Hack Slash #3 – Review

By: Tim Seeley (writer), Daniel Leister (art), Mark Englert (colors), Crank (letters) & James Lowder (edits)

The Story: Bobby Brunswick is back with an axe to grind against an ex-girlfriend and is using his “reanimate dead animal” powers to their fullest.

What’s Good: There’s lots of typical fun Hack/Slash action in this comic and that means it’s a lot of fun.  One of the villains in this arc is Bobby Brunswick, who old time Hack/Slash readers will remember as the veterinary assistant who had a huge crush on his boss, Lisa Elsten (the town vet and Chris Krank’s current girlfriend).  Lisa’s boyfriend at the time didn’t like this very much and in a prank-gone-wrong, Bobby was killed before coming back to exact revenge and exhibiting this ability to reanimate dead animals.

So, this issue has scads of zombified animals everywhere.  There are crows spying on pregnant Lisa through the window, zombie deer playing kamikaze with the sheriff’s patrol car, and zombie fish and an effing zombie snapping turtle trying to bite people in the river.  It’s both intense and funny all at the same time and that’s before we even get to the scenes of Bobby going after pregnant Lisa and the requisite Pooch humor (he gets locked in his cage for sniffing Lisa’s butt because “he wants to know what she ate for dinner”).

Summing up, this issue is just a lot of fun as Seeley keeps the action rolling and tosses in humor here and there.  If you like a silly take on slasher movies, you’ll love this series.

Weekly Comic Book Review’s Top Picks

Dean’s Top Picks

Best From The Past Week: Uncanny X-Men #535 – I should go back through my notes to see if I’ve ever let Uncanny X-Men wear the Big Sombrero and get to strut around as Best of the Week, but I don’t think I have before.  This comic made me so happy.  As a child of the 1980’s, Uncanny X-Men was the comic book for me and when I got back into comics as an adult, it really pained me that it often wasn’t a very good title.  Sure, there were often other X-books that were pretty good, but I wanted Uncanny to be good dammit!  So, I was extremely tickled to see Kieron Gillen knock his first issue out of the park with a fun and fast paced story that takes a small group (thank you) of X-Men off on a cool mission to mop-up some Break World leftovers from Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men run.  Great art by the Dodson’s too!  Runner-up: The Unwritten #24

Most Anticipated: Dark Horse Presents #1 – I LOVE me some anthologies and not many anthologies have a stronger pedigree than Dark Horse Presents.  Dark Horse properties such as Concrete, NextMen and Sin City are just a few of the properties that were first printed in earlier iterations of DHP.  This issue promises the first Concrete story in awhile, a Star Wars story and a sneak-peak at Xerxes (Frank Miller’s follow-up to 300).  Chances are there will be at least one awesome story in this issue.

Other picks: 68 #1, Hack Slash #3, Super Dinosaur #1, 28 Days Later #22, Thunderbolts #156, Hulk #32

Alex’s Top Picks

Best From The Past Week: Journey into Mystery #622 – Despite it being a big week, this was an easy pick.  Journey into Mystery was possibly the best first issue of 2011.  If you are at all interested in Thor, or fantasy in general, you need to be reading this comic.  If future issues are as good as this one, this may end up being Marvel’s best book, or at the very least in the running for that title.

Most Anticipated: Uncanny X-Force #8 – Whoa, two weeks in a row of Rick Remender’s Uncanny X-Force?  That’s awesome.  More awesome still is the fact that this issue sees the return of Jerome Opena on art.  I like Esad Ribic fine enough, but Opena’s work on this series has been outstanding.  Couple that with a plot that sounds like some over-the-top, 80s/90s, goodness and I am very excited.  Even if you can’t stand X-books, I highly recommend you give this book a shot.  It’s one of the very best team-books on the market.

Other Picks: Green Lantern Corps #59, Green Lantern #65, DMZ #64, Avengers #12, Invincible Iron Man #503, Iron Man 2.0 #4, Wolverine #8, Scarlet #5