The
first H/S omnibus includes pretty much all the miniseries and one-shots leading up to the regular monthly series. This second volume includes the first 17 issues of the monthly series, plus an "annual" issue (the Suicide Girls one).
In the early material, Seeley pretty much takes the concept--a Final Girl and her hulking, masked, machete-wielding sidekick on the hunt for slashers--for a series of test-drives. With little to lose, he just has a blast with it. All those early stories are permeated with smart tongue-in-cheekiness, gruesome fun, and rollicking black humor.
****SPOILERS****
The monthly series signals a darkening of tone, a more serious direction, and an upping of the ante straight out of the gate, in the very opening panels. Our heroine Cassie is alone in some grim, abandoned tenement. She's tied up. And one of her toes has just been cut off by a freaky psychologist who's peeled away all of his own skin. This Dr. Gross is scary in another whole league from all the previously featured baddies. He explicitly aligns himself with "torture porn" as a refinement on the slasher (a theme
touched on by CRwM--I could swear he's written about this at greater length, but can't seem to find the post):
That's not to say the humor goes away. The first multi-issue arc involves a hair-metal band. There's an issue drawn in a style that sends up Archie comics, which hammers the point home with Benday dots. The "Tub Club" story that began as one of the funny trailers in the first volume here gets fleshed out over three issues.
But Seeley really does settle into some long-term character exploration and development. The heart of this is his treatment of Cassie's relationship to her mother and father.
Up to this point, Cassie's mother has been an important part of her origin story, but hasn't been treated with any seriousness and certainly not with any dignity. She's introduced as a repellently bloated ogre of a woman:
. . . who meets a farcical end:
. . . and comes back as the "Lunch Lady," about as parodically ridiculous a name and concept for a slasher as could be imagined:
. . . and that's how she's been depicted up until the monthly series:
In short, she was two-dimensional and entirely unsympathetic in a way that was good for a few yucks early on when Seeley was playing around, but not so good for the kind of soul-searching he decides he wants to do in the ongoing series. Adding dimension to her character will basically amount to humanizing her, and since much of the impression she's made has been visual, that difficult task will fall mainly to the artist.
Now, Emily Stone took over the
Hack/Slash penciling duties starting with monthly series issue 1, and considering that it was her first major comics gig, she absolutely rose to the challenge. Let's look in detail at how she rehabilitates the image of Cassie's mother:
These two panels, while depicting a clearly recognizable Mrs. Hack, provide the starkest contrast with the panel that introduces her above. Whereas there she's depicted in a smudgy, sepia-toned chiaroscuro, here she's depicted in more natural light and color in a clean line style. The "camera" angle makes a difference--looking up at her makes her look frightfully imposing, whereas looking down at her helps her come across as human and vulnerable. The context-free, demented, almost demonic smirk is here replaced with a mama-bear look of angry consternation at seeing her small daughter physically bullied by three older boys. The long-shot, again from above, of her protectively and sympathetically crouching to Cassie's level to talk to her and help her up hammers all of this home. Her "Lunch Lady" uniform that reduces her to a role that I daresay won't evoke fond memories for most readers is here softened with the sweats, hair-scarf, and sock-sandal combination of a harried mom.
As she talks further with Cassie, her expression softens all the more, and she ultimately comes across as a single mother with a miserable job, who lacks the time, money, and motivation to eat well and take better care of herself. We sense her helplessness in the face of her daughter's heartbreaking unpopularity. In just a few panels, we've come a very long way from where she started.
Mrs. Hack's death can't be rewritten from scratch, but part of the beauty of comics is the way different artistic choices can put a very different emotional coloring on the "same" event or set of circumstances.
This four-panel sequence accomplishes that with extraordinary effectiveness. The top-left panel makes the mother and daughter focal; it emphasizes the intimacy of their relationship, and therefore of the saddening but necessary betrayal. The composition of the top-right panel wonderfully captures the emotional tone of what it depicts. Stone's use of perspective makes Cassie big and flanks her with the authority figure of a police officer aiming his gun; Mrs. Hack is smaller than both of them and alone, which is exactly how her dialogue and posture indicate she feels. In the original death-scene panel, the dead Mrs. Hack slumps into the gravy pot with a posture reminiscent of a hog at a trough, and is accompanied by a comically disgusted reaction shot by a police officer. By contrast, Stone depicts her here in the act rather than its aftermath--as a fully human agent making a tragic and terrible choice. Her solitude in that panel might not exactly ennoble her, but at least it doesn't add insult to injury the way the original panel did by showing the reactions of onlookers.
Later in issue #1, we get a glimpse, too, of Mrs. Hack at the moment she's abandoned by her husband, Cassie's father. In a mere two panels, Stone masterfully upends everything we've assumed about her and that relationship up to this point:
Stone strikes a perfect balance here; this woman is significantly slimmer, enough to be considered positively pretty, but not unbelievably so. The jeans just visible at left and the cleavage just visible at right indicate that she has not given up and is still a sexual woman. In other words, to put it crudely, she wasn't abandoned because she looked the way we've always seen her up to this point. It's worth noting, also, that these two panels wouldn't have been possible without the ones I've considered above preparing the way by humanizing her and softening her image.
So, in flashbacks that aren't even the main point of the first issue, Seeley and especially Stone have reintroduced and almost completely reinvented Cassie's mother. That's important, because the first issue also concludes with the suggestion that Cassie's father is alive and will at some point be appearing in the story.
The ultimate payoff for all of this culminates in none other than the story arc featuring Herbert West,
Re-Animator!!!
Unfortunately, this three-issue story-arc seems cursed. First, the original issues ran into distribution problems when Seeley was slapped with a
Cease-and-Desist from another party claiming rights to
Re-Animator. Then, this omnibus had a
major fuckup with the isbn or something. Ah well, at least I finally got my hands on a copy!
Parenthetically, before continuing with my analysis of Seeley and Stone's handling of Mrs. Hack, I'd like to mention that I watched
Re-Animator and
Bride of Re-Animator for the first time specifically in preparation for reading this story, and I have to say, not only is Herbert West a
perfect fit for the
Hack/Slash universe and the cod-science "explanation" for slashers offered so far, but Seeley gets him right storywise and Stone nails that distinct physicality that turned Jeffrey Combs so deservedly into such a horror icon.
We first meet Cassie's father as an associate of Dr. West. Dr. Jack Hack has been involved in scientific research on slashers almost from the beginning of the field--and that's how he met Cassie's mother, as a young lady who might possess a sort of "slasher gene." In the story's present, West has acquired the corpse of the "Lunch Lady." An extraordinary two pages (not a spread, wisely, but a flip) show us Dr. Hack's emotionally brutal reunion with his dead wife and his flashback to their first meeting:
Stone gets it exactly right here. In the story's present, she punches us in the gut with the full horror of Mrs. Hack as she'd originally been depicted. The roundness of her face in the first flashback panel realistically suggests the weight she'll put on through the stages of her life we've seen already, but at this point, she's young, pretty, and playful; it's easy to see how she gets under Dr. Hack's skin, how he could fall in love with her, and how they could have conceived Cassie together.
Well, enough dwelling on that. Rest assured--it's not all character development. There's plenty of the great bloody horror action promised by the title. This is a series I just can't recommend highly enough to any horror fan, and these omnibus volumes are a great way to enjoy it.
Here's an awesome blog devoted to all those truly awesome Spanish comics magazine artists of the groovy age (it's in Spanish--if you don't read that, here's the google translation), complete with extensive information on their credits for those UK girls' comics that seldom credited them at the time.
Where's he going with that? Well, this looks tantalizing:
And here's my review of vol. 1.
