Everyone wants to work at S-Mart.
Creative Staff:
Story: Mark Rahner
Art: Jethro Morales
What They Say:
The splatterific climax! After Vampi’s witch trial, she and Ash race to face an abbey swarming with possessed monks. Which is just a speed bump compared to the demonic angels the monks have conjured. A secret chapter from before the Deadite siege in Army of Darkness, from Mark Rahner (The Twilight Zone Shadow & Substance) and Jethro Morales (Dejah of Mars).
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
The Vampirella/Army of Darkness crossover has been an interesting experience. While I’ve become a fan of Vampirella since her relaunch over a year ago and have gotten into the various spinoff books, I’ve never tackled the Army of Darkness books even though I like the film. So this provided a first-look kind of opportunity for me to see what kind of vibe they run with the character in bringing it to life in print. While Ash hasn’t won me over to trying his own books, I’ve mostly enjoyed this series for its simplicity of function and form while adhering to the usual tropes that one would expect from it. There are no surprises here but it manages to be fun and silly in the right ways.
With events moving quickly and in a bad way, this installment focuses on the pair now having to work together to go and stop the monks from invoking the angels to save them from the DEadites. Of course, those aren’t angels that they’re summoning and they’re not actually waiting for the monk whose place Ash took in order to bring them down. There’s a lot of fun early on in seeing Ash and Vampirella traveling together as you really get the sense that she’s just waiting for the absolutely wrong thing to be said so she can slice his throat. There’s not a lot of banter between the two, but that’s mostly because Ash does his best to fill the quiet times with his own voice. That said, when the going gets tough the two do manage to work well enough together, misunderstandings and all.
The final battle is about as you’d expect with the range of creatures involved here and what they do and we get the additional fun of Vampirella having to change form to what she was at the start of the miniseries in order to really be a potent force against them. Morales captures the look of both characters well amid the battle and the sequence with Ash riding her back while using his shotguns is spot on. Add in that she’s biting off the heads of the bad guys and it just gets sillier. The flow of the book works well and Morales mostly captures the look of it, but there are times where I just felt like it took odd leaps in the story itself with the dialogue and locations, leaving me feeling like I missed a panel or two – or even a whole page.
In Summary:
The finale for the series is about as expected, which you can pretty much say about the series as a whole. There are fun moments, funny moments, and some good action to be had, but at the end of the day everything is reset to zero. And that works well enough because not everything has to be a game changer or incredibly important. What I found is that while some of the leaps in the book left me a bit cool to it, there’s a lot of fun to be had in general with the character presentations and the setting. It could use with a bit more expansion, a bit less Ash dialogue, and a bit more meat to the story, but for a fun romp that it wants to be it ends up succeeding quite well.
Grade: B-
Age Rating: 16+
Released By: Dynamite Entertainment
Release Date: October 14th, 2015
MSRP: $3.99
