It’s damn good to jump back into Hack/Slash: Back to School, artist and writer Zoe Thorogood‘s exploitation/horror/action/comedy/drama entry into the greater Stefano Casseli and Tim Seeley-created Hack/Slash project. Back to School‘s first two issues showcased both Thorogood’s formal mastery (in particular, her use of color and multiple illustration styles to set and shift Back to School‘s moods and perspectives) and her delighting in grody goth-girl-and-peers-vs-super-powered-undead-serial-killers action. Issue #3 sees her bring grids into play and start the toppling of the narrative tower she’s built up to now. It’s a blast, one with sting. Granted, it’s a hard-R, violence-and-fanservice-laden comic—not for everyone. Acknowledging that, I dig it.
Former Scream Queen turned Slasher Hunter Darla Ritz’s Hunters for Hire and Academy for Girls is home to something Cassandra “Cassie” Hack has not had for quite some time—stability. In issue #2, she was pleasantly surprised that having a reliable and (comparatively) safe place to sleep and food she didn’t have to salvage from dumpsters felt good. By issue #3, she’s gotten comfortable enough at the Academy for her introspection to grow from “Am I doing this (learning from and working for Ritz alongside a cohort who’ve been through similar experiences to her own)?” to “Who am I now that I’m doing this” and to start reaching out to her fellow students—in particular semi-covert anime nerd Samantha.
Image Comics
In the opening sequence of the issue, which tracks Cassie’s time at the school through her journal, Thorogood uses the structure of nine-panel grid pages to convey the continuing passage of time as Cassie settles into her status quo and visually emphasize that Ritz’s is a grounding and healthy (by Hack/Slash standards) place for her. Structurally, these grids lay the groundwork for the issue’s later action sequence to make a bigger impact by departing from their famous form with full pages that serve as exclamation points and larger, page-wide panels that capture key action moments.
Image Comics
And oh, that action. Thorogood’s rogues gallery for Back to School is one of the book’s delights. Her Slashers are not only unsettling and gloppy; they have range. Issue #1’s self-righteous creep in the full-body bunny costume (not to be confused with a Bunny-as-in-Playboy suit, which pops up in this issue). Issue #2’s disaffected indie game programmer who turned the creation he’d come to hate against the fandom he’d come to loathe. Issue three offers a crash course on how to combine arachnophobia with apotemnophobia (the fear of amputation). In terms of pure viscera, it’s the wildest of Back to School‘s terrors thus far. The Slasher and his monster may have the simplest motivation among the series’ villains thus far (the monster is a monster, while the Slasher’s twisted self is summed up with a punchline that I will not spoil here), but they make up for it in their physical warping of the human form.
Thorogood interlinks her action with fun character work. Consider the pages above and below, where Cassie and Samantha delve into Demon Ninja Revenge:
Image Comics
Cassie Hack’s world is absurd, violent, and often absurdly violent. The same goes for her peers’ worlds. Darla Ritz and her students are not folks who’ll fade away into the realm of “was.” Theirs are lives of action; on some level, the action is the juice. And in some cases (the cheery, murderous Boo, whose history Samantha shares with Cassie above), that peership is a matter of “close-enough-in-that-continent-away-sense.” It’s fraught, by definition. And for Cassie, whose lonesome life was thrown into chaos by her murderous mother and who met her best friend when she came perilously close to killing him, peers are rare and worth noting—some of them even become friends. Her time at the school thus far has been transformative, mostly positively.
But slashers and their absurd violence are not easily denied. In the last pages of issue #3, Thorogood pulls a brick and sets the tower wobbling. The crash is coming. Between her impeccable formal work, her enjoyably goopy carnage, and her compelling character work, Thorogood continues to make Hack/Slash: Back to School a ton of fun. If it’s your speed, it will be your speed.
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