By John Layman, Fabiano Neves, Fernando Blanco, Sean Phillips & various (Marvel/Dynamite Entertainment)
ISBN: 978-0-7851-4243-0
Swiftly catching a cultural wave to become one of modern Marvel’s most popular niche-franchises, a canny blend of gratuitous violence, sharp wit and arrant buffoonery led to the Marvel Zombies taking the comics-reading world by storm in the mid-2000s.
So big was the concept that, like a flesh-eating infection, it even escaped the confines of corporate continuity to engender an inter-company crossover with another hugely popular horror franchise…
In one of the many Marvel universes an intruder from beyond brought an extra-dimensional curse to one tragic reality: a pestilence that without exception instantly turned the infected (for which read “bittenâ€) victims into ravenous, undead eating machines.
Confronted by wave after wave of valiant superheroes, “patient zero†defeated them all and his all-conquering contagion spread exponentially as defenders fell to rise as voracious monsters. Before a day was out a chain-reaction of hungry terror had devastated the world, leaving its costumed champions nothing more than the apex predators atop a rapidly diminishing food source…
Ash Williams – as played onscreen by actor Bruce Campbell – is the implausible demon-killing star of the Evil Dead/Army of Darkness movies devised by Sam Raimi. A horny, misogynistic oaf and charmless goon, he is nonetheless chosen by fate to destroy all “deaditesâ€: ravening evil ghosts intent on ending all life, spawned by a malignant, malevolent sentient tome known as The Necronomicon.
For a total butthole, Ash is surprisingly competent at his job…
Dark Horse Comics produced the first Evil Dead comicbook series in 1992 and Dynamite Entertainment picked up the license in 2004 with dark and daft miniseries Army of Darkness: Ashes 2 Ashes. It led to 2005’s Army of Darkness: Shop Till You Drop (Dead) and Army of Darkness vs. Re-Animator before an on-going series was commissioned in 2006.
Considering his predilection for gory, sardonic splatter-tainment, the dimension-hopping, time-jumping Ash was a dead cert to visit Marvel’s funerary fun house…
This slim and sinister inter-company chronicle collects Marvel Zombies Vs. Army of Darkness #1-5 (May – September 2007), courtesy of scripter John Layman and illustrators Fabiano Neves with Fernando Blanco, Sean Phillips and colourist June Chung all contributing to the mix.
Unusual for such intersecting universe imbroglios, the events of this yarn are “in-continuityâ€, occurring during, contiguous with and affecting the tragic happenings seen in ‘Marvel Zombies: Dead Days’: even offering key story points not revealed in the exclusively Marvel tales…
It begins after Ash arrives on Earth in the hours before the infection first hits. A no-nonsense blue-collar kind of guy, the Deadite Destroyer can take demonic monsters and time-travel in his stride but is flabbergasted to see grown men in tights beating each other up.
Watching Daredevil battle super-villain Thunderball the nonplussed wanderer is unable to discern who is good and who evil but his amazement is suspended after the wicked spirit of the Necronomicon appears and taunts him with a prophecy… “This world will die and an army of the dead will riseâ€â€¦
Stuck in a world of costumed clowns, Ash decides to go straight to the top and seeks out Avengers Mansion, but the assembled heroes refuse to believe his warnings of doom. Being dumped in a lake by the Scarlet Witch only serves to jog his memory however and he recalls his last moments before arriving in this fruity, steroid-infested madhouse…
He was dead and about to enter Heaven when a costumed maniac attacked, biting the deceased, turning them into flesh-eating horrors and wrecking the entire Afterlife. Ash escaped back to the lands of the living, but the creature followed him…
The heroes are leaving to investigate reports of a monster when Ash finds them again, and Colonel America orders Spider-Man to take the raving lunatic away for his own safety. By the time the traveller convinces the Wallcrawler that he isn’t crazy, the damage has been done. Almost all of the World’s Mightiest Heroes are ravening undead horrors and Ash is ‘Earth’s Mightiest Zero’…
Stunned, the late-arriving webspinner is easy meat for the Star-Spangled zombie, leaving Ash helpless before a hungry rabble of former heroes…
Events kick into grisly top gear in ‘Marvel Team-Ups’ as Spider-Man, frantically fighting the hunger that’s killing him, whisks Ash to temporary safety before fleeing, leaving the extra-dimensional demon killer all alone until seeming kindred spirit The Punisher shows up.
The man with the skull on his chest doesn’t care about undead monsters: he’s busy killing a few living ones like The Kingpin, Hammerhead and The Owl…
Once his current job is completed however he comes around to Ash’s way of thinking, but his confrontational manner of only dealing with things head on soon ends his usefulness. The vigilante does however leave Ash with a lot of serious ordnance, which the cocky Mr. Williams uses to save hot babe Dazzler from imminent death by superhero bite…
Ash is convinced that the Necronomicon is summoning Deadites to this Earth and, after informing her that an evil magic book is behind all the grief, Dazzler takes him to the home of Doctor Strange, reasoning that if the chronicle of chaos is to be found anywhere it will be in the library of Earth’s Sorcerer Supreme…
They are too late: ‘Night of the Livid Dead’ finds Ash meeting again the Scarlet Witch (now the only still-breathing Avenger) and encountering his Marvel Earth counterpart as well as a flesh-eating humanoid duck named Howard, but the mystic they’re seeking is long gone.
Ash and his new team do however convince the other tormented tomes in the library to tell them where the Necronomicon is currently located and, leaving scenes of escalating horror behind them, the mortals fly to Latveria to confront a foreigner with the unlikely name of Doctor Doom…
By the time they get there the plague has gone global and the Balkan kingdom is under siege: possibly the only place on Earth where humans still live – and only then behind the straining force-fields of Castle Doomstadt.
‘The Book of Doom’ opens with the Iron Dictator disregarding Ash’s warnings of infernal invasion in favour his own conclusions of a simple pan-dimensional virus, before dumping him in the pens where a breeding stock of humans is cached, ready to repopulate Earth after Doom inevitably destroys the zombie hordes.
Unconvinced by his captor’s arrogant assurances, Ash busts out and meets Scarlet Witch on her way to the dictator’s library. Soon they are interrogating the Devil Doctor’s copy of the Necronomicon and Ash discovers he been played from page one…
Reeling with despair and defeat he then releases a hot chick in a glass tube who calls herself Amora the Enchantress, blissfully unaware that she is both an evil goddess and a plague-carrying zombie Doom has been experimenting on…
The tale and the world comes to an explosive, blood-drenched end in concluding chapter ‘The Stalking Dead’ wherein an army of undead heroes converge on Latveria, but not before Ash and Doom pull a minor rabbit out of their combined hats, ferrying the last humans to a place of other-dimensional safety. The hapless Deadite Hunter, however, is less lucky and lands in a dimension with a monster problem even he hasn’t encountered before…
Fast-paced, irreverent, raucous and gorily outrageous, this laugh-out-loud saga of no-guts-and-less-glory will sit well with readers hungry for immature entertainment and all comicbook completists, and comes with a splendid gallery of covers-&-variants by Arthur Suydam, recreating eight classic scenes from Marvel history. Also included are those inspirational originals by John Byrne, Terry Austin, Joe Simon, Jack Kirby, Carmine Infantino, Ross Andru, Dick Giordano, Jim Lee, Jim Starlin and Frank Miller.
© 2007, 2009 Marvel Characters, Inc. All rights reserved. All Marvel characters, names and distinctive likenesses are trademarks of Marvel Characters, Inc. Army of Darkness and all characters, names and distinctive likenesses are trademarks of Orion Pictures ™ & © 1993-2009 Orion Pictures Corporation, Inc. All rights reserved. Licensed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. to Dynamic Forces Inc. Dynamite, Dynamic Entertainment & its logo ™ & Dynamic Forces Inc. Inc. All rights reserved.