Hack/Slash Omnibus 3 review

     Pfft, this one is a tough one to review. Well, okay, it's not. Hack/Slash volume 3 isn't actually that good. I was a huge fan of the first two volumes but this omnibus and its stories pushed me away from the franchise. Basically, the omnibus takes some of the flaws of the previous volumes and then exaggerates them a great deal before adding a few more.

    The premise of Hack/Slash is Cassie Hack is a young beautiful Goth girl who is the daughter of a Slasher. Slashers are human beings with homicidal impulses who, if killed, resurrect from the dead as unstoppable revenants. Traveling with her deformed but pleasant-mannered friend, Vlad, she attempts to wipe out all Slashers everywhere. This basically being the case of a Final Girl and a good aligned Jason Voorhees versus an endless horde of horror movie villains.

    This volume is filled with a lot of returning "favorites", crossovers, and the introduction of the Black Lamp Society that I have issues. I was a big fan of some elements like the introduction of the character Samhain who is a pretty transparent homage to the character Angel from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The thing is, if you're going to take inspiration from other works for your wn then you should take from the best.

    In general, the omnibus shows there was perhaps just a little too much effort to appeal to older fans as well as try to gain crossover potential. One of the appeals of Hack/Slash is its a violent R-rated antihero comic book with a high body count. Cassie Hack kills her opponents and they should, if not stay dead, at least have a pretty big interlude between appearances. New varieties of slashers should be created since it shouldn't be like Spiderman with the same villains popping up again and again.

    I'm also not a fan of the Black Lamp Society or how it comes not only to dominate the story but the entire mythology of Hack/Slash. The origins of the Slashers are revealed to be an ancient Greek sex-hating cult that is misusing a sacred flower of an African tribe to create an endless army of murderous Michael Meyers types. How do I feel about this revelation? Roughly the same way that If did about Michael Myers being controlled by a secret cult of druids. It is a silly origin no one really needed for the monsters.

    Samhain is a good love interest for Cassie and I admit I kind of like her a bit more than Georgia Peaches (though I don't like her). I know how this story ends, though, and I feel like they could have gone deeper with the relationship between our heroine as well as our Jack-o-Lantern themed killer.

4/10