Racks and Stacks: The Evil Dead

 In the Racks and Stacks series, Cody discusses the comic books he's been reading.

This week: a comic book adaptation of The Evil Dead.

When Dark Horse Comics put together a comic book adaptation of director Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead film trilogy capper Army of Darkness in the early ‘90s, they hired John Bolton to both write the adaptation and provide the artwork. Around that time, Raimi and his producing partners Rob Tapert and Bruce Campbell (who also plays the heroic Ash in the Evil Dead films) befriended writer Mark Verheiden, who would go on to collaborate with Raimi and Tapert on the film adaptation of his Dark Horse comic book Timecop, with Campbell on the horror comedy My Name Is Bruce, and with the whole trio on the Ash vs. Evil Dead television series. In 2008, Dark Horse Comics got the rights to make a comic book adaptation of the first Evil Dead movie – and they made this one a reunion, hiring Verheiden to write the scripts for the four-issue adaptation and bringing Bolton in to create the art.

Verheiden didn’t want to do a scene-for-scene adaptation of Raimi’s classic film. He decided to expand the story a little bit... and while doing so, he made some unexpected changes. The film centered on Campbell’s character Ash, a young man from Michigan who heads down into Tennessee for a cabin in the woods vacation with his girlfriend Linda, his sister Cheryl, his friend Scott, and Scott’s girlfriend Shelly. The atmosphere at the cabin is creepy from the start and gets much worse once Ash and Scott venture into the cellar and discover a book that’s bound in flesh and inked with blood. It was brought to the cabin by a professor who had unearthed it in the ruins of a castle and brought it to the cabin to translate it. By reading from the book, the professor unwittingly unleashed evil spirits into the surrounding woods. (And into his wife.) The youngsters manage to stir the evil spirits up even more.

Verheiden’s adaptation removes the family element. Ash and Cheryl are no longer siblings; Cheryl just happens to be a friend of Linda’s. He decided to drop in some flashbacks to the group’s time before they went on vacation, but those flashbacks don’t add much to the story. In the movie, Ash and Scott also find a shotgun in the cellar. In this adaptation, the shotgun was already packed in the trunk of their car. So there are small changes here and there, just to make you scratch your head and wonder why.

The question is how these people managed to rent the cabin when it was either already rented by the professor or even owned by the professor and not being rented out to anybody has always lingered over the movie, and Verheiden does address that very quickly, letting us know that they got it through a rental agent and are aware that “some geezer” went nuts while staying at the cabin, an event that was attributed to cabin fever.

The action starts earlier. While the film builds up to the demonic possession horror, the comic book is very up front about it, letting us know within the first couple of pages that Ash’s girlfriend is going to be a “shrieking harpie-bitch from Hell.” There are early glimpses of demonic faces, and we get to see some of what happened to the professor and his wife while they were staying in the cabin.

One of the biggest differences here is the character Ash. In the movie, he’s overwhelmed and not able to do much to fight back against the demons for a large portion of the running time. The character evolved into a loudmouth braggart (and a highly capable monster killer) as the franchise went on. Verheiden stayed true to what Ash did in the first movie, but added an extensive narration in the voice of the Ash from the follow-ups. Within the story, he’s a more reserved character than the one he will become, but in the narration he’s the fully evolved (or devolved) Ash from Army of Darkness.

The clothes worn by the characters show that the setting of the events have been moved up from the early ‘80s (the movie was primarily filmed in 1979 and finally released in 1983) to the early 2000s, but the clothing is the only thing that brings it into the 2000s. 

Which brings us to the artwork. Wikipedia lets us know that John Bolton is “known for his dense, painted style, which often verges on photorealism,” and that’s exactly the style he brought to The Evil Dead. Some of the panels look like they were screenshots taken directly from the movie and just painted over, while others look like Bolton took pictures of model stand-ins for the characters and painted over those. I can’t say I always liked the artwork Bolton created for a specific moment, as his style isn’t quite for me and isn’t really what I’m looking for when I want to go through a comic book, but it’s certainly unique and frequently impressive.

As mentioned, this adaptation may leave fans scratching their heads at times, but it is fun to see the events of The Evil Dead – one of my favorite movies, and the one I consider to be the scariest movie I have ever seen – play out in the pages of a comic book.

Note: Marvel Comics will not be covered in Racks and Stacks articles, as they're getting their own article series.