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
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