Adapted & illustrated by: John Bolton
Review: Will Dubbeld
One of those old school, die-hard, knob slobberin’ Bruce Campbell fans.
Brisco County, Burn Notice, The Man With the Screaming Brain, Bubba Ho-Tep, Maniac Cop...
Gimmie all of that.
MANIAC COP, you guys.
Of course, the holiest of holies for fanboy jerkoffs is the Evil Dead series.
These films (and the subsequent television series) are campy splatterpunk horror at its best. They aren’t as madcap as Peter Jackson’s early films, maintaining a sense of horror or at least dread atmosphere mixed with comedic decapitations.
But you already know this.
Evil Dead has evolved from a DIY Independent film to a franchise producing sequels, action figures, video games, and (of course) comics.
This adaptation hit the stands in 1992. I remember thumbing through the third issue because I’d read it featured an alternate ending from the film.
Spoiler alert: it’s the one where Ash sleeps too long.
In any case, I’d long-forgotten this series existed until this particular issue showed up in a recent purchase of key Tomb of Dracula issues.
It’s not great.
Granted, I have a bias against most comic book adaptations of movies. They rarely lend anything other than a different visual interpretation and perhaps some alternate script takes, and this is exemplified here.
It’s essentially a storyboard for Army of Darkness, and I gotta say:
It is much more successful as a movie.
I absolutely love the film, but there are (chuckle...) nuances that do not translate well to the comic medium.
Most of the dialogue, to be frank, is pretty cringeworthy to read. It works in the cinematic Evil Dead universe, delivered with Bruce Campbell’s hammy acting, but is nigh-unreadable without that context.
It was sort of fun to read along with the movie playing in my head, pointing out the deviations in plot and dialogue, and see some additional content not featured in the film.
All in all, the absolute star of the show is John Bolton’s gorgeous painted art. The man has a keen mastery of mixing light and dark, and the surreal with nigh-photorealism.
The same page might show you some demonic hellbeast out of Goya battling a depiction of protagonist Ash that looks shockingly like Bruce Campbell.
Top notch.
Additionally, Bolton keeps his backgrounds extremely sparse and focuses all the detail in the fore. This reader is immediately zeroed in on the central action and does not meander from the page’s focal point. Swathes of background color serve as a field to showcase central detail; not detract from it.
I’d read some of the early-2000s Evil Dead comics, and they were little more than cartoonishly illustrated books regurgitating snappy one-liners from the movies.
More recently, Space Goat Productions snapped up the rights, and a glut of Evil Dead comics soon followed. The selections I have read were more bombastic than the source and set on a grander stage, a seeming inverse of the claustrophobic nature of the movies.
I haven’t outright despised any of these Evil Dead comics, but neither am I clamoring for more. I’d maybe pick the remainder of the series out of a dollar box or quarter bin but surely won’t go out of my way.
Even for a ride-or-die fan like yours truly, this one swings for the fences but falls way short.
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