This is the story of Cassandra Hack, a young nerdy woman whose own insults and tormented high school life led her tortured obese mother to seek revenge on all of the young girls who made Cassandra’s life difficult and painful. Cassandra lived to see her mother become a classic slasher, a woman called the lunch lady who hung and mutilated and devoured these girls and it was up to Cassie to bring her down once and for all.
Now that Tim Seely and “Hack/Slash” have moved from Devil’s Due to the higher profile Image comics to stand alongside the greats like The Walking Dead and Invincible, Seely and co. are working backward now to tell the story of Cassie Hack and how she became Cassie Hack and learned to hunt down the undead killers known as “Slashers.”
As is made clear here like the original series run, there’s a difference between serial killers (Dahmer) and Slashers (Jason Voorhes) and Cassie is about to find that out when she hunts a stripe sweatered grinning slasher who hides in the corn fields striking down kids who he thinks will touch his daughter. As expected Seely pretty much has to start all over again because while Devil’s Due is definitely an excellent little label, they’re not as well known as they should be and people are going to be starting fresh on “Hack/Slash” since the series has been mainly just a cult underground title. Now with potentially high mainstream success in the way of Kirkman’s series, and an impending movie deal, “Hack/Slash” has a lot of ground to cover and Seely is on the right track with this prequel of Hack’s story.
Even us hardcore fans of the title know very little about what happened in between Hack’s murder of her slasher mother and her discovery of her best friend Vlad in a basement, and now we’re beginning to see how she learned to deal with slashers originally, her methods, her hunting tricks, her strategies and how she came to grow in to her shell from an awkward young outcast in to a bonafide living ghost who went on to stalk the stalkers and hunt the predators. Daniel Leister’s art is wonderful as Cassie is more often than not depicted as this girl who is a direct reflection of her mother Delilah while also restraining her urges to kill and become a spawn of pure evil. The climax of issue one is quite heartbreaking as expected as Cassie paves her way as a hunter by completely cutting off all ties with her past and foster family and goes out with simply a knife to find the killer in the fields awaiting her entrance, as Cassie will eventually exit as a new woman, a woman who battles all forms of evil.