Bad to worse doesn’t even cover what’s happening.
Creative Staff:
Story: Fred Van Lente
Art: Vincenzo Carratu
Colors: Kike J. Diaz
Letterer: Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou
What They Say:
The hit series returns, cuz you can’t kill a never-ending army of zombies…you can only hope to beat the —- out of them! After tragically losing their first Chosen One against the zombie plague, Vampirella, Miss Fury, and what remains of the Project Superpowers look for a new savior — but Ash Williams is an even more reluctant Deadite hunter than usual! This time, the Army of Darkness has ray guns, super powers and a brilliant new general: Evil Sonja, who takes her role of Queen of Hel quite seriously!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
With this being something of a line-wide crossover event, I’ll admit it’s easy to get lost in who is who. We’ve had mostly familiar characters so far but there are some that I’ve had to strain to remember and others I have no clue. Fred Van Lente is definitely having fun here with it and who he gets to bring into the fight as the stakes keep rising. For Vincenzo Carratu, this means a lot of designs to try and get just right while still having his particular style about it. It definitely comes together well and has a good cohesive feeling while still going wild and weird as needed for what the undead are up to or some of our other players.
With this installment, Evil Sonja is really making a lot of progress in her journey to add more to her ranks. With it done as narration through a general within Project: Superpowers – a property I know almost nothing about – we see how she’s gone from the mountains of Tibet to being guided through large population centers so as to consume and convert more people into her army. The Chinese opted to try and stop her along the way with some mid-range nuclear weapon, but all that did was give her three more undead for every one of her existing army that was zapped by it. That has now made her far more powerful and she’s making her way to Shanghai in preparation for crossing the sea while the forces under her thrall in America are preparing for just that.
What our leading general gets here is some help, or promised help, from an unexpected place. Captain Future has been sent here by the White House to help out with figuring this out. His coming from the future (or really, “a” future) indicates that they’ve survived this and he’s going to be useful at some point in the story. While that gets set up, we also follow Jennifer Blood as she’s now gotten her hands on the smiley guy pin that I can never remember the name of. She’s bonded him to service to her for what she wants to achieve in finding Salvatore and then moving up the chain from there once she finds that he’s been zombiefied. I read a bunch of J-Blood a few years ago so I’m curious to see how well she fits into things, as well as the subplot of Vampirella going off to look for the Necronomicon.
In Summary:
There’s a lot to like with this installment as it hits the ground running, but you may have to do some homework to figure out who some of these characters are as a bunch haven’t seen print for a while. I do like that it’s not drawing on just the latest and most popular characters but moving through more of the larger library of properties. The main storyline is moving forward enough where Evil Sonja’s just growing in power so we know there has to be some roadblocks in her way to slow her down before it gets to the big culmination. Van Lente continues to deliver some solid dialogue with fun at times and Carratu’s artwork manages to make the whole thing cohesive when there are places where it shouldn’t be.
Grade: B
Age Rating: 15+
Released By: Dynamite Entertainment
Release Date: July 14th, 2021
MSRP: $3.99
