#pulp action

THE GIRL FROM RIO (jess Franco, 1969)

Cover by Stefano Caselli and Emilio Laiso.

Today I’ll be reviewing “Hack/Slash: Son of Samhain,” a miniseries (though labeled incorrectly as Volume 1 despite being cancelled) that acts as a sequel to the original “Hack/Slash” timeline that ended in 2013. Here’s the creative team: Michael Moreci and Steve Seeley on the script with direction by series creator Tim Seeley; art by Emilio Laiso; colors by K. Michael Russell; and lettering by Chris Crank (Crank!). The entire series is published by Image Comics.

A warning: given this series is a sequel to the main comics, expect spoilers on the Tim Seeley run, especially the events of the second ongoing series that ran on Image Comics from 2011 to 2013. The fact that this volume is labeled as “Volume 1” does make it seem like a jumping on point, but technically it is not. If you do want the actual beginning, the better position to start from is either the first Omnibus edition or, in smaller trades, the “First Cut” volume. Essentially, “Son of Samhain” can be considered a sixteenth volume of the main comics (after 13 main volumes [collected in five omnibuses], “My First Maniac,” and “Army of Darkness vs. Hack/Slash”) and a technical prelude to the later “Resurrection” series that began in 2017.

First, it seems best to look in on the basic concept of this arc. After the tragic events of “Final,” the conclusion of the main “Hack/Slash” comics, Cassie seemed to have settled down with Margaret Crump as live-in girlfriends and parents to the orphaned Cassandra “Sandra” Krank. Despite seemingly having moved past the deaths in her life, Cassie has trouble with the quiet life, and instead has, after certain issues (to be discussed below), left her lover and become a bounty hunter in Texas, having cut off all ties to her former life aside from Catherine “Cat” Curio of Cat and Dog Inc. (formerly, and later again known as Cat and Dog Investigations). Even the relative stability of her bounty hunter job is ruined when an aged monster hunter named Delroy recruits her to face down an army of genuine subterranean monsters (unlike the usual slashers to which she is more accustomed) that look and act not unlike classic fantasy Orcs in the vein of J.R.R. Tolkein, albeit at times somewhat smarter.

In general, the feel of the story therefore shifts from a horror comic to a classic two-fisted tales pulp story on some level. Due to Delroy’s influence, Cassie is shown more as an action heroine than a huntress of horrors, facing down armies with only some difficulty. The closest that the series got to this type of thing before was in the ‘Monster Baiting’ arc of the second ongoing, with a bit of it present in ‘Sons of Man’ from the first ongoing.

On another hand, the Black Lamp Society does show up, but are much more openly villainous, with the group shown outright saying to Cassie, when pressed, that they are working to bring up Samhain’s evil in conjunction with the efforts of the aforementioned monsters to resurrect a monstrous god, rather than to continue his work of “purging the children of Bacchus.” Of course, this is only a small group, and could easily be either a random splinter faction that found the scientific work that acts as a major part of this arc, or even a way of demonstrating how the cult has degenerated since the fall of their “murder messiah.”

With its very different feel and certain changes in characterization, it’s easy to tell why some fans look down on this arc of the comics. However, while it does take some breaking into, “Son of Samhain” is not necessarily a bad story at all, and is actually quite fun, even if it does take a large part of the arc to get to the most fun, interesting part of the team dynamics.

Our next focus is on our protagonist, Cassandra “Cassie” Hack.

Cassandra “Cassie” Hack has changed somewhat since her last outing as the Serial Killer Killer in “Army of Darkness vs. Hack/Slash.” Despite how it seemed she could have a family with Margaret Crump and Cassandra “Sandra” Krank, that she could be happy and move past her problems, that’s simply not the case. Much as with many other parts of the “Hack/Slash” horror epic, reality ensues with a vengeance. She never has gone into therapy (no, Doctor Edmund Gross does not count) for her countless issues, and her hereditary slasher bloodline doesn’t help either (if that part of her is still latent). Having walked out on her happiness due to her lingering post-traumatic stress disorder, she has taken to a freelance job as a bounty hunter, seemingly based in Texas, has taken up improvised weapons like a lug wrench instead of her signature bat (temporarily), and has picked up some new skills like lockpicking along the way, along with, for whatever reason, having decided against using firearms in her hunts anymore. Even her fashion style differs, with her putting her hair behind her ears instead of letting it hang in bangs in front of one eye, and having traded in her primarily goth, highly revealing ensemble for tight black or white shirts, jeans, and hooded sweatshirts that do not reach her midriff.

It is perhaps best to let Ms. Hack herself give the explanation of why she did this, as she does to Delroy when pressed. “I was in a relationship with someone I cared for, deeply. What we had, it was good. It was healthy. But what’s a relationship? It’s a shared illusion. You and this other person, you build a world within the world. Or maybe outside the world. I couldn’t do it. And it wasn’t that I was bored, or that I was, like, damaged. None of the Psych-101 bullshit. I’ve seen too much. When I close my eyes, I’m back to my days hunting down slashers. And that’s never going to go away. I know that now.”

Her speech can be unpacked into separate pieces, each of which contributes to her personality when we first see her again.

On the one hand, there’s her talk about relationships, and how she fundamentally does not believe in them. Over the course of the start in particular, before she went back into hunting nonhumans, she continuously uses terms like how a relationship is “playing make-believe” or related words. As a nomadic young woman by nature, she of course has trouble settling down. She can try, but even in her darker thoughts during “Army of Darkness vs. Hack/Slash,” she seemed very willing to keep away her girlfriend to go right back into hunting, even if it was just to solve a problem for the time being. Her problems with intimacy go even deeper by this point in her life, as one panel of the title card shows, with her not even going for the random one-night stands she attempted in “Final” or used as seduction in “Army of Darkness vs. Hack/Slash.” Much like her early days, people who hit on her are likely to be hit in return, either having broken bones or being knocked out. This kind of regression is sad, but hardly surprising given her plethora of issues.

Next comes her post-traumatic stress disorder. She’s had it ever since her mom’s death (or at least since the second time), and it, along with a hefty guilt complex, has been driving her ever since on one level or another. Couple that with the sheer horror of the things she ran into during her career, and you’ve got a pretty messed up mindset, with enough symptoms to officially diagnose her with the chronic variant of the disorder. Every one of her memories would be tainted at this point, anyway, from her loving time with Margaret Crump and Sanny connecting to the slasher menace, to her attraction to the Samhain personality in Akakios, to many, many other things. It’s no surprise that the only people she lets herself still keep in contact with are those who will directly help her hunts, even for normal people.

Notably, her antisocial personality disorder has been severely downplayed with the exception of her willingness to kill people and not feel any remorse about doing so. Even she admits that part of her life is not normal for people, but blames it on the Black Ambrosia.

In fact, shifting blame is another part of her earlier life that carries over, though it may be a little difficult for people to see due to being relatively downplayed compared to other the instances in her teen years and the first year or two of her twenties. The main focus of this blame shift is in her choice of names, specifically for some people in her past. She has gone back to calling Margaret Crump “Georgia,” her alias as a stripper, a name she only really used as a means of showing some distance before they became a couple. Before, she only really did that to either protect Margaret’s privacy or because they were not close enough for her to feel it had merit, but her decision to go back to using that name shows that she is trying to externalize all of her feelings and act as though they were never real at all, despite some pretty blatant evidence to the contrary. Another example is in calling Akakios “Samhain,” the identity of his amnesic self-preservation-based personality after which she had lusted. Much like how she blamed Akakios for “seducing her” despite her being the one to come on to Samhain on almost every occasion, calling him “Samhain” seems to be her means of establishing distance. In the case of the name being used elsewhere, it is entirely possible that the others of the Black Lamp Society consider him to be a “reborn” Akakios, but it’s admittedly slightly harder to swallow for returning readers.

However, Cassie’s attempts to shift blame do not mean she is without remorse, though not for lack of trying. In a one-page hallucination of Margaret, she seems to be completely aware, on some level, that what she is doing is bad for her and she should go home to her lover, but just argues with herself over it instead of accepting her own guilty conscience. The result is that Cassie is, as ever, a conflicted character, one who does awful things people would hate her for, and makes decisions people find aggravating, but is filled with a sense of tragedy that makes her difficult to avoid pitying.

Now, let’s discuss her supporting cast this time around: Delroy and October “Ocky” Bourne.

First, we have Delroy, the first sidekick type. A big, older man, heavily muscled, especially in comparison to Cassie’s still relatively slight frame, it’s easy to see what kind of role he is shaped up to play from the very beginning, something so obvious that when Catherine “Cat” Curio arrives with the Nef lowbeast (read: hellhound) Pooch for a brief time, she notes he fits the bill of Cassie’s sidekicks. However, his comparisons to previous partners end there. Rather than favor blades to contrast against Cassie using firearms, the positions are actually reversed, with his primary arsenal being in the form of a shotgun and various explosives, in no small part a likely reason why he has survived so long in his chosen profession of a more general monster hunter (as opposed to Cassie being primarily a slasher slayer).

Third to the team is the eponymous son of Samhain, Ocky, or as the concept art calls him, October Bourne. Essentially an eight-year-old clone of Akakios formed on the very same island that was the main location of the ‘Sons of Man’ arc of the original comic, Ocky was created from some of Akakios’ DNA when he was Samhain, in a secret project underwent by Samhain’s first known lover and eventual victim, Ava Park, while she was working under the watchful eye of the monstrous, but completely human Andrew Rodin on projects like his “Venus” models of the Sons of Man program. The entirety of the reason for his existence is unclear, but some things are not. For instance, he is borderline feral, biting people who come close to him or even starting to eat one of the monsters that tried to hope him captive, and is prone to kill anyone near him with his knife (and later katana) until he comes across people who aren’t trying to use him. In essence, he is what Samhain could have been like if he were a little boy and an actual true individual, rather than an alternate personality of a truly evil person. In fact, Cassie seems to even recognize this, and her experiences with Ocky are some of the most heartwarming in the book, showing her develop into a kind of mother figure to a new Samhain who has potential to be an actual hero, as a way to absolve herself for her actions in the ‘Monster Baiting’ arc of the second ongoing of the original run and how she had caused his father’s “demise,” so-to-speak. On another hand, she also might see him as a younger version of herself, struggling with the Black Ambrosia taint on his blood as he tries to fight to be good.

The two act as a kind of “devil and angel on the shoulder” type of dynamic, with Cassie acting as a relative middle ground between the two of them. Delroy’s behavior with regards to Cassie’s problems is a polar opposite to the likes of Vlad. While Vlad would often try to get Cassie to engage with other people to help her be happy, be it her friends in Eminence, Indiana or the aforementioned Margaret Crump, Delroy not only accepts her post-traumatic stress as a matter of course, but encourages her to do so as well, actively driving her into his monster-hunting lifestyle. When Ocky joins the team, he also acts the same way around him, even giving the eight-year-old boy a katana despite Cassie’s annoyance. In all, while Vlad or even Samhain served as restraining actors or at least neutral, Delroy’s actions seem to be, though perhaps not intentionally, poisonous to Cassie’s psychological wellbeing and a surefire way to make sure she cannot engage with normal people even if she did try. On the other hand, as Ocky learns about how to be good, he acts as a similar kind of chain on her morals in a similar way to Vlad, driving her to be good in order to feel good, even if that mentality is inherently immature on some level. Then again, considering Cassie’s state of being nearly perpetually stuck in her late teens, having someone also immature to talk with may be the best possible option.

When it comes to psychology, the main element under examination is the debate of nature versus nurture, in particular with regards to Ocky himself. Despite his bloodline and that of Cassie, the latter tells him up front that just because his father turned out badly (with Cassie deliberately ignoring the fact that he was always that bad and that “Samhain” technically didn’t exist), doesn’t mean that he has to. She even uses a “not so different” style speech to explain.

“Look, there's only so much you can control about who you are. You're born a certain way or shit happens to you and before you know it, you're the person you see when you look in the mirror. For better or worse, you can't escape from you.”

At its core, her argument is that it doesn’t matter where he came from as long as he can try to be good on his own, divorced from his circumstances, since at the end of the day, how he is will be a consequence of everything both in and around him, with who he decides to be as a person derived from what he does with that knowledge. For instance, while she has her many personality issues, Cassie decided to use the increased emotional volatility that comes with being a hereditary potential slasher to try to do good in the world, and never regretted that fact in and of itself (even as it cost her again and again).

Ocky’s existence is even more profound, as not only is he a clone specifically created for evil (not just extremism, but actual evil), but he was supposed to aid the monster army in its rise, breaking away not unlike many a rebellious antichrist in fiction. On account of Cassie’s parenting, he learned how to be a good person and have people to genuinely care for, something that Akakios never really bothered with at all, and never even truly understood on even the most fundamental level. To quote the dragon Paarthurnax from The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, “No day goes by where I am not tempted to return to my inborn nature. […] What is better? To be born good, or to overcome your evil nature through great effort?”

Emilio Laiso returns for the artwork, having previously worked with Michael Moreci and Steve Seeley on the one-shot story ‘Hack/Slash/Repeat’ that acted as issue 19 of the second ongoing series, just before the ‘Final’ arc that closed out the original run. While that art was more haunting in keeping with its theme of an inescapable, unending horror, this style is more fun, with definite parallels between the two. The action is hard-hitting, highly animated, and fast, the faces very expressive, especially when it comes to Cassie and Ocky. Both youth and age are emphasized, with Delroy’s age lines and scars at the forefront of his appearance, and the youthful, softer faces of Cassie, Ocky, and Cat showing the idea of a different generation of hunters (and investigators). Even Pooch benefits from this kind of softer style, emphasizing the “cute” nature of the horrible looking dog-thing over the unnaturalness other artists would work toward.

Of particular note is the use of a title card in the place of a narration of exactly what happened to Cassie after the initial introduction of the monsters in the opening pages. Each letter of the title shows a different stage in Cassie’s devolution as she moves from her prior life to her new one, without using a word of actual dialogue. Everything is neat and concise, ranging from standing at a grave to talking with a loved one to walking out the door to other stages, while using only the absolute minimum of words to illustrate the protagonist’s single-mindedness and inability to stay in one place to be happy. Rather than use some narration that would take up several pages or lingering too long, the title card alone manages to get through nine different scenes in a single page to get readers where they need to go in the story, before a more complete context is given to Delroy some time later.

Some of the best shots focus in on unique perspectives, from seeing an attack coming from the reflection in a victim’s eye to seeing how dead someone is inside emotionally from how there is no such reflection when sitting still. These shots rely heavily on K. Michael Russell’s colors, ones that continue to grace the series into its successor “Resurrection” two years later. Russell’s coloring is soft at times, hard at others, working into a realistic style that relies on light heavily to give an added depth to the characters and their emotions. While Laiso’s art is amazing, Russell’s colors truly bring it to life, much as Rosario Costanzo’s colors did in the aforementioned ‘Hack/Slash/Repeat.’

Chris Crank, a.k.a. Crank! (not to be confused with Chris Krank, the father of Sandra Krank), acts as the letterer on this series, much like he does on most if not all of the other “Hack/Slash” main series works. He is, as ever, very good in his use of letters, but where he really excels is in atypical lettering choices, such as using the background to showcase onomatopoeias. A rumbling in the distance wouldn’t be nearly as shocking if it were in a speech bubble, but in one case, it is portrayed as being actually outside of the window of a moving car, coming up on both the characters and readers alike by surprise before something intense happens.

ARANA NEGRA

Argentine fotohistoria / fotonovella starring Linda Peretz as The Black Spider fighting alongside her sidekick, The Tarantula.

THE FIGHTING DEVIL DOGS (Republic, 1938)

CHOPPER COP #1: VALLEY OF DEATH (1972)