Army of Darkness Forever #10 // Review
Ash’s dark side seems to have everything lined-up. The darkness yearns to rise again. It’s going to devour the light in its entirety. He has the power to mobilize armies and rain darkness over every city on every continent. Only...why is it that Ash is smirking as his dark side gloats. What does Ash know that his dark side doesn’t? He’s about to find out in Army of Darkness Forever #10. Writer Tony Fleecs pounds another nail into the Evil Dead franchise with artist Pop Mhan and colorist Brad Simpson. Evil Ash is about to find out just how much he doesn’t know.
As it turns out, Ash’s dark side has the wrong Necronomicon. It’s the one that sucks. Literally. There’s like...the magical equivalent of a black hold inside the thing. So he hasn’t quite gotten the power that he thinks he does, which allows Ash an opening...and that opening heads straight to 1300 A.D. Ash is going to have to deal with the “original recipe Deadites.” There’s 244 of them. So he’s a little outnumbered, but what’s the worst that could happen? He’s already been transported a few hundred years in the past. How could things possibly get worse for him?
Fleecs is handling quite a lot in the course of a story that finds him right back in the middle of everything with an army of the undead in the 14th century. There isn’t as much of a sense of setting, so the contrast between Ash and the history he’s returned to isn’t really all that present. He’s not really the center of the story anyway. Shield and her family drama are a lot more interesting than Fleecs has managed to make Ash in this series, so it’s nice to see her closer to the center of everything throughout the tenth issue of thee series.
Mhan manages a great deal of tension and intensity in drama and action throughout the issue. (Bjorn Barends’ Cover A for the issue is absolutely gorgeous as well.) Sheila has a lot going for her in the artwork with very cunning and passionate expressions drawn across her face and the posture and movements of an action hero. Ash comes across a bit more cartoonishly, which is perfectly find given the overall make-up of his character, but one gets the feeling that a more satisfying approach might have explored Ash’s personality in a bit more detail.
Ash is really the heart of the whole Evil Dead franchse. It’s difficult to get a feel for an Army of Darkness series that doesn’t place him pretty solidly in the center of everything. And though he DOES appear in nearly every scene in the issue, the story doesn’t dive to heavily into the psyche on the single most appealing of The Army of Darkness--its hero. The family drama that Sheila is involved in is interesting enough, but it doesn’t feel like something that has its heart rooted in the Evil Dead..
