Dynamite Entertainment 2020
Written by Ryan Parrott
Illustrated by Jacob Edgar
Coloured by Kike J. Diaz
Lettered by Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou
It’s been six months since the events of the Army of Darkness film…Ash is just trying to settle down and get back to his groovy ways. But dammit, DEADITE-POSSESSED strangers keep attacking him at every turn. Why is evil following everywhere he turns, and what happens when an awful splinter spell causes Ash to become…TEAM ASH!? And, because it’s February, we’re celebrating Valentine’s Day with a special variant by artist Sebastian Piriz!
I am a huge fan of Ryan's and that was a huge factor in my trying this. The other is that I love the Ash vs. The Evil Dead series on Stars, which I am sad as hell that's over. So I am all for this and after reading it Ryan once again impresses with me just how well he knows and understands the source material of what he writes. This feels like it could bridge the the path between those films and with the show on telly. That it feels so on point in what could be the timeline of the franchise. If that isn't enough for you that's okay because you can still read this as a brand new reader and not feel like you are missing anything making it a great jumping on point.
I love the way that this is being told. It feels like the end of the story is the opening and we have to go back and see the events that have led up to this point. It is a good way of showing that this isn't an ongoing and just an arc so we know when we approach what we see happening here and then how that ends to finish things up. The story & plot development that we see through how the sequence of events unfold as well as how readers learn information is presented beautifully. The character development that we see is completely on point. While Bruce and this role aren't all that hard to nail down making him seem like his own person, a separate entity if you will, is something else altogether, the pacing is fabulous and as it takes through pages revealing the twists and turns along the way and how it works with everything else helps create the books ebb & flow.
The interiors here aren't what I was expecting to see but ya know what that's always a good thing in my book. The linework is fantastic and how the varying weights are utilised to bring us the attention to detail is great to see. There is something really interesting about the hard angles that we see and more so in the face and it creates this almost exaggerated feel that's between an animated style and traditional comics. This gives it this unique feel and with a franchise like this that's a huge factor in setting it apart. The utilisation of the page layouts and how we see the angles and perspective in the panels show a strong, solid eye for storytelling. The colour work is just as interesting. The backgrounds seem to have this nice overlay where the colours are rendered differently than on the people and that add that certain something that helps the linework make that impression upon the reader.
This is a phenomenal book and it has tall the right notes of humour and horror blended in ways that make it feel like the cheesiness of the films. There is a reason this has such a cult following and what Ryan and company do here should make all those involved in the franchise feel proud as punch at how well the tone, mood and feel has been captured.