Review by Shaun Daniels and Edited by Sharon Wong
Hack/Slash #12 Written by Tim Seeley, Art by Dan Leister, Covers by Tim Seeley, Mark Englert & Mark Dos Santos and Published by Image Comics
It’s a tough act to follow any story arc that involves the Bomb Queen but issue 12 of Hack/Slash does it in spades. Jam-packed with crazy Kaiju monsters, a cure for the common Slasher and psychic dinosaurs, this issue is the perfect follow up to the previous arc. Now normally going off the rails is a bad thing, but this book goes off the rails in all the right places.
Cat, Samhain (pinch hitting for Vlad) and Cassie make like Indiana Jones and take off in a seaplane in search of adventure, better yet the cure for Slashers. The Hack/Slash gang land on an island in the Caribbean that once was the home of Monster Bait Studios, the American equivalent of Toho Studios. A couple of the studio’s top-selling movies were Gorillaconda (our favorite) and It Came from Ground Zero, the first film starring a giant half-gorilla, half-anaconda creature and a giant mutant spider. Cat, the ever intrepid detective, researched the studio’s founder Roman Carpenter, who worked for the Nazis during WWII to try and build an army of…Slashers. Like a few men who’ve been on the side of evil, Roman sees the light and attempts to undo the evil he has unleashed upon the world. Undoubtedly, there are skeletons in the closet of Monster Bait Studios with the cure maybe coming at the cost of Samhain, who can’t leave the island. That said island is also the home for the real-life Kaiju monsters that appeared in Monster Bait Studio’s films.
Seeley, as we stated earlier, is taking the book off the rails but in the right places. Yes, this is a book about Slashers but Seeley is fully committed to the story.
He doesn’t stop at psychic dinosaurs, going the full monty with Gorillaconda and giant spider monsters. If for any reason Seeley decides to leave the life of comics, he would definitely get a job writing movies for SyFy.
Liester again turns in another solid book. With this issue, he gets to flex his art muscles in a big way, literally. Seeing Liester take on Slashers has been fun and now so with his take on Kaiju. We can’t wait to see Gorillaconda in full on action.
The one and only thing that could make this story arc any better is a Kaiju-sized Slasher.
Feedback is always welcomed at shaun@horrorhaven.com and sharon@horrorhaven.com
