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Meet Team Ash in Dynamite's mad new miniseries, Death To The Army Of Darkness
Just when you thought the twisted existence of S-Mart's worst employee couldn't get any weirder, a new Dynamite miniseries struck straight from the Evil Dead franchise will light up comic shops in February of 2020 with five splintered versions of Ash Williams erupting out of the multiverse — and SYFY WIRE has an exclusive sneak peek inside all the madness.
Death to the Army of Darkness might not arrive until next year, but its demented premise and presence are already being felt across suburban neighborhoods, Kansas cornfields, and throughout the Deadites' evil domain.
Writer Ryan Parrott (Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, Batman: Gates of Gotham) and artist Jacob Edgar (Savage Tales: Red Sonja) have brewed up this insane comedy-horror cocktail, which picks up shortly after director Sam Raimi's iconic Army of Darkness film from 1992.
Here amid the mounting mania, Ash gets much more than he bargained for when Ashley Joanna Williams, Ash's alluring feminine iteration, suddenly shatters into multiple differing clones and each refracted version is injected with the same outrageous personality as the original "Chosen One."
The confusing mixup is obviously due to another terrible translation of the Necronomicon that breeds not only Ashley Williams but erratic Lil' Ash, Dash, aka Doggie Ash, the irate and gloomy Skeleton Ash and Chainy -- Ash's absurd sentient chainsaw!
Together, this crazy crew travel back through the centuries to Ancient Egypt to prevent the dreaded Necronomicon manuscript from ever being written to try to eradicate Ash's split personality problem -- which might not sit too well with the other party members. What could possibly go wrong?!
Completing the groovy creative posse is colorist Kike J. Díaz (Sherlock Frankenstein, Ether) and letterer Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou (Red Sonja, Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt).
Parrott claims it was Dynamite editor Nathan Cosby who came to him with the idea of wanting to do a Team Ash book.
"At first we talked about it being different from Ash's other realities, but I think character-wise we really gravitated toward the idea of forcing Ash to face different parts of his own personality," Parrott tells SYFY WIRE.
"There was already kind of a precedent there with Evil Ash, so it didn't feel like we were stretching things too far. And that's the nice thing about Ash being a loudmouth braggart; you wanna believe that deep down he might be something more. So once we locked in on that concept, it was just about combining the different facets of Ash with interesting visual characters. We pared it down from something like 12 characters into the six that are in the book. I won't tell you which ones we didn't use because ... I'm desperate to find a way to put them ALL in the story at some point."
"In crafting the story, the fun part for me was figuring out all the ingredients of the Army of Darkness movie, and then hopefully remix them in a new interesting way," he adds. "That meant a bunch of chainsaws, boomsticks, and Deadite battles. We'll see some familiar characters and locations, like S-Mart and the cabin, and of course you have to have a little time travel. But instead of medieval times, we're going all the way back to the creation of the Necronomicon itself, and what that means to Ash, Team Ash, and the world itself. If there's one thing my editor keeps telling me, it's to push it farther, seeing how much we can stretch the mythology, and hopefully we succeed."
Dynamite has also recruited a gregarious gang of talented cover artists, including Ben Oliver (Vengeance of Vampirella, American Carnage); the "Zombie King" himself, Arthur Suydam (DCeased, Marvel Zombies); and Mirka Andolfo (Unnatural, Catwoman).
Watch for Dynamite Entertainment's Death to the Army of Darkness #1 in February of 2020.
