We often simply read comic issues and don't really think about what was going on behind the scenes. Just as we enjoy commentary on DVDs and Blu-rays, the same can be applied to comics. It's great to hear from the writer to find out what they originally or what little aspects in a panel might mean.
Today, we have the commentary from ARMY OF DARKNESS/REANIMATOR by Mark Rahner. The one-shot issue is on sale TODAY from Dynamite Entertainment. There will be some spoilers (obviously). Pick up the issue and follow along at home!
Ash is hurled into an American graveyard in the 1920s and meets an intense young doctor named Herbert West. If the name sounds familiar, West's obsessed with reanimating the dead at any cost. But he just can't seem to find corpses that are fresh enough. If the setting isn't, it's H.P. Lovecraft's New England - and his bizarre original short story as the source material. Bonus! Also featuring a reprint of Re-Animator #0!
PAGE 1 - THE VORTEX
Ash’s narration spoofs that of a typical H.P. Lovecraft narrator who’s nearly been driven mad by the horrific ordeal he’s about to relate to you.
“It’s an evil force, created by an evil book.” In the original script, the line that followed was, I believe, “Even more evil than ‘Fifty Shades of Gray.’”
I’m a lifelong Lovecraft zealot, and have rarely been satisfied with adaptations or spinoffs of his work. So I wanted to make this as close to his original story as possible, essentially dropping Ash into the role of that story’s unnamed narrator and assistant, and setting it in the story’s time of the 1920s – adding twists that fit into all of that. It’s claustrophobic, small in scale, darker, and with plenty of humor but not wacky like you’d expect if you’d only been nurtured on director Stuart Gordon’s over-the-top movies.
Here we go.
PAGES 2-3 - MEET HERBERT WEST
This is Ash the way he looks at the end of ARMY OF DARKNESS – metal hand, no chainsaw.
West is in the middle of digging up a body in the background. He says Ash may have been concussed and Ash says he thinks me may have hurt his head instead. Ash is such an idiot that it’s nearly impossible to have a conversation with him. This is also the beginning of a running gag about announcing the “Herbert West – Reanimator” name. Because I like to drive things into the ground as much as West likes to dig ‘em up.
PAGES 4-5 - ASH ON THE TABLE
I wrote Ash’s healthcare crack months before the government shutdown over Obamacare. The timing was just fortunate. Unless you were one of the workers who got furloughed.
Apart from Ash’s idiocy, his language barrier with West hints at the era Ash has landed in. Ash calling himself Elvis Presley is a blatant “Bubba Ho-Tep” Easter Egg. That’s the Don Coscarelli movie with Bruce Campbell playing old Elvis in a nursing home – the guy who died was a paid imposter – and his best friend is an old black guy who thinks he’s JFK. And they fight a monster.
Surprise! West has done Ash a favor: replaced his missing hand. But it’s the hand of a black man. As much as I revere Lovecraft, it’s funny to me to riff on his racism. It was a century ago, and Lovecraft can’t be held to 2013 standards. But it’s always fair game to poke fun at it.
PAGES 6-7 - I’M NOT CALLING YOU THE KING.
West isn’t a primitive screwhead, so Ash’s “boomstick” line doesn’t work on him. He’s going to have to figure out a different approach.
In Lovecraft’s story, West’s narrator/assistant stuck with him out of loyalty, fascination, fear, and possibly free meat. Here, West blackmails Ash, who wants nothing to do with this crap. West has hidden the Necronomicon, and Ash can’t get back home without it.
“God damn it, Herb” may have been the first thing that tickled me when I was thinking of this story. For one thing, Ash is needling West, who hates being called Herb and considers himself a visionary genius worthy of respect. But it also sums up their relationship. I’ve said I prefer horror played straight, but if there were a sitcom called “God Damn It, Herb,” I’d never miss an episode.
Ash sees the newspaper’s date and realizes he’s in 1922. It was important for me to set the story in its original period. That’s rarely done with Lovecraft adaptations, maybe because period movies are prohibitively expensive. Research takes time. And maybe some people think no one wants to read or watch a horror story that’s not contemporary. But it also makes West’s ridiculous, Easy Bake Oven-caliber science easier to go with. Characters are products of their eras, and sometimes they work best there.
The newspaper’s headlines: F.W. Murnau’s landmark “Nosferatu” vampire film came out that year. Henri Landru was a French serial killer who took out ads to meet widows in the time before OKCupid, seduced them, got them to sign over their assets, then dismembered them and burned the parts in his oven. He was executed that year. The missing-girl headline is a little shorthand for exposition in Lovecraft’s story, and the outlook’s not so great for the poor girl.
I missed a golden opportunity with Ash and West looking at the death notices. There are plenty of editors and friends whose names could have gone there.
PAGES 8-9 - GRAVE ROBBING
We get an idea of what happened to the assistant Ash replaced. He probably wound up on West’s table.
West talks a lot of exposition here – with a montage, no less – as they dig up a fresh corpse and wheel it back to the lab. Well, Ash does all the work. As much of a mad genius as Lovecraft was, his prose was crammed with exposition. Much of it takes place is interior. And his tales tend not to be very linear and plot-driven. And since there are few things as unexciting in a comic book as exposition and two guys talking, why not rob a grave?
Ash doesn’t know what typhoid is, because he’s not so bright. Also, developed countries such as the United States pretty much eradicated it decades ago.
A lot of West’s dialogue is straight from Lovecraft’s story, particularly when he talks about swarthy polyglot immigrants who come in different species. To whatever extent West’s views mirrored Lovecraft’s actual racism is for scholars, but Lovecraft wasn’t the biggest fan of immigrants. He was an anti-Semite. And his description of the black boxer in the original story – a “Buck Robinson,” no less – wouldn’t exactly get him invited to an NAACP meeting today:
He was a loathsome, gorilla-like thing, with abnormally long arms which I could not help calling fore legs, and a face that conjured up thoughts of unspeakable Congo secrets and tom-tom poundings under an eerie moon. The body must have looked even worse in life -- but the world holds many ugly things.
PAGES 10-11 - BOXER ATTACK
And here’s that boxer. Two things you’ll notice: 1) He’s missing a hand. Ash has a new black hand. You do the math. 2) He’s got a bloody child’s hand hanging by tendons from his mouth. Let’s have a moment of silence for the missing girl.
PAGES 12-13 - WEST TELLS HIS STORY
West comes clean about his twisted past. Bride of The Montage! In Lovecraft’s story, West’s saga takes place over decades, and the narrator gives it all to you in big, fat doses of cumbersome exposition. (It was serialized in six parts in an amateur mag called “Home Brew,” so having it live on like this would have shocked Howie as much as Obama’s presidency.) This shorthands that and introduces West’s longtime nemesis, Dr. Halsey. Does this make Lovecraft the true father of the cannibal zombie, decades ahead of George A. Romero? Discuss.
The power dynamic between Ash and West has shifted a little. The arrogant West is in the doghouse and has to explain himself to Ash, who’s becoming less of a buffoon as the shit starts to hit the fan.
I couldn’t resist an Abu Ghraib crack here – a lot of my work is crawling with political satire, especially ROTTEN. But this also reminds you that there’s a disjointed time element to what’s going on.
PAGES 14-15 - WEST’S COMMANDING OFFICER
In my script, the head of West’s commander is in a pan. You know, a medical-type pan, with some neck juice in it, like the cutting-edge science depicted in “The Brain That Wouldn’t Die”! When I got the art pages to sign off on, I saw that artist Randy Valiente had put the head in a pan all right – a FRYING PAN! And it was so funny that changing it would have been a crime.
This is the head of West’s patron in the Great War, Sir Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee. And that was his exact name in Lovecraft’s story. Absolutely nothing funny about it. But Lovecraft didn’t grow up with Monty Python, and “Sir Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee” is such a cumbersome Pythonesque name that it’s hilarious to me. In fact, I give you my word that the next cat I adopt, will be named Sir Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee, and every time I call him, whether it’s for dinner or to scold him for clawing the couch, I will use his full name.
Here’s a spot where I wanted to go the complete opposite direction from the 1985 campy “Re-Animator” movie. In it, a reanimated corpse holds its severed head as the head violates a co-ed. Not here. With whatever consciousness the head of Sir Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee retains, it’s hellishly horrified and warns Ash to end all of this by killing West.
PAGES 16-17 - ASH GOES TO THE MOVIES
This segment allowed Randy to get out of the lab and depict 1920s America. Ancient cars. A silent movie – the magnificent Count Orlok in “Nosferatu.” Naturally, Ash has no patience for silent movies. And his new black hand has developed a (homicidal) mind of its own. When’s THAT happened before?
I think having an S-Mart reference is one of the compulsory moves in an Army of Darkness story – the Russian judges will mark you down harshly if you don’t have one, along with a clean dismount. Here it’s a setup for a joke: to anyone in the 1920s, a superstore would be wondrous, but to a maniac like West, there’s nothing at all incredible about a reanimated head in a pan.
PAGES 17-18 - WEST’S NEW VICTIM
PAGES 18-19 - WAVE GOODBYE TO THE HAND
Easy come, easy go. Ash had to lose a hand once before – that’s Army of Darkness 101. But in 1922, they didn’t have power chainsaws. So it’s time for some old-school dismemberment.
PAGES 20-21 - THE ANNOYING CALM BEFORE THE UNDEAD REANIMATED STORM
The dots are starting to connect. A dude with a head of wax. Know anyone missing a head? The Sefton asylum. Remember anyone there? Something seems to be making West irritable, and Ash’s Senor Wences routine isn’t helping. And if there’s such a thing as a Benny Hill Easter Egg while Ash is doing bad ventriloquism, just think, “It’s INCOSSIGLE!”
I like buddy comedies with one guy constantly needling the other. Why not have the victim of the needling and stupidity – the Bud Abbott type – become fed up enough to kill the other one? When Ash finds himself on West’s operating table, it’s every bit as much because he annoyed West too much as it is that West is a crazed, obsessive, crackpot scientist.
PAGES 22-23 - GET MY RIFLE!
Company’s knocking! Even a guy as dimwitted as Ash remembers when he hears the “THUMP THUMP” that West got a deal on his house because the basement was connected to a series of catacombs thought to be tombs. This has been another lesson in Real Estate Horror (see also “The Amityville Horror.”) You get what you pay for. And then you pay some more …
“It doesn’t matter now anyway.” West knows that the jig is up for him, all the undead chickens are coming home to roost … you get the idea.
And here’s where we seamlessly, expertly, brilliantly blend Reanimator history with Army of Darkness. The undead lay siege to Herbert West’s lab, the site of countless atrocities, just as they do in Lovecraft’s story. But now you know what they really were – possessed zombies made possible because Ash went back in time to 1922 and allowed that quack, West, access to the Necronomicon! West’s lunatic experiments were all grotesque failures, so he’s recited a spell from Ash’s book.
But that’s not the end. More is revealed. Jokes are driven further into the Earth’s core. Ash finally gets to be a righteously cool badass with a line or two that may stick with you. Does he get back home? Who’s he been telling this incredible story to? And will there be more?
What, you want to know everything here? Get the book, you churlish penny-pincher!
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