By John Layman, Fabiano Neves, Fernando Blanco, Sean Phillips & Arthur Suydam with John Byrne, Terry Austin, Joe Simon, Jack Kirby, Carmine Infantino, Ross Andru, Dick Giordano, Jim Lee, Jim Starlin, Frank Miller & various (MARVEL/Dynamite Entertainment)
ISBN: 978-0-7851-4243-0 (TPB)
This book includes Discriminatory Content produced in less enlightened times.
Swiftly catching a cultural wave to become one of turn-of-the-century 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. The result was carnage, mayhem, buckets of blood, macabre laughs via a 5-issue miniseries that mutated into this hard-to-find but fab-to-read treat…
You will need not nets, swords or shotguns but cold hard currency in various formats…
In one of so many Marvel universes an intruder from beyond brought an extra-dimensional curse to that tragic reality: a pestilence that without exception turned the infected (for which read “bitten” and “chewed on”) victims into ravenous, undead eating machines.
Confronted by wave after wave of valiant superheroes, “patient zero” defeated them all and his contagion spread exponentially as defenders fell to rise again as voracious monsters. Before a day was out, a chain-reaction of hungry terror devastated the world, leaving its costumed champions as no less than the apex predators atop a rapidly diminishing food source…
Ash Williams – as played on-screen by actor Bruce Campbell (and who wrote the eerily excellent DC Horror Presents: Sgt. Rock vs. the Army of the Dead) is the implausible demon-killing star of the Evil Dead/Army of Darkness movies devised by Sam Raimi. A horny, misogynistic oaf and utterly charmless goon, he is nonetheless chosen by fate to destroy all “deadites”: ravening evil ghosts intent on ending all life, and originally 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 comic book series in 1992 before Dynamite Entertainment picked up the license in 2004, opening with dark ‘n’ daft miniseries Army of Darkness: Ashes 2 Ashes. That 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 finally 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, sinister inter-company chronicle collects Marvel Zombies Vs. Army of Darkness #1-5 (May – September 2007), by scripter John Layman and illustrator Fabiano Neves, with Fernando Blanco, Sean Phillips and colourist June Chung all contributing to the moody mix.
Unusual for such intersecting universe imbroglios, the events of this yarn are “in-continuity”, occurring during, contiguous with and ultimately affecting the tragic happenings seen in ‘Marvel Zombies: Dead Days’. It even offers key story points not revealed in the exclusively Marvel tales, so completists be warned…
It all begins after Ash arrives on (an) 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 supervillain Thunderball, the nonplussed necromantic nomad is unable to discern who is good and who evil, but his amazement is suspended after the wicked spirit of the Necronomicon appears to taunt him with a prophecy… “this world will die and an army of the dead will rise”…
Stuck in a la la land of costumed clowns, Ash opts to go straight to the top, seeking out Avengers Mansion, where 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 happily 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 superheroes 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 now 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. However, once his current task is completed, 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 leave Ash with a lot of serious ordnance, though which cocky Mr. Williams uses to save hot babe Dazzler from imminent death by superhero bite…
Ash is convinced the Necronomicon is summoning Deadites to this Earth and – after informing the mutant musical transducer 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 far too late: ‘Night of the Livid Dead’ finds Ash reunite with Scarlet Witch (now the only still-breathing Avenger) and encounters 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 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 forcefields 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 Haunt 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-&-less-glory will sit well with readers hungry for immature entertainment and all comic book completists, and comes with a splendid gallery of covers-&-variants by Arthur Suydam, recreating eight classic scenes from Marvel history. Also included are 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.