HACK/SLASH: THE EARLY STORIES OF THIS HALLOWEEN HEROINE

This weekend’s light-hearted, escapist superhero post from Balladeer’s Blog looks at Cassie Hack, the horror superheroine who battles a long line of slashers as stylishly as Buffy fought vampires.

In Hack/ Slash stories, slashers are their own breed of monsters just like werewolves, vampires, etc. Tim Seeley created the series, which has been published by various indie outfits over the years.

HACK/ SLASH Vol 1 #1 (Apr 2004)

Title: Euthanized

Villain: Bobby Brunswick

Synopsis: This very first appearance of Cassie Hack starts off with a few-page synopsis of her origin story. In school, Cassie was often bullied by the other students. This caused her mother to snap and become a slasher called the Lunch Lady, who took to carving up the teens who had bullied Cassie and mixing their remains in with food at the school cafeteria. Our heroine was forced to take action, saving her mother’s last victim. The Lunch Lady killed herself but rose again as a slasher. This time Cassie had to destroy her personally.

Readers are now dropped into the main story, set years later when Cassie Hack has established herself as a roving heroine who battles living and undead slashers alongside her African American sidekick – the hulking, gasmask-wearing Vlad. He views Cassie like a daughter and wields meat cleavers and butcher’s knives in battle.

In this adventure, Cassie and Vlad clashed with Bobby Brunswick, a veterinary assistant killed by the boyfriend of the female vet he worked for. Bobby came back from the dead for revenge and also preyed on the city with the army of dead animals that he controlled.

HACK/ SLASH Vol 1 #2 (Oct 2004)

Title: Girls Gone Dead

Villains: Father Wrath and Laura Lochs

Synopsis: Cassie and Vlad drive their van south to Palm Beach where a new slasher is slicing and dicing young people celebrating Spring Break.

The undead slasher turns out to be Father Wrath, a Baptist Preacher who was killed by his nephew when he tried to molest him but came back from beyond to kill and kill and kill. Malicious Catholic School girl Laura Lochs controls Father Wrath but Cassie and Vlad stop them.

HACK/ SLASH Vol 1 #3 (Mar 2005)

Title: Comic Book Carnage

Villains: Lloyd Sundermann and Jimmy Sundermann

Synopsis: This story continued the tongue-in-cheek humor and the blood-soaked action. Cassie and Vlad do battle with the Sundermann Twins – Lloyd and Jimmy.

The twins unleash a reign of terror at a comic book convention where they slay comic book creators whom they blame for turning wholesome Golden Age superheroes into gritty and violent antiheroes. Features illustrated versions of real-life comic book creators like Steve Niles (30 Days of Night), Robert Kirkman (The Walking Dead, Irredeemable) and Skottie Young (I Hate Fairyland).

HACK/ SLASH Vol 1 #4 (Jun 2005)

Title: Evil Ernie

Villain: Evil Ernie

NOTE: Just 4 stories in and Hack/ Slash did its first crossover tale. In this case with Brian Pulido’s horror creation Evil Ernie, whose series he launched at Eternity Comics in 1991. (Horror icon Lady Death also made her first appearance in that series.) In the last Evil Ernie story before this one, the character wiped out his Earth via a nuclear holocaust.

Synopsis: In 2005, Hack/ Slash‘s publisher Devil’s Due Publishing picked up Pulido and reintroduced Evil Ernie in this storyline. With his own Earth destroyed now, Ernie’s powers let him materialize on Cassie Hack’s Earth in a Multiverse sense.

The villain fell in love with Cassie, considering her this Earth’s equivalent of Lady Death. To win her love, Evil Ernie tried impressing Cassie by following in her path of killing slashers. In his usual insane way, Ernie mistakenly thought all people locked up in insane asylums were automatically slashers.

When the maniac raided a hospital for the criminally insane and started killing all the inmates and staff, Cassie and Vlad intervened to stop him. Cassie was killed during the battle, so Evil Ernie, now knowing that he would materialize on another Earth if he died, gave up his life energy to revive Cassie Hack even though he knew it would separate them forever as he vanished to another Earth.

HACK/ SLASH Vol 1 #5 (Nov 2005)

Title: Land of Lost Toys Part I

Villain: Ashley Guthrie

NOTE: This was the first Hack/ Slash story with full color interior art. The previous installments had color covers but black & white art on the interior pages.

Synopsis: Cassie and Vlad drive their van to Mount Healthy, OH to investigate the deaths of children who seem to have been killed by their toys while sleeping. They root out the real cause and clash with Ashley Guthrie, a little boy so evil his own mother killed him.

Similar to Freddie Krueger, Guthrie’s spirit took up residence in the Dream Dimension from where he’s been murdering other Mount Healthy children in their dreams. He gives them nightmares about their toys killing them while animating their toys to do just that in the real world. The children die while still asleep.

HACK/ SLASH Vol 1 #6 (Dec 2005)

Title: Land of Lost Toys Part II

Villain: Ashley Guthrie

Synopsis: Cassie and Vlad’s adventure in Mount Healthy, OH continues in all its “Nightmare on Elm Street Meets Puppet Master” glory.

Alone in the dream dimension, Cassie is at the mercy of the vile Ashley Guthrie as he uses every toy that Ms. Hack remembers in a bid to kill her off.

On the side, readers got treated to some flashback details about Vlad, who was orphaned, then raised by a butcher who taught him the use of sharp objects.

HACK/ SLASH Vol 1 #7 (Jan 2006)

Title: Land of Lost Toys Part III

Villain: Ashley Guthrie

Synopsis: The war with Guthrie continues as Cassie is still fighting Ashley and evil versions of her toys. Meanwhile, in his dreams, Vlad is fighting the Japanese anime characters that Guthrie is using against him since Vlad never had toys as a child.

Ultimately, unable to match Ashley’s powers in the Dream Dimension, Cassie saves herself and Vlad by co-opting those powers instead. She draws her slasher mother the Lunch Lady into her nightmare. Cassie imagines her mother in so much detail that Guthrie is overwhelmed by her and killed by her.

HACK/ SLASH Vol 1 #8 (Feb 2006)

Title: Trailers

Villains: Chippy, O-Nada, Kamikaze, Hot Tub Slasher, Space Zombies, Star-Slayer and Blackfin.

Synopsis: This issue features several Cassie Hack short stories told as parodies of movie trailers. 1) Blood and Nuts – Chippy the Chipmunk, a comic book character on Cassie’s Earth, emerges from the pages and goes on a slashing spree. 2) Renegade Knife: Itai – In Tokyo, Cassie and Vlad fight a pair of Japanese slashers tied to competing corporations: O-Nada and Kamikaze.

3) Tub Club – At Franco-Belle College in Massachusetts, Cassie must save herself and her classmates from a slasher who preys on co-eds in hot tubs. 4) Orbit-uary – Cassie and Vlad are sent into space to fight an entire space station full of condemned killers accidentally turned into unkillable zombies by scientific experiments.

5) Dead Celebrities – Vlad is being framed for the slashing of several celebrities, so he and Cassie try to clear him by finding the real murderer. 6) Once Bitten – Cassie and Vlad take to the sea to eliminate a great white shark called Blackfin only for it to come back as an unkillable zombie.

HACK/SLASH Vol 1 #9 (Jul 2006)

Title: Slice Hard: Pre-Sliced

Villains: Acid Angel, CeutoTech

NOTE: This twenty-five-cent special was a promotional item which reprinted some past Hack/ Slash material like Cassie Hack’s origin story.

The Slice Hard: Pre-Sliced portion of the issue was a short prelude to Cassie and Vlad’s next adventure. This material was not reprinted in that next issue, so this was the only way to buy it. This prelude story saw Cassie and Vlad corral an undead female slasher called Acid Angel.

She was betrayed by a lover and returned from the dead to kill men and women in acid baths after seducing them. Before Cassie could destroy Acid Angel, she and Vlad were jumped by mysterious CeutoTech agents who used high-tech to capture our heroes plus the still-animated Acid Angel. That was the cliffhanger ending.

HACK/ SLASH Vol 1 #10 (Dec 2006)

Title: Slice Hard

Villains: CeutoTech, Acid Angel, Hibachi Devil, X-O, Mortimer Strick, Waking Man and Ashley Guthrie

Synopsis: While Cassie Hack and Vlad are secretly being held at CeutoTech corporate headquarters, we readers learn that Ashley Guthrie did not really die at the end of Land of Lost Toys. Instead, his spirit was ejected from the Dream Dimension and became trapped in a teddy bear that was on hand in Mount Healthy. Ever since, this Guthrie Bear has been tracking down Cassie and killing his way across the country like Chucky does.

Back at CeutoTech HQ, Cassie and Vlad meet Emily Christy, a disgraced former Miss America who runs the CeutoTech cosmetics corporation. Emily offers to pay our heroes big money to capture slashers for her since her troops keep getting nearly wiped out for every slasher they’ve already nabbed for scientific studies in de-aging.

Cassie is furious to see that CeutoTech is already holding some of her old undead foes like Acid Angel, Hibachi Devil, X-O, the Waking Man and Mortimer Strick. She warns Emily that she’ll never be able to keep those killers from escaping at some point.

Meanwhile, the Guthrie Bear infiltrates the facility and decides to free his fellow slashers so they can all team up against Cassie and Vlad. Alarms go off and the freed villains begin slicing and dicing all the research and security personnel in the CeutoTech HQ. Cassie arms up with the company’s high-tech weaponry and it’s on.

Amid much bloodletting on multiple floors, our heroes whittle down the number of slashers against them but every other man and woman in the place gets butchered. Even Emily Christy gets mortally wounded but drinks the resurrection serum her scientists isolated from the anatomies of the slashers.

Emily passes away and comes back immediately as a slasher calling herself “Ms. America.” With her to deal with now, the fighting goes on and eventually Cassie blows up the facility. She and Vlad get out alive and assume that all their foes are toast. After they depart, Ms. America’s charred corpse rises from the ruins, kills a cop and shambles off into the darkness, now wearing her Miss America sash.

*** Hack/ Slash is still being published to this day, but sadly all of the attempted movies and television shows fell through in Development Hell. After Slice Hard, Cassie and Vlad had crossover stories with the likes of Chucky, Halloween Man, Herbert West: ReAnimator, Vampirella, Ash Williams from The Evil Dead plus several new villains of their own.