Some people spend the holidays wrapping presents, listening to Christmas music and getting soppy drunk on spiked eggnog drinks. Me, I'm spending this Christmas staring at a very young Bruce Campbell's puss, watching and rewatching the first EVIL DEAD movie. I'm in the final stretch of adapting and expanding on the movie for an 88 page, fully painted, four issue comic book series due out sometime (I hope) in 2007.
The first movie was never my favorite of the three Ash sagas (EVIL DEAD 2 remains one of my personal top ten movies of all time), but analysing it in excruciating detail has raised my opinion considerably. Coming from a bunch of kids makin' a movie out in the woods, there are some great scares, and a star-making performance from Campbell. There's a sequense where the camera holds on Campbell's face for a long take, reacting to noises outside the house, that is touching, intense and inexplicably comic, all at the same time. (When the noises stop for a moment, Ash breaks into a relieved smile, "ahh, it's over, *whew*", that cracks me up every time!)
John Bolton is the artist on this epic, and I wish I could figure out how to insert pictures into this blog, because his work is really spectacular. If anything, he's made the ghouls even creepier, frozen in rictus stares on the page. Fans of the film will remember a scene where one of the girls-turned-demon starts to chew the stump her her severed hand; John has managed to make this even MORE disturbing than the film version.
As a writer, the "fun" of the adaptation has been in expanding on certain scenes. For the first time, we'll meet Ash and the others before they take off for the cabin, and you'll see that the "friendship" between Ash and his pal Scotty was a shaky ground even before they took to the woods. And we're also see what happened to Scotty when he took powder into the woods, only to stagger back with a torn face and broken arm. (Hint: it wasn't nice.)
Anyway, keep yer eyes peeled, this book should finally come out sometime in late 2007...
4 comments:
Sounds awesome. I can't wait to see how you've fleshed out the movie. (If you'll pardon the expression...)
is this coming from Dark Horse or Dynamite comics?
The EVIL DEAD adaptation is from Dark Horse... though Dynamite is doing fun stuff with their Army of Darkness books.
Could an Evil Dead 2 adaptation come after?
It would be great to complete the trilogy of comics. That and seeing John Bolton's painted version of Ash's severed possessed hand and the giant evil rotten apple head from the film's ending...
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