Hack/Slash (2004 - Present)

The final girl is not a new phenomenon in horror films - from strong female characters like Laurie in Halloween to Nancy in Nightmare on Elm Street, final girls are pretty awesome. They're the ones left standing, the ones who generally bring an end to the slashers that they are unwittingly pitted against. In the world of slashers, which is a genre of film that caters mainly to the base desires of lust and gore, having some kind of ideal that brings some kind of substance (however small) to a normally shallow film is a good thing.

And then there's Hack/Slash, which is a comic book dedicated entirely to the idea of final girls. Cassandra Hack, aka the Slasher Killer, is definitely a character that I can get behind. Coming from the roots that one might attribute to a serial killer (although, with Cassie, that topic is debatable), Cassie is the daughter of the infamous Lunch Lady - a woman who killed the students who picked on her beloved only child. Cassie is forced to turn her own mother over to the authorities, causing the woman to kill herself by sticking her head into a pot of boiling water. Oh yeah, this comic doesn't skimp on the gore, at all.

Cassie goes on to become a slasher slayer, a young woman who travels across the country to protect people from killers just like Freddy and Michael and Jason (oh my). She even runs afoul of quite a few well known killers, like Charles Lee Ray, better known as Chuckie, and Herbert West of H.P. Lovecraft fame. Along with the usual titillation of short skirts and skimpy shirts, Cassie also plays by the usual rules of slasher horror films (set into stone by Wes Craven's Scream series), albeit not by choice. She's a virgin, doesn't drink, and usually doesn't say that she'll be right back, though she is definitely guilty of rattling off ridiculous one liners.

My personal favorite villain of the series is Cassie's polar opposite and really brings out the interesting parts of her character: Laura Lochs, a religious zealot who dresses like the prude she is and yet wields arcane black magic in order to achieve her ends. After she gave her virginity up to the man she loved, he promptly scorned her and brought about Laura's righteous wrath. Using arcane tomes from her school's library, she resurrects a priest who committed suicide after it was discovered that he was gay (yes, there's a pattern here that isn't difficult to see). While Cassie skips around in her barely there underwear, she still has more morality than Laura can claim to have in her little finger. It's a definite case of don't judge books by their covers, because you certainly won't be getting what you see. Laura is the upstanding pillar of the community who's educated, had sex and dabbles in the dark arts in order to achieve her ends; meanwhile Cassie has a high school level of education and gets by with a knife in her hand. 

The comic definitely panders to the lust of the cis heterosexual male, but in all truth it's playing off the riffs of what makes a slasher film a slasher. Horror films operate on the idea of fear, as well as a sort of behavioral programming method for young adults - anyone doing anything deemed "bad" in a horror film will be axed. Drinking, drugs, having sex, you will die in some absolutely horrible way, brought to that terrible end but this mute creature of a man (or, in Freddy's case, one who just won't shut up). Then you've got characters like Vlad, who certainly don't fit the stereotype of the male fantasy: raised by a butcher, Vlad was ugly from birth and incredibly malformed. Only through the teachings of his adopted father did he survive, and eventually go on to help Cassie in her quest to stop the slashers, even as their quest seems to be an unending, unforgiving, and lonely one.

 From the backlots of Hollywood to across time and space, Cassie travels all over and where ever she's needed to stop killers before they start preying on the young and stupid. Other notable appearances are Wizard of Oz characters and the Archie comics. Each issue is sketched by artists with incredibly varying styles, but each brings their own interpretation of Cassie's gothic look to a new level that fits the various stories they are telling. I suppose my personal favorite would be when Mary Shelley Lovecraft invades a sleepy little town, turning all of its townfolk into Cthuluian fish people - or the time when Cassie had to figure out how to stop a killer who moved through the internet, literally. There are millions of stories to pick through, each quite possibly more amazing than the last.

Hack/Slash is published by Devil's Due Publishing; Omnibus 4 is due out April 4 of this year, so if I were you, I'd get the other three and catch the f*** up!