In last year’s superhero/horror mash-up DIE!Namite, Dynamite Entertainment took its Masks team-up in a weird new direction. Masks featured the comic book publishers’ classic superhero characters working together with some of pulp comics’ best villains. Last year’s intro series DIE!Namite found Red Sonja colliding with a 100-year-old John Carter of Mars, Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt, a space-voyaging Vampirella, and Marla Drake aka Miss Fury (flashing ahead fifty years and in her eighties)–still fighting crime and taking names. This year get ready for DIE!Namite Lives!, a sequel monthly series featuring Evil Dead’s Bruce Campbell hero Ash Williams joining up with Old Miss Fury (think Old Man Logan), Peri-Purr the Sixth (a cat who thinks Miss Fury is her sidekick), a bald-is-beautiful Vampirella, the Egyptian goddess Sekhmet aka Pantha, and a few other surprises.
And they’re all surrounded by the Undead. Deadites. Zombies. Drakulon has fallen to the undead plague. What’s a warehouse inventory worker like Ash going to do about it?
Writer Fred Van Lente (Wolverine) lays out a great beginning in the first issue, following on after his series last year without missing a step. He’s firmly inside the twisted brain of Ash, with his mannerisms and funny quips. Zorro artist Vincenzo Carratu’s renderings of Sekhmet as Pantha are gorgeous. She’s a great character you’ll want to see more of. June Tarpé Mills’ original newspaper strip character Miss Fury lives on in a way you’ve never seen her before. The new world of the time-skipping, genre-colliding DIE!Namite is a crazy follow-up to Alex Ross’s fully painted 2012 series Masks and the 2015 team-up in Masks 2, in good company with books like Noir and Swords of Sorrow.
And you can’t beat Ash swapping a chainsaw for a weed whacker.
Here’s a look inside the first issue of DIE!Namite Lives! and some variant covers coming your way in future issues:
It’s the good kind of weird. Add DIE!Namite Lives! to your weekly comics pull list at Elite Comics, or your local shop, or order it here at Amazon. You can also order issues of last year’s DIE!Namite from your comics shop or pre-order the trade paperback volume here at Amazon.
C.J. Bunce / Editor / borg
