But this was the last issue and I’d pressed on this long. So after Cassie betrayed Ash and left him in ancient Greece, what would become of her?

Cassie takes on Britt Cilentro and heads back to the Ig’nant Mime Squad concert where overweight and underwashed teens had their sodas spiked and turned into Black Paladin stab happy dombies (that’s a demon-zombie, kids). This issue really tugged at my heart strings, Cassie is willing to cross time and space, fight deadites, cult leaders, suped up GI Joe wannabes and more to save Vlad from his fate. So she goes back to where Vlad died. But Ash, in a moment of maturity tells Cassie that he’s been down this road. But some other awful thing always happens. If she saves Vlad; what if she doesn’t marry Margaret and adopt Sandra? What if she has a whole different life that no one else remembers? 

And Cassie listens, and she doesn’t save Vlad. And she goes home with her wife and Ash babysits while they see the new Denzel movie. 

So I give Tim Seeley credit. Because he’d really lost me with #5. I was PISSED. Here’s the thing, though; it didn’t feel totally authentic until Ash asked Cassie to call him if she and Margaret ever wanted to make a reverse Oreo. 

That’s Tim Seeley’s cover. None of that happened. But metaphorically it makes perfect sense.

Comicbook Catch-up Extravaganza! Numero Dos!

Featuring Army of Darkness vs. Hack/Slash #5, Lazarus #6, Ms. Marvel #1

Army of Darkness vs Hack/Slash #5

I’ve really enjoyed this series. Despite the chronic late release of the issues it really maintained momentum for me because I loved LOVED seeing Ash and Cassie play off of eachother. The 2 badasses breaking heads with their unconventional weapons, enemies and friends from each series. Fun. Good. This one flew in the frigging face of all of that. The end of last issue featured their hook-up. Cassie’s in a committed relationship with Margaret- so one of two things spring to mind for me: 1) she’s trying to confuse Ash or 2) the writer is a shallow idiot who thinks bisexuals are all sluts. Either way she’s deceitful. 

The duo get to Ancient Greece, turns out Britt the cult leader went back in time and met with Akakios who was an alchemist and “created the principals that the cult followed” and icing on the cherry hate cake? He killed Cassie’s old partner Vlad. They throw a wild party in Ancient Greece to attract Akakios and his cult and deadites and they burn ’em to a crisp. Cassie goes berserker and beelines for Akakios himself, “Changing the past is bad” Ash says, Cassie KO’s him and he knows he’s been played. But not only did she play Ash…she played Margaret. To “Bring back the only thing she ever loved. Vlad.” 

WHAT THEE FUCK?

Thankfully, issue 6 is the last. Because fuck all that shit. Ash and Cassie are now enemies at odds for possession of the Necronomicon.

Ms. Marvel #1

Kamala Khan, teenage supe, writer of Avengers fanfic, shapeshifter and Muslim. Her family is varying degrees of assimilating and she just wants to be a “regular teen” like her classmates and go to parties. So she sneaks out to a party with boys and booze on the waterfront. Her BFF Bruno tries to get her out of there, and she’s all “MYOB” and storms off.. then a crazy for starts to permeate the area. Kamala Khan gets KO’d and has a drugged out dream about the Avengers, and her homegirl, Captain Marvel. And she wishes, “I want to be beautiful and awesome and butt kicking and less complicated. I want to be you.” And Carol Danvers says, “All right, kid. As fate would have it, you’re about to get the kind of total reboot most people only dream about.”

Epic debut. Kudos to G. Willow Wilson for calling out concern trolls and stereotypes. So pumped to find out what’s up with the fog, or what’s up with Captain Marvel being her fairy godmother. I repurposed that photo from Jeremy Roberts’s deviantart. http://jprart.deviantart.com/art/All-New-Ms-Marvel-412376037

Lazarus #6

Flashback again, to mini-Forever doing pushups on her thumbs and conjugating Latin verbs, she’s taking her training with Marisol too far.

In the present she wakes up to an alarm, takes her regimen and then she receives the text again. “He is not your father, this is not your family.” Joanna is still sporting a black eye and playing innocent. Flash to Montana, we see the family whose home was destroyed. The cost to rebuild will have them taxed out for the foreseeable future. Back in LA, a woman propositions the guards in exchange for food and others break in and set up a device to hack the keypad. They steal canisters of acetylene. Forever catches them in the act, but she directs her wrath at the guards taking advantage of a hungry woman. Forever asks her where the others have taken the canisters. And the Barrets leave Montana for Denver in hopes that their children can work for the Carlyles. Will this play an integral role? Will they start an uprising? Will Forever discover what’s really happening outside of her family? So many questions. 

Rucka has built this insane world. It’s bleak, it’s dark… and sadly, it’s very very real. Carlyles have infinite wealth and resources and meanwhile we see families giving up all they’ve got, their time, their dignity, their land, their children, they sell themselves out. It’s very blood and guts, but no major revelations this issue.

Army of Darkness vs. Hack/Slash #4

Yay, this series is back on schedule! This one was originally supposed to be out in October

 

subscription cover by Ken Haeser.

Ash and Cassie are on the hunt for more pages from the Necronomicon. Washing off goopy blood in the motel sink they meet up with a friend of Cassies; Cat …who travels with a dog. She’s a government employee and she has another tip. In this area over the past three weeks, four children have gone missing. What’s really weird is that they are all related to Benjamin Blackswell, who lived in Stamford, CT between 1644 and 1701. Witch trials + Necronomicon + strangely high rates of disappearances? yeah, sounds right.

Especially cool? the fact that since that was 300+ years ago: no one would have made that connection. But for Cat, running genealogies is a “hobby” making her meticulous and Sherlockian… and a blonde hottie in a pink sweater who travels with a dog so fierce that Ash mistakes it for a mole horse deadite. …it is actually a demon dog, which Cassie travelled with circa 2011, Bomb Queen versus Hack/Slash era.

The issue begins with a flashback to the past where Sarah Toothaker is saved from certain death (being hanged for being a witch). She’s not a witch, she just denied the advances of the Magistrate and it earned her a spot on the gallows. But somehow she appears in the future, in a pile of bones, with a man who knows her name. Hmmm…

Sarah has some out of wedlock, unheard of in her time, intercourse with this man. The man is the former lead singer for JesusFist. During a tour, they stopped at a flea market and he found one of Sarah’s journals and through her words: he fell in love with her. 

Cassie and Ash get a little tense (Ash was trying to make a lesbian threesome joke. Cassie didn’t approve… because he fetishizes the hell out of her relationship. Not cool.) But to lighten the mood, he teaches her to moon cars. 

Then they see a deadite man-bat.

Peter (from JesusFist) is chaining Sarah to a stake… she’s blindfolded. Ready to hang are the kidnapped children. Peter is feeding them to the deadite. Paying a tithe for bringing Sarah back. Sarah is outraged and disgusted. Their heritage, being descendants of Blackswell is not their fault. As the deadite is about to get his meal… Cassie arrives.

She blows off the deadite’s head, makes some threats and then Ash falls in a hole full of deadites that try to drag him to hell.. oh. boy. The deadites, not satisfied without their four soul meal..

Then Sarah starts to go deadite. The souls were an exchange for hers. Peter cries that Sarah was born in the wrong time. Sarah says she would rather die. Peter waffles… and so Ash takes matters into his own hands, behinding the 17th century maiden.

Cassie looks remorsefully at the brokenhearted Peter. He’d tried to find a better way, but that was the only spell that they would sell him. 

Cassie and Ash drop the five children (still with their heads covered at a near by Qwik Stop. The boys are pretty unfazed. Cassie tells them that no one will believe the demon stuff, that they should say it was drug dealers or terrorists. 

Then… Cassie Hack and Ash make out!? Ash protests “What about your girlfriend? You guys got that cute little kid–“

Elsewhere- The redhaired cult leader is getting it on when the book calls to her. The necronomicon tells her that “A new history begins”

The villain and victim in this issue was awesome. Peter fell in love with Sarah for her mind, through her words. …goofily, because her “poetry” was “so metal” 

But Cassie and Ash making out? I hope there is some angle. After repeatedly having her same-sex relationship fetishized by the pervy and being highly offended by it… them hooking up… is nonsense. Honestly, the whole idea of it is so bullshit. I would rather they go the “friends forever” route instead of …whatever is happening. If they become love interests… I’m going to be mad! And everyone should be. It’s been hinted at that Cassie is bi -and that’s all good and fine, but Ash making “jokes” about her sexuality and making out with her while she’s unconscious… he deserves a knuckle sandwich, not kisses. Please please please… move away from this. It’s inappropriate and degrading to have Cassie’s committed homosexual relationship presented as temporary and fleeting for laughs for horror fans. STAHP

Army of Darkness vs. Hack/Slash #3

It took super long for this to come out and then I waited a week and a half to pick it up. Was it worth the wait?

Yessir.

Issue three gets a new voice, that of Cassie Hack, serial killer killer. The final girl. 

The cult priestess is selling off the Necronomicon before Cassie and Ash come around.She sells it to a Mr. Raash, and offers him a deal -a huge discount in return for vanquishing “a skinny goth chick and a chinny pervert.” He accepts the deal and sets off with 3 deadly soldiers (and of course reads a page from the book of the dead to supe them up a bit.”

Meanwhile, our heroes are socking it to mini-clones and what not. And we’re reminded why Cassie is along for the ride when she receives a call from her partner, Margaret, and baby Sandra. They go stay in a hotel and go to their separate rooms and not too long after they are attacked by the most “alive” seeming deadites yet. A woman who looks like a panther, a well armed man with a snake tongue AND the world’s only Arctic Ninja. 

Instead of getting their heads blown off, Cassie reads some pages from the book of the dead. -Now how that works without absolutely heinous repercussions? I don’t know.

It’s a fun issue and I like having Cassie as the narrator this time. Seeing her opinion of Ash their friendship was awesome (and there were some mini-clones pandering to those who think they should be more than friends), and Margret making an appearance to remind us that Cassie is doing this for her fam. Definitely the best one yet.

Check out Variant Cover B (my personal fave) by Ben Templesmith, artist of 30 Days of Night. 

I’m really hoping the next issue of this doesn’t take as long to come out.

“Girls Don’t Like Comic Books” & other hot nonsense

This post has been brewing in my cranium for a while. More so since last week when I went to pick up my comics and this dumb dumb behind me said “I can’t believe girls by comic books” in front of me with my stack and the girl working there. And he follows up with: “Cute girls, too.”  And this isn’t that surprising, it happens all the time. The stereotype that how people happen to look has to have some effect on the kind of things they are supposed to like. Of course Mr. I-have-no-goddamn-social-skills-and-have-no-idea-about-what-girls-like is feeding into his own comic book nerd stereotype, but I digress.

I didn’t read comics for years. Years and years.

And then this:

And I said, “Oh HELL YEAH!” (even though I will say that I got PO’d at comments on CNN.com where dudes were all “feminists better support this, they say they want equality but then they don’t like Women’s MMA, women won’t read this” here’s the deal: feminists and ALL WOMEN and really ALL HUMANS like different assortments of things. I don’t have to like everything. I don’t have to like something because an empowered woman is there if it’s not the type of thing I would otherwise like. I don’t watch MMA. You know what feminists don’t love? When men tell them they HAVE TO love something. Seriously.)

But since I was at the comic book store, I found some other stuff to dig:

 

Now look at these. Look at all the females! And they are all different!

When people bring up female fronted comic books that fail, someone undoubtedly says “Red SheHulk is cancelled” Red She-Hulk is a knock off of a knock of. Red Sonja is a fierce Barbarian and adventurer, Cassie Hack is a serial killer killer out for revenge, sharp tongued enough to keep Ash to his toes. While both females are scantily clad and quick witted no one would mistake one for the other. Toni Chu bites people to see the future and works for NASA, the females of Extinction Parade bite because their vampires, Mercy wolfs out to save the soul of her dead lover. Lazarus main protag Forever Carlyle who was considered “too butch” for one male fan (who got schooled hard by Greg Rucka) would surely not be raiding Sonja or Cassie’s closets, she’s a genetic experiment who can take bullets and barely miss a beat, she isn’t funny like Cassie or serious and experienced like Sonja… because women aren’t all the same.

That why “the all girl X-men” is so frigging good. The characters have different strengths, speak differently, have their own faults, interact in ways that you think they would based on previous events. Not just “I’d better like it because there are women there.”

And then today I read this in which rape and victimization of women that are so present in comics is passed off a “okay” because it’s not “for women.” The author of the article rightly points out that it is not okay for men and young boys to be repeatedly shown rape scenes because it normalizes this behavior and, frankly, women should be concerned if men enjoy reading unadulterated rape scenes.

…”comic creators Todd McFarlane (Spawn), Mark Millar (Kick-Ass) and Gerry Conway (The Punisher) have unabashedly inferred that it doesn’t matter how they portray women in their comic creations, because comic books are not for women, anyway. “…

WHHHHHAAAAAAAATTTT? No, jackasses… your books are not for women, who you have no respect for, clearly. But there are plenty of good female centered comics out right now (some by women and some not). Why creators are trying to appeal to less of the population instead of more, I don’t know. But if you write like crap… I won’t read it. And if you build it, they will come, fuckers. “Women liking comic books” isn’t the responsibility of the women. I won’t like a female character who’s a default knock off, or who has no relationships with other women. I will not like a book that uses rape to advance the plot. I will not read one dimensional characters.

It’s like I expect you to write good or something.

Related articles

• Comics And Chromosomes (dish.andrewsullivan.com)
• Mark Millar’s rape comments, ‘Superheroes’ TCA panel: The comics world responds (herocomplex.latimes.com)