The following interview was conducted by Matt Brady and posted to Newsarama on June 15th, 2004. It is presented here for archival purposes. All text is as it was on the original post.
ARCHIVE LINK TO THE ORIGINAL POST
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| J. Scott Campbell's cover to Army of Darkness: Ashes 2 Ashes #1 |
ASH'S NEW MAN: ANDY HARTNELL TALKS ARMY OF DARKNESS
Ash is back, and so is the Army of Darkness that he thought he vanquished. July’s Army of Darkness: Ashes 2 Ashes #1 is on the horizon, and if you thought the end of Army of Darkness was the end of Ash – just wait.
Produced by Dynamite Entertainment and published by Devil’s Due, Army of Darkness is the most recent move to capitalize on Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead franchise, as well as its slightly overconfident, slightly not too bright, but eminently likable hero, Ash. Written by Andy (Danger Girl) Hartnell, with art by Nick Bradshaw, the miniseries picks up where the film ended.
Newsarama spoke with Hartnell for an inside look.
“The guys at Dynamite are fans of Danger Girl, which has a similar action-adventure-humor combination,” Hartnell told Newsarama when asked how he landed the gig in the first place. “It’s a totally different book, but that’s the tone they were looking for. J. Scott Campbell was doing a cover for Army, and he and the publisher got to talking about getting me involved with the story. It really just took off from there, very quickly. I was so familiar with the movies that it didn't take much time to begin writing.”
Like many of his contemporaries, and fans of the original films, Hartnell first saw Evil Dead and Army of Darkness on home video in the ‘80s, when the movies were able to slowly break out of their cult standing and draw a larger audience. “We had our own bootleg copies back then and watched them almost every weekend - up until the point where the tapes wore out,” Hartnell said. “I think that may have made them even more fun to watch as a kid - you had this really poor quality horror movie on an even worse quality videotape. Don't get me wrong, when I say poor quality movie, I'm talking about the shoestring budget, not the direction, execution, and perfect performance by the almighty Bruce Campbell. They were unlike anything else at the time, and still are today. They're fun to watch, not like some of the other horror films that just try to shock you. I'd much rather laugh at a severed head stuck in a vise than be disgusted by it.”
The approach cited by Harntell – the over the top stories in the films, and performances by Campbell gave the films a comic book feel, something which has to be dealt with when moving the characters and situations from film to print.
“There has to be something at stake,” Hartnell said, when asked about approaching the translation of the material. “There has to be a serious threat that Ash has to squash. But other than that, I just try to beat him senseless. I think that's the way Sam Raimi would have wanted it. There really is a somewhat complex story in this series, but the main objective is to have fun. Laugh and cringe at the mess Ash gets himself mixed up in. That's what I always loved about the films.”
That said, the films did have an R rating.
“There were two times - so far - we were asked to turn it down a notch,” Hartnell said. “Nick Bradshaw and I went a little overboard with the gore. Although when you see the book, people will probably be wondering how it could have been any more gory. It was – trust me – there were just a few extra bits and pieces of deadite flesh flying across the page.
“It's all done with a sense of humor, though. It's cartoon violence, very much like in the Evil Dead movies. I would never want people to get Ash confused with Jason or Freddy. Ash would never kill, unless what attacks is already dead!”
So – yeah, Army of Darkness did have an ending – with Ash returning to his work at S-Mart, and fighting off the last remnants of the deadites that came back with him, How do you continue from there? As anyone who’s seen the film knows, Ash has always had a problem when it comes to repeating words correctly…
“Ash did come back to S-Mart, but he did go on to admit that he may have misspoken the ‘magic words' that brought him back to the present,” Hartnell said. “That little boo-boo brought the evil back with him, and also brought him back to the present too early, not too late as in the alternate ending of the film. He's arrived in the present before he ever went on to the cabin and encountered the Necronomicon in the first place.
So now he's got to go back to that blasted cabin, force his younger self back to the past to redo the events of Army of Darkness, and then go on to destroy the book of the dead once and for all, here in the present, in order to prevent the horrible future some of us saw in the alternate ending of the film. Along the way, the ‘Promised One' is going to suffer like never before. I promise thee!”
And if you’ve never checked out that alternate ending…”post apocalyptic” barely starts to describe the world in which, Rip Van Winkle-style, awoke.
And after the first miniseries. Unless Dynamite beats Hartnell away with a stick, or throws rocks at him, he’s in. “People can always expect Ash to pull through at the end of these stories, but how much trouble is that going to get him into? As fans of the films know, Ash's ‘victories' always turn out to be more elaborate failures. The mess he's made just gets bigger and bigger. He's a knucklehead who I hope can become my own personal punching bag for many more misadventures.”
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