Bookmonkey vs Hack/Slash: Day Nine

Trailers and Crossovers

The next few Hack/Slash story arcs focus on a staple of comic books, the crossover event, and a staple of modern motion pictures, the movie trailer.

In Hack/Slash Vs Evil Ernie and Hack/Slash Vs Chucky, Cassie and Vlad begin to expand their world to include two other comic book characters published through Devils Due Publishing – Evil Ernie (a reanimated corpse that can control other corpses) and Chucky, the killer doll from the 1988 MGM film Child’s Play.  Generally comic book crossovers refer to an event where “…a hero with its own title series appears in an issue of another hero’s series” (Alberich, Miro-Julia, Roseello, 2002, 3).  With both of these crossovers, however it works a little differently.  Evil Ernie was a completed series at the time, and in his story the majority of the Earth had been destroyed, so a little exposition was needed to explain how he could possibly end up in Cassie and Vlad’s world.  For Chucky to appear inHack/Slash, on the other hand, it came down to a potential “…big screen adaption of ‘Hack/Slash’ in development at Rogue Pictures, which is also the home of the “Chucky” film franchise” (Richards, 2006) Unlike the extensive explanation of how Cassie and Evil Ernie could meet, Chucky and Cassie are simply written as already being aware of each other and begin moving through the story. 

In the first Hack/Slash trailers collection, the reader is treated to a number of short stories which are horror movie-style trailers for potential Hack/Slash stories.  In an interview about the issue, Seeley stated “…They’re written, really, just like a trailer, complete with bad one-liners, tag lines, and voice overs (you’ll have to pretend it’s the ‘Voice-Over Guy.’).  The ‘stories’ they ‘preview’ aren’t actually coming to comic stores (or theatres) anytime soon (as in ever).” (Richards, 2006)  As movie trailers are short advertisements for upcoming films, these stories work in much the same way, allowing readers to imagine Cassie and Vlad in Japan, fighting a killer shark, and even adventuring in space.  Also, as Hack/Slash trailers was my first experience with the series, I found the mix of violence, humour and self-awareness of the Slasher sub-genre definitely peaked my interest.

It’s also interesting to note that the crossover and trailers use characters from previous stories and even introduce villains and storylines that did eventually get used in the main series.

WORKS CITED

Alberich, R. Miro-Julia, J., & Rossello, R. (2002). Marvel Universe looks almost like a real social network. arXiv preprint cond-mat/0202174.  Retrieved online from http://arxiv.org/pdf/cond-mat/0202174.pdf

Richards, D. (January 3, 2006). “Playing in the Trailer Park: Seeley talks ‘Hack/Slash: Trailers’ in Comic Book Resources.  Retrieved online from: http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=6153

Richards, D. (December 21, 2006). “One of the Good Guys: Seeley talks ‘Hack/Slash Vs Chucky’” inComic Book Resources.  Retrieved online from: http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=8919

IMAGE USED

Cover of Hack/Slash vs Chucky.  Retrieved online from: http://www.amazon.com/Childs-Play-Chuckys-20th-Birthday/dp/B001B1UO6W/ref=sr_1_1?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1381367253&sr=1-1&keywords=child%27s+play

Bookmonkey vs Hack/Slash: Day Three

Before we begin digging into the main storyline of Hack/Slash it's probably best to ensure we have a basic understanding of the key characters and concepts used in the series.

First the Characters:

Cassandra "Cassie" Hack: A 24-year-old survivor of her first Slasher; The Lunch Lady (who also happened to be Cassie's mother), Cassie travels with her partner Vlad in her continuing hunt for Slashers, and her goal to kill them before they kill others.

Vlad: Cassie's parter, Vlad is a slightly deformed giant, who, in addition to being a formidable killer of Slashers, is almost an innocent in Cassie's world, he enjoys children's comics and cartoons, protecting his friends and making jokes.

The Nature of Slashers Described in Issue 2

Slashers: In the World of Hack/Slash Slashers are "...a type of undead I guess...sort've like a vampire or a zombie.  They're so full of anger that they don't wanna die.  They hate love, youth, sex...things they miss, from life.  All I know for sure is that they're mean and hard to kill" (Seeley, 2004)  Slashers are also clearly differentiated from Killers (who may come back from death as Slashers, but are considered different while they are human).

and Key Concepts used in or addressed by Hack/Slash

The Final Girl: described as "...intelligent, watchful, levelheaded; the first character to sense something amiss and the only one to deduce from the accumulating evidence the pattern and extent of the threat" (Clover, 1992, p. 44), the final girl is a popular horror movie trope which represents the final surviving character in Slasher films.  Traditional examples include Laurie Strode in Halloween (1978) and Nancy Thompson in A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), Cassie (often compared to the character of Buffy Summers in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992)) is a subversive form of the Final girl, following many of the basic traits as outlined by Clover, but also moving beyond genre conventions as well.

Modality: The level of reality represented in any given text (comic book, film, television show, etc.), or 'truth claim' (Burn, 1994) where the higher the modality, the closer to reality the text is assumed to be - Hack/Slash plays with the concept modality almost from the first issue.  The main character shares a world with a number of characters known to be fictional to the reader (Chucky from the 1988 horror film Child's Play) and yet refers to the name of prominent Horror movie actress Linnea Quigley in the second issue, forcing the reader to ask the question, do Cassie and Vlad inhabit our world, or a shared world made up of all our popular horror films?  While Cassie is clearly a fictional character, she has a real-world profile on the website Suicide Girls.  The fact that the series includes a number of crossovers with film and comic book characters only add to the complexity of this question throughout the series.

WORKS CITED
Burn, A. (1994) "Potterliteracy: Cross-Media Narratives, Cultures and Grammars" in Explorations into Children's Literatures. 14(2) retrieved online from http://eprints.ioe.ac.uk/4230/1/Burn_2004_Potterliteracy.pdf

Clover, C.J. (1992) Men, Women, And Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

IMAGE USED
Seeley, T. (2004) Hack/Slash: Euthanized (Issue 1), Berkeley, CA: Image Comics. Image retrieved from http://static.comicvine.com/uploads/original/1/15659/2773870-slashers_hack_slash_euthanized_1.jpg