Written by Tim Seeley
Drawn by Daniel Leister“Fame Monster,” Part One. Every time Cassie falls asleep, she dreams of another celebrity murder. And when she wake up, she finds it has actually happened! The cast of “Douche Beach,” the Pouperheus Sisters, Lady Art Projekt, even teen heart throb Kendall Schipp and his millions of “Worschippers”… none are safe from the Fame Monster!
Reading Hack/Slash leaves me with more questions than answers, a hundred percent of the time. Why? After the jump, quit being impatient.
Have you ever had one of those things where, try as you might, your finger just can’t seem to locate a pulse? I’m not even talking about a specific comic book series here (yet), but entire genres or sub-genres where you feel at sea. There’s clearly something to be gotten, because other people are out there getting it. But every time you try, it’s like the thing’s been greased to avoid your grasp. (“No,” said Principal Skinner, gazing at the empty 4H Club. “It’s the children who are wrong.”) This is how I feel when things veer into the hazily defined turf of… I’m not even sure what to call it. Meta-horror? Post-modern horror-derived action product? Despite being no stranger to horror movies and their attendant cliches, works rooted in admiration for and emulation of them, even winking and subversive ones, always leave me cold.
For something like a decade now, Hack/Slash has followed Cassie Hack, teen goth drifter, and Vlad, a hulking and deformed behemoth (who I’ve never understood on one specific point: is he supposed to be mentally disabled or something?), as they drive around the country in their van, solving mysteries. Well, actually, they hunt “slashers.” Slashers are serial killers, but with the key difference that slashers are more likely to end up being women in bikinis. (Sometimes, for variety, they’re women in lingerie.) Cassie’s mother was a slasher, which motivates her grim quest for petulant and bloody revenge. I’ve tried to get into Hack/Slash a couple times over the years, but I never managed to find an inroad. For one thing, it always seemed like the characters were completely unaware of just how much driving around the country in a van, attacking people who fit a certain profile, makes them seem like serial killers themselves.
Hack/Slash usually noses around the well-trod turf of teasing horror movies. The modus operandi is to lift some ridiculous horror-movie cliche — like, say, a serial killer stalking a sorority house — and then try to have its cake and eat it, too. (Lately, it’s become more of a general pop-culture thing, if only because there are only so many horror cliches that can take place within walking distance of a Victoria’s Secret.) Ideally, it works as both a tongue-in-cheek send-up and a legitimate genre exercise. Unfortunately, this requires cleverness that Hack/Slash steadfastly refuses to explore. This is, after all, a comic whose cover marks Snooki and the Situation as its targets of parody through a fake ad for “Douche Beach.” In the opening pages, a Lady Gaga stand-in whose pop career is actually part of her senior art thesis gets murdered. This singing superstar’s name: Art Projekt. Like I said in the opening paragraph up there — I get what they’re getting at, but I don’t get what people get out of this.
Anyway, some kind of slasher with magic powers is going around killing obnoxious celebrities, and Cassie Hack is having dreams about the murders. What strikes me isn’t the dramatic potential of such a set-up — my faith there is in short supply — but the way that Cassie is, in these moments, a really weird protagonist. One page, she’s screeching that she’d rather kill herself than confront another psychic slasher; the next page, she’s the one pitching the idea of chasing the psychic slasher clear into Manhattan, no convincing required. In another scene, she dreams another murder, but because that requires her to be asleep, she makes an offhand comment about how she hates cough medicine making her fall asleep. Because she doesn’t let out a single cough or make any other reference to the need for medicine anywhere else in the story, the reader can only assume that her crimefighting methodology involves recreationally drinking cough syrup en route to a confrontation with a villain.
Continued belowVlad doesn’t fare any better: he has two roles in this issue. One, he drives the van. If this was Tumblr, I’d be commenting on the subtext of a white woman using her markedly “other” associate as a means of achieving menial labor that blah blah blah. Really, though, the problem is just that while Cassie gets to run around and get tased, Vlad sitting in the car just makes him seem like kind of a useless lump, which is a weird light to put your own co-hero in. Vlad’s other role is to comment on how he likes watching celebrity news, even though this entire comic (starting with the unsubtle cover) takes great pains to let us know that enjoying these pop cultural figures is, in Cassie’s own words, “retarded.” This is why I can never quite tell if Vlad is mentally disabled. Then again, it wouldn’t be Hack/Slash if it didn’t try to have these things both ways.
Somewhere within the concept of Hack/Slash is an intriguing and surprisingly deep idea. Cassie Hack, daughter of a serial murderer, living like a Hot Topic Henry Lee Lucas with her big dumb monster friend. How different is she from the things she hunts? How will hunting them heal the wounds her mother’s murder habits left? If Vlad is the monster with the heart and mind of a child, then Cassie is the child with the heart, if not mind, of a monster. But that’s a bit too deep for Hack/Slash — or, at least, if they went there, it’d be as obvious and strained as “Douche Beach.” Reading this comic, the adjective that most frequently comes to mind is “lazy.” It doesn’t feel like Tim Seeley pushes himself to write it — so why should I push myself to keep trying to find a reason to like it? Dig that Nate Bellegarde Cover B, though. That’s some great stuff.
Final Verdict: 3.0 / No thanks
